We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties....

The consequences of many policies are complicated and difficult to foresee. Those who are capable of providing information to policy makers often have a vested interest in the outcomes. This gives them an incentive to distort information to manipulate policy decisions. In this article we argue...

This paper examines the political economy of redistribution when voters have asymmetric information about the redistributive preferences of politicians and the latter cannot make credible policy commitments. The candidates in each party are endogenously selected by a process of Nash Bargaining...

This paper examines the mechanics of intertemporal information provision in {\em dynastic governments}. It has been suggested that ``horizontal accountability," i.e., a system of governance where auditing functions lie outside the executive branch, can ensure credible disclosure of information....

Professional experts offer advice with the objective of appearing well informed. Their ability is evaluated on the basis of the advice given and the realized state of the world. We model this situation as a reputational cheap-talk game with continuous signal, state, and ability type spaces....

Which issues are discussed by candidates in an election campaign? Why are some issues never discussed? Model tractability is lost quickly when dealing with these questions, partly because of the multidimensional voting inherent in models of multiple issues. Our model features two candidates for...

A decision maker is contemplating an action whose outcome is state dependent. She has a ‘prior’ over the states of the world and before choosing an action, she can consult an ‘expert’. We model the communication game between the decision maker and the expert as a ‘cheap-talk’ game....

In this paper we investigate how “civil service” personnel management interacts with bureaucratic discretion to create high capacity, expert bureaucracies populated by policy-motivated agents. We build a model in which bureaucrats may invest in (relationship specific) policy expertise, and...

This paper offers an explanation for why policy makers stick to inefficient policy decisions. I argue that repealing a policy is a bad signal to voters about the policy maker's competence if voters do not have complete knowledge about the effects of implemented policies. I derive the optimal...

The debate over campaign-finance reform includes how different sources of campaign contributions affect the outcomes of political campaigns. Using data from the Congressional races of 1996, I find that PAC contributions had a larger effect on the percentage of votes received and campaign...