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Many resource-rich countries have negative genuine saving rates, so deplete their exhaustible natural resource wealth faster than they build up wealth in other assets. This phenomenon is stronger in more fractionalized countries with poor legal systems. We explain this by a power struggle about the control of natural resources. Competing fractions in society thus have a private stock of financial assets and a common stock of natural resources. We solve a dynamic commonpool problem and obtain political economy variants of the Hotelling rule for resource depletion and the Hartwick saving rule necessary to sustain constant consumption in an economy with exhaustible natural resources. Resource depletion is faster than demanded by the Hotelling rule. As a result, the country has negative genuine saving rates and is running down its national wealth. The country saves more in financial assets than the current natural resource rents. Still, the erosion of natural wealth exceeds the accumulation of financial assets. Even though the power struggle boosts output, consumption is sub-optimally low. The highlighted political distortions are larger if the country is more fractionalized.

The third-person perception is the tendency for people to believe others are more affected by media messages than they are themselves. Analysis of a probability sample telephone survey revealed a significant relationship between having voted in the 2004 presidential election and third-person perception level. This empirical evidence supports a link between past voting behavior and the third-person perception, which expands third-person perception and behavioral domains beyond censorship issues. Republicans were also found to have a significantly greater third-person perception level than Democrats.

This article presents the results of research designed to test participatory democracy assertions that high‐quality public participation can affect participants' beliefs in desirable ways. It examines the relationships between exposure to quality participation and participant beliefs about the trustworthiness and responsiveness of a public agency and the value of including different viewpoints in public meetings. After participation in quality project meetings, participants were significantly more likely to believe the agency was responsive to public concerns. The results indicate that some specific aspects of quality participation are positively associated with expectations about the agency's responsiveness and performance. Positive associations were also found with tolerance for differences of opinion. These results have important implications for public administrators and theorists of participatory democracy.