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....

Fiscal decentralization is high on the agenda in policy fora. This paper empirically investigates the underlying causes of fiscal decentralization, based on the predictions of a simple political economy model. We argue that the likeliness that a central government engages in devolution of powers...

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...

Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that, by coordinating voting behavior, these interest groups increase the winning set, which is defined as the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the...

We study Downsian competition in a Mirrleesian model of income taxation. The competing politicians may differ in competence. If politicians engage in vote-share maximization, the less competent politician's policy proposals are attractive to the minority of rich agents, whereas those of the...

This paper utilizes a simple model of redistributive politics with voter abstention to analyze the impact of nonpartisan ‘get-out-the-vote' efforts on policy outcomes. Although such efforts are often promoted on the grounds that they provide the social benefit of increasing participation in...

This paper experimentally examines behavior in a two-player game of attack and defense of a weakest-link network of targets, in which the attacker's objective is to successfully attack at least one target and the defender's objective is diametrically opposed. We apply two benchmark contest...

We provide a solution to the free-rider problem in the provision of a public good. To this end we define a biased indirect contribution game which provides the efficient amount of the public good in non-cooperative Nash equilibrium. No confiscatory taxes or other means of coercion are used. We...

I examine the impact of risk preferences on efforts and winning probabilities in generalised Tullock contests between two players. The theoretical analysis yields two main results. First, I specify a sufficient condition on the agents' comparative prudence under which a higher common level of...

We investigate whether the simple plurality rule aggregates information efficiently in a large election with three alternatives. The environment is the same as in the Condorcet Jury Theorem (Condorcet (1785)). Voters have common preferences that depend on the unknown state of nature, and they...