This paper studies a model of how political parties use resources for campaigning to inform voters. We show existence of equilibrium under mild assumptions for an arbitrary number of parties. The main result is that if the parties are more extreme, then they spend less resources on campaigning...

This paper provides new evidence on the effect of immigration on election outcomes. Our analysis makes use of data on city districts in Hamburg, Germany, during a period of substantial inflows of immigrants and asylum seekers. We find significant and robust effects for changes in foreigner...

We present a model in which the media provide voters with information that is tainted by their own preferences, and derive an equilibrium in which media endorsements influence voting behavior. Competition for media endorsement causes political parties to adopt more centrist policies, which...

This paper investigates the effect of political representation on the electoral outcome at the party level in a proportional multiparty election system using data from Swedish local government elections. There are two notions of representation in a council; the first is to hold seats, and the...

This paper presents a theoretical model of rational retrospective voting, which is tested empirically on pooled cross-sectional and panel data from the Swedish Election Studies between 1985 and 1994 supplemented with time series on inflation and unemployment. Compared with the cross-sectional...

Conventional wisdom suggests that compulsory voting lowers the influence of specialinterest groups and leads to policies that are better for less privileged citizens, who often abstain when voting is voluntary. To scrutinize this conventional wisdom, I study public goods provision and rents to...

The two major earthquakes which struck northwestern Turkey in 1999, caused enormous amounts of death and destruction, and exposed rampant government corruption involving construction and zoning code violations, as a factor magnifying the disaster. The opposition parties and one of the incumbent...

We use laboratory experiments to test for one of the foundations of the rational voter paradigm - that voters respond to probabilities of being pivotal. We exploit a setup that entails stark theoretical effects of information concerning the preference distribution (as revealed through polls) on...

No voters cast their votes based on perfect information, but better educated and richer voters are on average better informed than others. We develop a model where the voting mistakes resulting from low political knowledge reduce the weight of poor voters, and cause parties to choose political...

Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that the act of voting makes people more positive toward the party or candidate they have voted for. Following Mullainathan and Washington (2009), I test this prediction by using exogenous variation in turnout provided by the voting age restriction. I improve...