This study argues that urbanization changed the relationship between the occupation of candidates running in parliamentary elections and their electoral success. To identify local-level variation in urbanization, we leverage exogenous changes to the boundaries of electoral constituencies in the...

We analyze a model of political competition in which the elite forms endogenously to aggregate information and advise the uninformed median voter which candidate to choose. The median voter knows whether or not the endorsed candidate is biased toward the elites, but might still prefer the biased...