We study the relationship between voters' preferences and the emergence of party platforms in two-party democratic elections with adaptive parties. In the model, preferences of voters and the opposition party's platform determine an electoral landscape on which the challenging party must...

Using the 2007 wave of the Pew Global Attitudes Project, this paper finds statistically significant and economically large Stolper-Samuelson effects in individuals’ preference formation towards trade policy. High-skilled individuals are substantially more pro-trade than low-skilled individuals...

Representatives have more effective incentives to cater to the preferences of the majority of citizens when they are elected in districts with few rather than many seats. We investigate this hypothesis empirically by matching Swiss members of parliament’s voting behavior on legislative...

We analyze whether female or male members of parliament adhere more closely to citizens’ revealed preferences with quasi-experimental data. By matching individual representatives’ voting behavior on legislative proposals with real referenda outcomes on the same issues, we identify...

This study tests for direct causality between RealClearPolitics (RCP) polling averages and InTrade (IT) share-prices by performing Granger causality tests. These tests are applied to the 2012 U.S. presidential election campaign between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Three time series are...

The Random Utility Model (RUM) of voting behavior can account for strategic voting by making use of proxy indicators that measure voter incentives to vote strategically. The contribution of this paper is to propose a new method to estimate the RUM in the presence of strategic voters, without...

While several cross-sectional studies (La Porta et. al. 2002, Norton 2002) examine institutional and cultural determinants of economic freedom, changes in economic freedom remain unexamined. I construct a measure of median voter preferences and find changes in voter preferences for economic...

Economic voting theory is one of the most powerful explanations of voting behavior of ordinary citizens and it’s almost a part of democratic practice. This approach is heavily used in the Turkish context and models based on this model are very successful in estimating election results....

We examine the possibility that regional differentiation of occupations may shed light on how professional behavior adapts to environmental change. Based on the relative prevalence of occupational categories, we defined five geographic regions within the 48 contiguous United States. 77...