It is argued that even though the progress to date has been substantial, we can gain a better understanding of policymaking in democracies by combining the insights from different strands of thinking. A simple model of a society where the government uses a common pool of tax revenues to provide an array of public goods, the benefits of which are completely concentrated to well defined groups, is discussed. An overriding theme is to identify the forces that make some groups more politically powerful than others. Since the underlying economic model is completely symmetric, asymmetric allocations require some asymmetries in the political process.
