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This paper first formulates a model of how the politicians in a local government collectively lobby to raise intergovernmental grants to their local government. The model identifies a relationship between council size and grants received. I then study this relationship empirically using the distribution of intergovernmental grants to the Swedish local governments. I use a fuzzy regression-discontinuity design that exploits a council size law to isolate exogenous variation in council size and find a large negative council size effect. This pattern provides indirect evidence for the occurrence of lobbying. The direction of the effect could be explained by free-riding incentives in individual lobbying effort contribution caused by a collective action problem in grant-raising among local government politicians.

Why are the leaders in some U.S.-style legislatures more influential than others? This study uses individual-level data on lawmakers' perceptions of their leaders' influence to test three general theories of legislative power delegation: legislative leaders have no real power, simple collective action theory, and Conditional Party Government theory. These perceptions of speakers' legislative influence are modeled with varying intercept, multilevel, ordered probit models. The analyses strongly support the simple collective action problem explanation of legislative leadership influence, in particular suggesting that collective problems caused by the internal dynamics of the legislative process drive the delegation of influence to leaders. Adapted from the source document.

This article investigates the practical form of citizen engagement that occurs in collective problem-solving efforts such as civic enterprises, grassroots initiatives and self-help groups. Drawing on extensive empirical evidence from diverse policy fields, it articulates the distinct experimental and disruptive policy work that citizens enact in these citizens' governance spaces and challenges dominant interpretations which view them as either (i) a testament to the capacity of citizens to effectively solve complex public problems or (ii) a symptom of advanced neoliberalism where states off-load complex problems onto citizens. The article moves beyond this dualism to consider the motivations, challenges, available resources and distinct democratic work enacted by citizens in these spaces of bottom-up governance. Citizens' governance spaces, the article concludes, offer important lessons – both in terms of potential benefits and risks – for the project of deepening the quality and reach of citizen participation in modern systems of democracy.

Why are the leaders in some U.S.-style legislatures more influential than others? This study uses individual-level data on lawmakers' perceptions of their leaders' influence to test three general theories of legislative power delegation: legislative leaders have no real power, simple collective action theory, and Conditional Party Government theory. These perceptions of speakers' legislative influence are modeled with varying intercept, multilevel, ordered probit models. The analyses strongly support the simple collective action problem explanation of legislative leadership influence, in particular suggesting that collective problems caused by the internal dynamics of the legislative process drive the delegation of influence to leaders.