Overview

Political Economics is a rapidly growing field that analyzes the relation between political institutions and economic interactions. The aim of this course is to introduce some of the basic tools from Economics that are widely used to address political-economic questions. In the first part of the course, we concentrate on electoral regimes. We start with defining electoral rules as social choice rules, and move on to discuss majoritarian electoral rules’ capability of aggregating individual information of voters. Next, we investigate the effect of economic inequality on fiscal policy in electoral regimes. In the second part of the course, we turn to political bargaining within the context of non-electoral interactions. We introduce some of the basic bilateral and multilateral bargaining frameworks as models of political bargaining. With the help of this framework, we discuss various topics such as conflict, ethnic diversity, legislative bargaining, and power sharing.