Are ordinary citizens or political party leaders better positioned to select candidates? While the American primary system lets citizens choose, most democracies rely instead on party officials to appoint or nominate candidates. The consequences of these distinct design choices are unclear:...

We propose a new game theoretic approach to modeling large elections that overcomes the "paradox of voting" in a costly voting framework, without reliance on the assumption of ad hoc preferences for voting. The key innovation that we propose is the adoption of a "smooth" policy rule under which...

It is common to rank different categories by means of preferences that are revealed through data on choices. A prominent example is the ranking of political candidates or parties using the estimated share of support each one receives in surveys or polls about political attitudes. Since these...

We estimate valence measures for candidates running in U.S. House elections from data on vote shares. Our estimates control for endogeneity of campaign spending and sample selection of candidates due to endogenous entry. Our identification and estimation strategy builds on ideas developed for...

The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 officially granted voting rights to women across the United States. However, many states extended full or partial suffrage to women before the federal amendment. In this paper, we discuss the history of women's enfranchisement using an...

We use 201,000 observations from repeated survey data in 61 elections and 9 OECD countries since 1952 to study the formation of vote choices and policy preferences in the electoral season and assess how TV debates contribute to this process. We find that the share of voters who state a...

We study the extent to which personal connections among legislators influence abstentions in the U.S. Congress. Our analysis is conducted by observing representatives' abstention for the universe of roll call votes held on bills in the 109th-113th Congresses. Our results show that a legislator's...