Theories from psychology suggest that voters' perceptions of political positions depend on their non-policy related attitudes towards the candidates. A voter who likes (dislikes) a candidate will perceive the candidate's position as closer to (further from) his own than it really is. This is...

We study electoral competition among politicians who are heterogeneous both in competence and in how much they care about (what they perceive as) the public interest relative to the private rents from being in office. We show that politicians may have stronger incentives to behave...

Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that, by coordinating voting behavior,these interest groups increase the winning set, which is defined as the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the...

Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that the presence of these interest groups increases the winning set, which is the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the incumbent. Therefore interest...

Studies in political science and psychology suggest that voters' perceptions of political positions depend on their personal views of the candidates. A voter who likes/dislikes a candidate will perceive his position as closer to/further from his own than it really is (projection). Clearly these...

The quality of political candidates often depends on the current state of the world, for example because their personal characteristics are more valuable in some situations than in others. We explore the implications of state-dependent candidate quality in a model of electoral competition where...

In this paper we contribute to the study of how democracy works when politicians are better informed than the electorate about conditions relevant for policy choice. We do so by setting up and analyzing a game theoretic model of electoral competition. An important feature of the model is that...

We compare experimentally the revealed distributional preferences of individuals and teams in allocation tasks. We find that teams are significantly more benevolent than individuals in the domain of disadvantageous inequality while the benevolence in the domain of advantageous inequality is...

We study experimentally the protection of property in five widely distinct countries-Austria, Mexico, Mongolia, South Korea and the United States. Our main results are that the security of property varies with experimental institutions, and that our subject pools exhibit significantly different...

The sanctioning of norm-violating behavior by an effective formal authority is an efficient solution for social dilemmas. It is in the self-interest of voters and is often favorably contrasted with letting citizens take punishment into their own hands. Allowing informal sanctions, by contrast,...