This paper challenges the notion that voting games with purely instrumental players cannot account for high turnout (the ‘turnout paradox'). Although it has been known for over 25 years that such games can generate high-turnout equilibria, the said equilibria have been rejected on the grounds...

We study vote buying by competing interest groups in a variety of electoral and contractual settings. While increasing the size of a voting body reduces its buyability in the absence of competition, we show that larger voting bodies may be more buyable than smaller voting bodies when interest...

In spatial models of electoral competition, candidate quality is typically modeled as valence, a measure of general appeal assumed to be constant across voters. This paper introduces and formally models an alternative conception of candidate quality according to which candidates differ in their...

Most government bureaucracies in developed countries use civil service systems. What accounts for their adoption? We develop and test a model of bureaucratic reforms under repeated partisan competition. In the model, two political parties composed of overlapping generations of candidates compete...

I present a model in which different candidates are stronger on different issues and an incumbent must decide how many resources to devote to each of two different issues. I derive conditions under which the incumbent has an incentive to devote an inefficiently high amount of resources to the...

There are two distinct views on how candidate (or party) issue strategies influence mass evaluations. One is the view underlying the classic spatial model that the proximity between the voter's own issue positions and the positions taken by the candidates drives the evaluation. The other view is...