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Why has US commercial policy become increasingly politicized in the twenty-first century? We argue that this politicization reflects an interaction between elite rhetoric on unfair trade practices and American meritocratic values. As the twenty-first century progressed, elites increasingly argued that economic malaise was a result of predatory practices by US trading partners. This "trade is unfair" rhetoric resonated most strongly with meritocratic Americans: individuals who believed in principles of market fairness but also worried about future economic prospects. To evaluate the argument that trade policy frames resonate differently among Americans, we draw on data from several survey experiments as well as a large, original panel data set with repeat observations of the same individuals. Individuals who are most tied to the myth of the classic American Dream are the most likely to respond to a frame blaming unfair trade for America's economic problems, and this contributes to rising antiglobalization sentiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study shows that shifts in political climate influence stock prices. As the party in power changes, there are systematic changes in the industry-level composition of investor portfolios, which weaken arbitrage forces and generate predictable patterns in industry returns. A trading strategy that attempts to exploit demand-based return predictability generates an annualized risk-adjusted performance of 6% during the 1939 to 2011 period. This evidence of predictability spans 17%-27% of the market and is stronger during periods of political transition. Our demand-based predictability pattern is distinct from cash flow-based predictability identified in the recent literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media outlets provide crucial inputs into the democratic process, yet they face increasingly severe economic challenges. I study how a newly salient manifestation of this pressure, reduced reporting capacity, influences political coverage. Focusing on newspapers in the United States, where industry‐wide employment fell over 40% between 2007 and 2015, I use panel data to assess the relationship between reporting capacity and political coverage. Staff cuts substantially decrease the amount of political coverage newspapers provide. Across different samples and measurement approaches, a typical cutback to a newspaper's reporting staff reduces its annual political coverage by between 300 and 500 stories. These political news declines happen against the backdrop of similar reductions in nonpolitical coverage, meaning the share of newspaper articles focused on politics remains stable over this period. This demonstrates that economic pressure affects the political information environment by shaping the media's capacity to cover politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does news about the economy influence voting decisions? We isolate the effect of the information environment from the effect of change in the underlying economic conditions themselves by taking advantage of left‐digit bias. We show that unemployment figures crossing a round‐number "milestone" cause a discontinuous increase in the amount of media coverage devoted to unemployment conditions, and we use this discontinuity to estimate the effect of attention to unemployment news on voting, holding constant the actual economic conditions on the ground. Milestone effects on incumbent U.S. governor vote shares are large and notably asymmetric: Bad milestone events hurt roughly twice as much as good milestone events help. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on political business cycles focuses on elected incumbents and neglects the incentives of appointed officials. We present evidence of rate hikes before elections when the chair of the US Federal Reserve is from a different party than the incumbent president. This finding contrasts with the traditional belief that an inappropriate policy-rate bias implies a more expansive pre-election policy stance. We also find weak evidence that rates are lowered when the chair and president are from the same party. The evidence that ideological preferences of the chair matter remains even when we control for career motives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal write about the century-long relationship between national income inequality and congressional partisan polarization: rising income inequality corresponds to more polarization. I question this relationship. First, income inequality correlates more strongly with Republican positioning than with polarization, even before Republicans moved asymmetrically rightward. Second, holding the Republican position fixed, leftward movement of congressional Democrats corresponds to decreasing inequality. Consistent with these empirical facts, I explore substantive evidence that (1) suggests that a Republican-centered explanation plausibly runs in either causal direction but (2) casts doubt on whether polarization driven by Democratic extremism contributes to or is fostered by rising income inequality. Given the prominence of McCarty et al.'s argument in scholarship and the commentary on American politics it informs, this observation is central for understanding how politics shapes and responds to income inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does a state's source of wealth condition the domain in which it seeks to project influence? We argue that what a state makes conditions what they take. Specifically, the less states rely on land rents to acquire wealth, the less interested they will be in seeking control over territory and the more interested they will be in securing access to distant markets. We develop and test several observable implications that should follow whether this proposition is true. First, as states become less economically dependent on territory, they should be less likely to fight over territory; second, those states should be more likely to both invest in power projection capabilities and subsequently project power at greater distances. Our findings support our theory. These results are robust across a variety of model specifications that take into account potential confounds, such as regime type, economic development, threat, and geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the relationship between economic inequality and US congressional agendas. Longstanding insights into the influence of political spending on public policy suggest that money can narrow the scope of policy conflicts. I argue that rising inequality should intensify these negative-agenda forces as wealthy interests gain a political advantage relative to other social groups and use this advantage to protect their socioeconomic position by donating to candidates who pursue less disruptive agendas. The expectation is that economic inequality narrows the purview of policymaking and that this is manifest through a reduction in the diversity of the congressional agenda. Empirical analysis supports this position. Error-correction models show that rising inequality is associated with a reduction in the diversity of congressional hearings, bill introductions, and laws. Moreover, it is legislators who are heavily dependent on deep-pocketed donors and political action committees that engage with a narrower range of policy topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do political factors affect foreign aid allocation? Recognizing that aid can be used as inducement, we argue that the US has incentives to provide aid to countries who oppose it a priori at the United Nations General Assembly when it is the sole country that “buys votes” with aid, in order to maximize the number of favorable votes. When there is a rival country trying to buy votes, as was the case during the Cold War, there are incentives for the US to provide aid even to those who support its position already. We empirically demonstrate that the US provides more aid to countries who hold unfavorable positions to the US only in the post-Cold War era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some corporations attempt to lessen their tax burden through involvement in the legislative process. We identify firms that contributed to congressional candidates who favor reductions in the U.S. corporate statutory tax rate. This support created a temporary incentive to manage effective tax rates (ETRs) up. We document that these firms increased their reported effective tax rate in the two calendar quarters preceding the 2012 election relative to adjacent periods and other firms supporting candidates in the same election. We find that the variation in upward ETR management is correlated with firm-level proxies for potential reputational costs, capital markets costs, and long-run tax burdens. The variation in upward ETR management is also correlated with firm-candidate-level proxies for strength of relationships and competitiveness of election races. Our findings provide new evidence on accounting choices in support of corporate political activity and on the political cost hypothesis in the tax setting. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2842. This paper was accepted by Shivaram Rajgopal, accounting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a model of mass incarceration in the United States, which has the largest proportion of its population imprisoned among advanced countries. Although the 1968 Kerner Commission recommended integrating blacks into the larger American community, political decisions pushed American judicial policies in the opposite direction. The model demonstrates that the United States has moved from one equilibrium position to another. It explains why the growth of prisoners has ceased in the last decade and what would be needed to return to the original equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the consequences of economic downturns for states’ redistributive politics. We track state policies from 1980 through 2010 and illustrate how economic downturns led states to adopt budget-balancing policies by suppressing both the increased spending on programs benefiting the poor otherwise expected under Democratic Party control and the tax cuts for the wealthy otherwise expected under Republican Party control. We also undertake a natural experiment case study—comparing the forty Democratic and Republican governors in office right before (2007–2008) and after (2009–2010) the onset of the Great Recession. We find that Republican governors were less likely to propose spending and increased calls for spending cuts; yet, no similar shift in tax proposals was evident with continued calls for tax cuts to the wealthy. Democratic governors exhibited a similar pattern, but were less responsive and more likely to maintain their earlier policy proposals even after a significant downturn in the national economy. Together, these findings highlight how economic and political conditions interact with one another to shape “who gets what, when, and how from government,” as well as clarify that we must ask and answer these questions separately for taxing and spending to capture the complex politics of redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective Work on economic news argues that U.S. coverage focuses primarily on changes rather than levels of future economic conditions; it also both affects and reflects public economic sentiment. Given that economic perceptions are related to policy preferences and government support, this is of consequence for politics. This article explores the generalizability of these findings. Methods Using nearly 100,000 stories over 30 years in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, we compare media tone, public opinion, and economic conditions. Result Analyses demonstrate that media tone and public opinion follow future economic change in all three countries. Media and opinion are also related, but the effect mostly runs from the public to the media, not the other way around. Conclusion These results confirm the generalizability of prior findings, and the importance of considering more than a simple unidirectional link between media coverage and public economic sentiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores on the history of the U.S. including the political economy, foreign relations and the nation's infrastructure as well as the offshore commercial and military base. It highlights the importance of American community in order to recognize the Americans in the foreign territory. It also cites the rights, protections, and duties of U.S. law for the Americans citizens and residents in the country wherein the nation made treaties and alliances with the polities through internal migrations and negotiations.

We analyze the consequences of economic freedom on economic dynamism across U.S. states and over time. Using data from the Economic Freedom of North America index, we show that states with greater economic freedom have higher rates of gross and net job creation and establishment entry. The results are robust to the inclusion of many different control variables and alternative specifications, suggesting a connection between freedom and dynamism. This evidence supports theories in which government policies may impede business dynamism. ( JEL 043, P16, R5) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its origins in the late 19th century, the most salient characteristics of the progressive state have been marginalism in economics, the geatly increased use of scientific theory and data in policy making, and the encouragement of broad electoral participation. All have served to make progressive policy less stable than classical and other more laissez-faire alternatives. However, the progressive state has also performed better than alternatives by every economic measure. One of the progressive state's biggest vulnerabilities is commonly said to be its susceptibility to special interest capture. The progressive state makes many decisions via either legislation or administrative agencies, and both are thought to be prone to special interest control at the expense of the public. Nevertheless, the superior economic performance of the progressive state calls that conclusion into question. How can a state policy that is so prone to special interest capture also produce superior results? One severe weakness of the capture argument against the progressive state is that it uses the free market as a baseline for identifying what is in the public interest. Under such a standard, any political theory that believes that market failure is more widespread and in need of correction will generate too many false positives suggesting capture. In fact, special interest capture often explains failures to regulate as much as special interest regulation itself, and today the former dominates the latter on many important issues. Ironically, one exacerbating factor in producing such capture is the structural features of the Constitution itself, which place much higher burdens on those seeking to regulate than on those seeking to resist regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using motivated reasoning, voters rely on partisanship as a heuristic for evaluating the economy in belief-preserving ways. Yet recent findings show that these motivations may be restricted by a range of contextual factors. We argue that partisan motivations in economic perceptions are moderated by the local economic context. As conditions worsen, a negative information environment leads in-partisans to political ambivalence that reduces confidence in party cues when evaluating the economy. As conditions improve, the motivation for in-partisans to rely on party cues is restored. As positive information has been shown to be less influential for opinion formation than negative information, and out-group members tend to be most prone to motivated reasoning, the economic context should moderate the political motivations of out-partisans to a lesser extent than in-partisans. A multilevel analysis of the 1980 to 2012 American National Election Studies supplemented with state-level data on unemployment and per capita disposable income supports this argument. The effects of in-party attachments on economic perceptions are diminished as economic conditions deteriorate and grow stronger as conditions improve. Moreover, the conditional effects of economic performance on subjective perceptions are stronger for in-partisans than for out-partisans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Economic inequality in the United States is extreme, but little is known about the national origin of affluent households. Households in the top one percent by total wealth own vastly disproportionate quantities of household assets and have correspondingly high levels of economic, social, and political influence. The overrepresentation of white natives (i.e., those born in the U.S.) among high-wealth households is well-documented, but changing migration dynamics suggest that a growing portion of top households may be immigrants. Methods: Because no single survey dataset contains top wealth holders and data about country of origin, this paper uses two publicly-available data sets: the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Multiple imputation is used to impute country of birth from the SIPP into the SCF. Descriptive statistics are used to demonstrate reliability of the method, to estimate the prevalence of immigrants among top wealth holders, and to document patterns of asset ownership among affluent immigrants. Results: Significant numbers of top wealth holders who are usually classified as white natives may be immigrants. Many top wealth holders appear to be European and Canadian immigrants, and increasing numbers of top wealth holders are likely from Asia and Latin America as well. Results suggest that of those in the top one percent of wealth holders, approximately 3% are European and Canadian immigrants, .5% are from Mexico or Cuban, and 1.7% are from Asia (especially Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China, and India). Ownership of key assets varies considerably across affluent immigrant groups. Conclusion: Although the percentage of top wealth holders who are immigrants is relatively small, these percentages represent large numbers of households with considerable resources and corresponding social and political influence. Evidence that the propensity to allocate wealth to real and financial assets varies across immigrant groups suggests that wealth ownership is more global than previous research suggests and that immigrant groups are likely to become more prevalent in top wealth positions in the U.S. As the representation of immigrants in top wealth positions grows, their economic, social, and political influence is likely to increase as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the international relations between the U.S. and the United Nations (UN) along with the engagement of the U.S. with the UN under the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. Topics mentioned include the foreign policy priorities of Trump's administration, the financing of the UN climate-change mitigation by the U.S. government and the strong and productive relationship of the UN with President Trump, who is serious in his statements about solving global problem for the country's interests.

Behavioral public administration is the analysis of public administration from the micro-level perspective of individual behavior and attitudes by drawing on insights from psychology on the behavior of individuals and groups. The authors discuss how scholars in public administration currently draw on theories and methods from psychology and related fields and point to research in public administration that could benefit from further integration. An analysis of public administration topics through a psychological lens can be useful to confirm, add nuance to, or extend classical public administration theories. As such, behavioral public administration complements traditional public administration. Furthermore, it could be a two-way street for psychologists who want to test the external validity of their theories in a political-administrative setting. Finally, four principles are proposed to narrow the gap between public administration and psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Federal Reserve (the Fed) is the central bank of the United States. Because of its power and importance in guiding the economy, the Fed's independence from direct political influence has made it a target of ideologically motivated attacks throughout its history, with an especially aggressive round of attacks coming in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and ongoing today. We defend Fed independence. We point to the Fed's exemplary performance during and after the 2008 crisis, and we offer the example of a potential future crisis in which Congress fails to increase the debt ceiling to show how the Fed's independence makes it the only entity that can minimize the damage during crises (both market-driven and policy-induced). We further argue that the Fed's independence is justified to prevent self-dealing by politicians, even when no crisis is imminent. Although the classic justification for Fed independence focuses on the risk that political actors will keep interest rates lower than appropriate for the long-term health of the economy, we show that Fed independence addresses the risk of self dealing and other pathologies even when, as now, political actors favor tighter monetary policy than appropriate for the long-term health of the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We empirically analyze the pricing of political uncertainty, guided by a theoretical model of government policy choice. To isolate political uncertainty, we exploit its variation around national elections and global summits. We find that political uncertainty is priced in the equity option market as predicted by theory. Options whose lives span political events tend to be more expensive. Such options provide valuable protection against the price, variance, and tail risks associated with political events. This protection is more valuable in a weaker economy and amid higher political uncertainty. The effects of political uncertainty spill over across countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary debates on the relationship between migration and development focus extensively on how migrant remittances affect the economies of sending countries. Yet remittances also produce dynamic political consequences in migrants’ origin communities. Income earned abroad creates political opportunities for migrant groups to participate in the provision of public services in their hometowns. Focusing on organizational variation in partnerships across time and space, this article examines the conditions under which the transnational coproduction of public goods between organized migrants and public agencies at origin shapes democratic governance. I argue that local citizen inclusion and government engagement interact to determine four different types of coproduction: corporatist, fragmented, substitutive, and synergetic. Using four comparative case studies based on fieldwork in three Mexican states, I trace central mechanisms to organizational forms of coproduction and describe how emergent variation affects democratic governance and state–society relations. I show how transnational forces, when collaborating with local social and political institutions, can profoundly affect democratic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses subnational political power and innovations in America in relation to a question about whether state and local government interventions can help to advance U.S. civil rights laws and initiatives as of 2016. Community-benefits agreements (CBAs) and inclusionary zoning are addressed, along with economic inclusion and bans on source-of-income discrimination and credit history limitations. U.S. federal law and the nation's political economy are also assessed.

The current estate tax raises little revenue, yet is ill designed to further the social goals used to justify it. This Article takes one frequently mentioned goal--minimizing dynastic wealth transfers--and explores what insights focusing on that objective yields for the design of the transfer tax system. It starts from the premise that what renders dynastic wealth transfers problematic is that such transfers can bestow upon the recipient unearned political and economic power, which contravenes the democratic ideal that power should be earned, not inherited. Under this view, the tax system should be concerned with neither the build-up of wealth per se nor transfers of wealth that are not large enough to bestow power upon the recipient. Instead, the tax system should be concerned only with transfers of wealth large enough to confer economic and political power on the recipient. The structure that best reflects this concern is a progressive cumulative accessions tax that focuses on the recipient, instead of an estate tax that focuses on the transferor. Each recipient should have an extremely high exemption amount, given that receiving a few hundred thousand or couple million dollars does not give one power. Lastly, there should be no generation-skipping penalty, because what matters is how many individuals have the ability to use the power accompanying the wealth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of my career, I have navigated a research agenda that moves between scholarly and policy-oriented research. Building on this experience, I argue that it is time for law and society scholars to take seriously a commitment to engaged scholarship that speaks to a wider audience of stakeholders and policymakers. Three themes frame my proposal to get back in the game of advocacy and policy. First, I consider why we need to rekindle this commitment at this historical moment: inequalities in wealth, income, and social mobility and the rise of mass incarceration and its collateral consequences diminish the foundation required for effective democratic governance to thrive. Second, what our scholarship has to say is key to the framing of pragmatic policy: law and society's focus on law in action and the culture of law are key to understanding the ways in which most policies tend to deliver unintended consequences. Finally, we need to consider how to go about the next step to make our work visible to a wider audience of stakeholders? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business economists work within the confines of an imperfect economy. Economic theory can only take us so far. A less-than-perfect economy is characterized by imperfect information, dynamic adjustments over time and economic policy inconsistencies. Forecasts and scenario analysis must account for these factors for our analysis to deliver results that will better inform both private and public decision makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We find that congressional influences affect the amount of airport subsidies that a congressional district receives through the Essential Air Service (EAS) program. The EAS program was passed with the goal of helping to continue commercial air service to rural communities following deregulation in the 1970s. Using data from 1998-2014, we find strong and consistent evidence that subsidies are higher in districts having congressional representation on the House Transportation and Ways and Means Committees. Our empirical results, when combined with news reports of members claiming credit for securing EAS funding, are consistent with the EAS serving private and public interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did the most severe global financial crisis since the 1930s affect the organization of the world political economy? Was Anglo-American structural power in finance eroded? I employ network methodologies that have been recently extended for use with weighted and directed networks to shed light on these questions. I draw from complexity science and political economy to link these empirics to prior theories of structural power, which I refine in several ways. This approach provides unique explanations for developments in global banking since the crisis, including expected outcomes that did not occur: the continuation - and even expansion - of Anglo-American prominence, the decline of continental European prominence, and the lack of emergence of the BRICS economies into the core of the global banking system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between globalization and the political power of business? Much of the existing literature focuses on the ability of mobile capital to threaten exit in order to press for more business friendly rules. In this article, we refine arguments about exit options in global markets by arguing that the relative exit options available to business and other actors are neither fixed, nor exogenous consequences of some generically conceived process of globalization. Instead, they themselves are the result of struggles between actors with different interests and political opportunities. Since exit options play a crucial role in determining the relative structural power of business vis-à-vis other actors, we dub the power to shape exit options structuring power, distinguishing it from structural power, and argue that it is crucial to explaining it. We identify two channels through which actors can shape exit options - extending jurisdictional reach and reshaping the rules of other jurisdictions - and the factors that will make regulators and business more or less capable of exercising structuring power. We then use two exploratory case studies - one involving privacy regulation, the other accountancy standards - to illustrate how structuring power can work to shape exit options, and thus structural power. We conclude by considering the relationship between structuring power, structural power, and the existing literature in comparative and international political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do approaching elections affect the security policy states conduct? We build on classic political economy arguments and theorize that one problem likely faced by democratic policy makers near elections is that of time inconsistency. The time-inconsistency problem arises when the costs and benefits of policy are not realized at the same time. We develop an application of the argument to the case of allied troop contributions to Operation Enduring Freedom and the International Security Assistance Force mission in Afghanistan. In that case, we argue that the expectation should be one of fewer troops committed close to elections. The exogenous timing of elections allows us to identify the effects of approaching elections on troop levels. Our finding of significantly lower troop contributions near elections is arguably the first identified effect of electoral proximity on security policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I will argue that in the administrative state, in contrast to classical constitutional theory, the abuse of government power is not something to be strictly minimized, but rather optimized. An administrative regime will tolerate a predictable level of misrule, even abuse of power, as the inevitable byproduct of attaining other ends that are desirable overall. There are three principal grounds for this claim. First, the architects of the modem administrative state were not only worried about misrule by governmental officials. They were equally worried about "private" misrule--misrule effected through the self-interested or self-serving behavior of economic actors wielding and abusing power under the rules of the 18th-century common law of property, tort, and contract. The administrative state thus trades off governmental and "private" misrule. Second, the rate of change in the policy environment, especially in the economy, is much greater than in the late 18th century--so much greater that the administrative state has been forced, willy-nilly, to speed up the rate of policy adjustment. The main speeding-up mechanism has been evergreater delegation to the executive branch, accepting the resulting risks of error and abuse. Third, the costs of enforcing legal rules against executive officials are necessarily positive and plausibly large, in part because any institutional monitors created to detect and punish abuses must themselves be monitored for abuse. The architects of the administrative state believed that a government that always forms undistorted judgments, and that never abuses its power, will do too little, do it too amateurishly, and do it too slowly. In that sense, the administrative state constantly gropes towards an institutional package solution that embodies an optimal level of abuse of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although they agree that economics and elections are intertwined, theories of economic voting disagree on the policy focus (on positions taken or outcomes achieved) and time horizon (retrospective or prospective) that guides voters’ decisions. Most research on these debates looks at the considerations voters weigh. Instead, I explore the types of economic voting that candidates encourage through their campaign appeals. Content-coded advertising data from the 2004 congressional elections show that appeals focus more on policy positions than outcomes and more on the past than the future. Consistent with predictions from emphasis allocation theory, strategic incentives and electoral context shape the exact mix of economic appeals campaigns make. When promoting their own candidacy, politicians ask voters to think about (more unifying) future economic outcomes; when attacking their opponent’s candidacy, they ask voters to think about (more divisive) past policy positions. In districts experiencing worsening economic conditions, voters are exposed to more information about policy outcomes; in districts where the incumbent is ideologically “out of step,” they hear more about policy positions. Studies that seek to evaluate competing theories of economic voting are thus likely to draw misleading conclusions if they treat the information environment as a homogeneous constant: Campaigns in different districts, facing different strategic incentives, encourage significantly different types of economic voting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We present a short history of the Virginia School of Political Economy in its institutional settings of University of Virginia (UVA), Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, or Virginia Tech (VPI), and George Mason University (GMU). We discuss the original research and educational project as envisioned by Buchanan at UVA, its maturity into a normal science at VPI, and its continuation at GMU. We argue that the future of Virginia Political Economy will depend critically on the various alternative interpretations of the Buchanan project in positive economics, welfare economics, and political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We mine two public choice traditions for insights into intellectual property rights: the Virginia school, centered on James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, and the Bloomington or Institutional Analysis and Development school, centered on Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom. We apply the perspectives of each school to issues of intellectual property and develop new insights, questions, and focuses of attention. We also explore tensions and synergies between the two schools on issues of intellectual property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the outset of the 2012 presidential race, Republican candidate Mitt Romney touted his private sector leadership of the private equity firm Bain Capital. As this election unfolded, Romney's Bain Capital story became less of a narrative he could run on and more of a narrative he had to run from. Why did this Bain Capital story, a story about someone's success in the free marketplace in a society that seemingly values such success, become so troubling for the Romney campaign? This question constitutes the centerpiece of the present essay. In addressing this question, we argue that the Bain Capital narrative's role in the 2012 presidential race divulges a great deal about the fundamental nature of economic discourse in American democracy. Specifically, we contend that the economic narratives circulating in American democracy actually construct a tale of two economies--a tangible economy and a speculative economy. Unfortunately for Romney, his Bain Capital narrative situated him on the wrong side of this economic divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of voting in undisputed, yet scholarly works attempting to understand the causes and consequences of incorrect voting are relatively scarce. Building on the works of Lau and Redlawsk (1997, 2006; Lau et al., 2008), I design and implement a new survey method measuring incorrect voting I call Self-identified Incorrect Voting (SIV). This method allows survey respondents to determine for themselves if they voted incorrectly in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. I conducted the SIV survey of a national sample of voters and use the results to test traditional hypotheses regarding the value of partisanship and the economy as cues to help low-information voters behave in the same manner as high-information voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voters increasingly view their consumer activities, not their campaign contributions, as the most meaningful way to participate in politics. In 2014, after it became public that Mozilla's CEO, Brendan Eich, had made a controversial political donation in a state ballot proposition, consumer pressure led to his resignation. Eich's downfall and the politicization of retail markets means that business leaders are unlikely to respond to McCutcheon v . FEC by embracing transparency with their campaign donations, and also suggests that campaign finance deregulation is causing hydraulic effects that the Supreme Court has failed to anticipate. This Essay explores what "economic reprisal" means for business leaders--a significant segment of the so-called "donor class"--when consumers vote at the cash register. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]