Contributions by investor-owned companies play major roles in financing the campaigns of candidates for elective office in the United States. We look at the presidential level and analyze contributions by companies before an election and their stock market performance following US presidential...

This paper studies how political competition can lead candidates to strategically increase the salience of specific issues, in order to influence voting decisions of marginal groups, with non trivial consequences for turnout rates. In my setup issues differ in their divisiveness, to be defined...

A new methodology that estimates attitudes semiparametrically and estimates actions nonparametrically, as a function of the resulting attitudinal measures, is used to examine the behavioral effects of ѣultural' and ѥconomic' preferences in the Presidential elections of 1984 and 1992. The...

Only a few years ago, it was a widespread belief that globalisation would trigger processes of democratisation worldwide. However, even old and established democracies such as the United States have recently revealed serious weaknesses. This article shows that the US election system is heavily...

We model the decision problems faced by the members of societies whose new members are determined by vote. We adopt a number of simplifying assumptions: the founders and the candidates are fixed; the society operates for a fixed number of periods and holds elections at the beginning of each period;...

We study the harmonization of the base remuneration for the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who were previously paid like national parliamentarians implying large differences between the delegations from the 27 member countries. Based on detailed information on individual MEPs between...

Using a new data set on Swiss state and local governments from 1890 to today, we analyze how the adoption of proportional representation affects fiscal policy. We show that proportional systems shift spending toward broad goods (e.g. education and welfare benefits) but decrease spending on...

We employ bootstrap methods (Efron (1979)) to test the effect of an important electoral reform implemented in Italy from 1993 to 2001, that moved the system for electing the Par-liament from purely proportional to plurality rule (for 75% of the seats). We do not find any effect on either the...