News Release

Scandinavian Journal of Economics pays tribute to the rise of political economics.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Although research on the politics of government policymaking has historically been pursued in very different traditions by economists and political scientists, the last 10 years has seen the formation of a well-defined body of research on political economy, or political economics, at the boundary between the two fields, drawing on the best in the traditions of public choice, rational choice and the macroeconomics of government policy.

The Scandinavian Journal of Economics is proud to pay tribute to the rise of political economics with a special issue that brings together invited contributions from some of the top academics in the field.

For free access to the issue online visit www.blackwell-synergy.com/loi/sjoe

Three papers consider positive models addressing the dynamic evolution of economic or political institutions, broadly defined. Daron Acemoglu builds a model, where inefficient institutions may arise if powerful groups prefer the inefficient policies produced by such institutions and the powerful groups cannot be compensated by others if they chose institutions (and policies) that would be efficient for society as a whole. Silje Aslaksen and Ragnar Torvik combine insights from two existing literatures by setting up a model to show how conflicting interests over rents in a resource-rich economy may be resolved either through peaceful democratic elections, or by violent conflict, depending on economic and political conditions. Bill Jack and Roger Lagunoff consider social conflicts due to differences in wealth (or in ideology) and show how the outcome may be a sequence of political reforms that gradually delegate decision-making authority from richer to poorer agents, as in the gradual extension of voting rights observed in many European countries.

Two papers investigate the efficiency aspects of political institutions. B? Harstad evaluates the performance of cooperative arrangements, clubs, under different majority rules and different requirements of participation to start a particular form of cooperation, and applies the results to the debate over flexible integration in the European Union. Roger Myerson compares different voting rules in multi-candidate elections, with regard to appropriate representation of the electorate's preferences and effective deterrence of the abuse of political power, and finds support for approval voting.

Two papers deal with the politics of redistribution. Marina Azzimonti, Eva de Francisco and Per Krusell consider how redistribution evolves over time in the neoclassical growth model and show that under certain conditions on private preferences, equilibrium taxes depend only on mean and median wealth, independently of the distribution of wealth. Steve Ansolabehere and James Snyder study empirically the redistributive expenditures across counties in US states over 40 years, where they find evidence against the predictions of swing-voter models, but in favor of the predictions of loyal-voter models where redistribution raises the electoral turnout of loyal supporters.

The paper by Arianna Degan also studies electoral turnout by characterizing which voters on the ideological spectrum will endogenously choose to acquire information about candidate platforms and which will show up at the polls, in a model built around the civic duty of voting and the costs of making electoral mistakes.

Finally, two papers focus on interest groups and lobbying activity. Dave Baron extends the existing theory by analyzing optimal lobbying behavior of competing interest groups, who interact with a legislature where individual lawmakers not only make decisions by majority rule but also act as agenda setters, by deciding which policies to put to a vote. Morten Bennedsen and Sven Feldmann extend the existing theory by allowing interest groups to influence the implementation of policy by the bureaucracy and studying the subsequent effects on the propensity of legislators to delegate decisions to the bureaucracy under unified as well as divided government.

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