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...

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...

We propose a theory of party competition (two parties, single-issue) where citizens acquire party membership by contributing money to a party, and where a member?s influence on the policy taken by her party is proportional to her campaign contribution. The polity consists of informed and...

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...

The goal of this paper is to illustrate the significance of information acquisition in mechanism design. We provide a stark example of a mechanism design problem in a collective choice environment with information acquisition. We concentrate on committees that are comprised of agents sharing a...

We assume that people have a need to make statements, and construct a model in which this need is the sole determinant of voting behavior. In this model, an individual selects a ballot that makes as close a statement as possible to her ideal point, where abstaining from voting is a possible...

Three vote-share equations are estimated and analyzed in this paper, one for presidential elections, one for on-term House elections, and one for mid-term House elections. The sample period is 1916-2006. Considering the three equations together allows one to test whether the same economic...