Psychological experiments demonstrate that people exhibit a taste for consistency. Individuals are inclined to interpret new evidence in ways that confirm their pre-existing beliefs. They also tend to change their beliefs to enhance the desirability of their past actions. I present a model that...

In many democratic countries, the timing of elections is flexible. We explore this potentially valuable option using insights from option pricing in finance. The paper offers three main contributions on this problem. First, we derive a rationally-based mean-reverting political support process...

The goal of this paper is to introduce communication in a collective choice environment with information acquisition. We concentrate on decision panels that are comprised of agents sharing a common goal and having a joint task. Members of the panel decide whether to acquire costly information or...

A voting with absenteeism game is defined as a pair (G;r) where G is an n-player (monotonic) simple game and r is an n-vector for which r_i is the probability that player i attends a vote. We define a power index for such games, called the absentee index. We axiomatize the absentee index and...

Anti-immigrant feeling (xenophobia) among voters has been proposed as a key factor explaining why, in the 2002 French national election, Jean Le Pen’s National Front Party won second place. Here, we study the effect of anti-immigrant sentiments among voters on the equilibrium position of...

Many suppose that democracy is an ethos which includes, inter alia, a degree of economic equality among citizens. In contrast, we conceive of democracy as ruthless political competition between groups of citizens, organized into parties. We inquire whether such competition, which we assume to be...

A brief, historical review of the study of the interdependency between politics and economic distribution is offered. While the impact of economic interests on politics has been acknowledged for thousands of years, and the impact of politics on distribution for hundreds, it is only in the last...

We survey critically the brief history of modeling party competition in general elections, beginning with the Hotelling-Downs model with a unidimensional policy space, and the Wittman model with endogenous parties, to the multi-dimensional citizen-candidate and PUNE models. Some applications of...

We consider the voting-with-absenteeism game of Quint-Shubik (2003). In that paper we defined a power index for such games, called the absentee index. Our analysis was based on the theory of the Shapley-Shubik power index (SSPI) for simple games. In this paper we do an analogous analysis, based...

In a citizen candidate equilibrium, there are n candidates each of whom announces a policy in a policy space of dimension d. Thus the policy equilibrium lives in a space of dimension nd. We show, in a canonical example, that the equilibrium manifold is generically of dimension nd. In particular,...