Strategic behaviour in political bargaining

This thesis brings together three self-contained studies in Political Economics, unified by a common focus on how political actors make strategic decisions under incomplete information. The first chapter develops a model of international bargaining in which a sender government simultaneously threatens sanctions and offers rewards, showing that domestic political constraints can restore credible cooperation where signalling frictions would otherwise lead to systematic bargaining failure. The second chapter analyzes policymaking within legislatures when preferences are private, evolving, and defined over high-dimensional policy spaces; it introduces a new notion of long-run stability and characterizes the policy outcomes that can be sustained without commitment or quasilinear preferences to monetary transfers , shedding new light on vote trading, vote buying, and agenda manipulation. The third chapter examines delegation under extreme polarization in a sequential principal–agent model where an uninformed principal chooses between full delegation and veto-based delegation to a biased but better-informed agent; it shows that when both players’ ideal points lie outside the feasible policy set on opposite sides, veto delegation collapses into complete reform gridlock, whereas full delegation leads to the implementation of an extreme reform that may leave the principal worse off than the status quo.