Information affecting a candidate's reputation might have significant electoral consequences. Do candidates respond to the release of information? Using Brazilian elections and audits as an exogenous source of information, I show that both incumbent and challenger increase their campaign...

We develop a model of elections in which parties choose their ideological position and the ideology of their candidates. Tighter candidate selection reduces policy uncertainty for voters. We show that weak institutional con- straints, as in a Presidential regime, induce parties to allow their...

Legislation affects corporate governance and the return to human and financial capital. We allow the preference of a political majority to determine both the governance structure and the extent of labor rents. In a society where median voters have relatively more at stake in the form of human...

This paper examines the incentives for a party leader in office and for a parties' rank-and-file to replace a sitting member of parliament. As to the leader's decision, we show that the leader prefers to replace a critical member of parliament who votes against the leader's policy. A competent...

In the literature on electoral politics full convergence of policy platforms is usually regarded as socially optimal. Thereason is that risk-averse voters prefer a sure middle-of-the-road policy to a lottery of two extremes with the sameexpectation. In this paper we study the normative...