Competitive elections create a relationship of formal accountability between policy makers
and citizens. Recent theoretical work suggests that there are limits on how well this formal …

Influential theories depict politicians as, alternatively, strongly constrained by public opinion,
able to shape public opinion with persuasive appeals, or relatively unconstrained by public …

Many citizens in the US and abroad fear that democratic institutions have become weak, and
continue to weaken. Politics with the People develops the principles and practice of'directly …

We study the consequences of populism for economic performance and the quality of
bureaucracy. When voters lose trust in representative democracy, populists strategically …

Americans today don't trust each other and their institutions as much as they once did. The
collapse of social and political trust has arguably fueled our increasingly ferocious …

We survey the literature on dynamic elections in the traditional settings of spatial
preferences and rent seeking under perfect and imperfect monitoring of politicians. We …

Why do some donor governments pursue international development through recipient
governments, while others bypass such local authorities? Weaving together scholarship in …

Politicians shirk when their performance is obscure to constituents. We theorize that when
politician performance information is disseminated early in the electoral term, politicians will …

Most governance is indirect, carried out through intermediaries. Principal-agent (PA) theory
views indirect governance primarily as a problem of information: the intermediary (agent) …

Institutions' matter'to electoral reform advocates and political scientists-both argue that
variation in electoral institutions affect how elected officials and citizens behave. Change the …