greater benefits when the central government sets a uniform policy. Consistent with our theory, we present empirical evidence …

Voting Theory generally concludes that, in first-past-the-post elections, all votes should go to effective candidates …

types to voters. We identify two novel implications of models in which signalling incentives are important. First, because …. Second, voters can exploit the signalling behavior of politicians by precommitting to a higher threshold for signals received …. Raising the threshold discourages signalling effort by low quality politicians but encourages effort by high quality …