In developing countries with weak institutions, there is implicitly a large reliance on elections to instill norms of accountability and reduce corruption. In this paper we show that electoral discipline may be ineffective in reducing corruption when political competition is too high or too low....

Gerrymandering undermines representative democracy by creating many uncompetitive legislative districts, and generating the very real possibility that a party that wins a clear majority of the popular vote does not win a majority of districts. We present a new approach to the determination of...

Rational voters update their subjective beliefs about candidates' attributes with the arrival of information, and subsequently base their votes on these beliefs. Information accrual is, however, endogenous to voters' types and difficult to identify in observational studies. In a large scale...

Promises are prevalent in many competitive environments, but promise keeping is often difficult to observe. Do promises still offer an opportunity to honor future obligations, if promise keeping is unobservable? Focusing on campaign promises, we study the value of transparency. We showhow...

Previous research has established that good-looking political candidates win more votes. We extend this line of research by examining differences between parties on the left and on the right of the political spectrum. Our study combines data on personal votes in real elections with a web survey...

This paper investigates the differential response of male and female voters to competitive persuasion in political campaigns. We implemented a survey experiment during the (mixed gender) electoral race for mayor in Milan (2011), and a field experiment during the (same gender) electoral race for...

Economic and social interactions often take place in open communities but the dynamics of the community choice process and its impact on cooperation of its members are yet not well understood. We experimentally investigate community choice in social dilemmas. Participants repeatedly choose...

In this paper, we analyze several local referendums on land development and land-use regulation in the City of Erlangen (Germany) in the period between 2011 and 2018. To identify the positive influence of the travel distance on approval for the development of land, we employ a two-way...

Asymmetric information between voters and legislative representatives poses a major challenge to the functioning of representative democracy. We examine whether representatives are more likely to serve long-term campaign donors instead of constituents during times of low media attention to...

We incorporate prospect-theory preferences in a game-theoretic model to study voter turnout. We show that voter turnout is heavily affected by agents having subjective reference points with respect to the vote or abstain decision and their subjective probability weighting in the decision-making...