The Kenyan Constituency Development Fund (CDF) aims to alleviate poverty by allocating resources to constituencies which MPs and residents decide how to spend.  In this paper we assess whether MPs' re-election chances were affected by their management of the CDF.  For this purpose we analyse...

I develop and test two competing models assessing the impacts of targeted government transferson a local incumbent's electoral performance. I take advantage of the randomized roll-out of alarge-scale Conditional Cash Transfer program in the Philippines, which offers an ideal setting totest the...

Intuition tells us that strategic voting is most likely in marginal constituencies where the preferred party is a long way behind the second placed parity. Some formal theories suggest there should be complete desertion of all but two candidates (Palfrey 1989), or additionally that the second...

This paper develops an infinite-horizon, political agency model with a continuum of political districts, in which incumbent politicians can improve their re-election probability by attracting swing voters in key states through strategic trade protection. A unique equilibrium is shown to exist...