We present a formal model of electoral competition where parties' platforms are endogenously chosen and depend on the degree of the electoral rule disproportionality. We first show that proportional electoral systems generate centrifugal forces that increase candidate differentiation. This in...

We study electoral rule choice in a multi-party model with office-motivated parties and electoral outcome uncertainty. We show that when all dominant parties (parties with positive probability of winning the election) have sufficiently good chances of winning, they agree to switch from the PR...

We use a credible regression discontinuity design to estimate causal education effects. Pupils in the Swiss education system had to pass a centrally organized exam that classified them into different levels of secondary school, and that ultimately determined their educational degree. A major...

Why do some people go to the polling station, sometimes up to several times a year, while others always prefer to stay at home? This question has launched a wide theoretical debate in both economics and political science, but convincing empirical support for the different models proposed is...

By January 1, 2005, Switzerland reduced the legal level of blood–alcohol concentration while driving from 0.8h to 0.5h. This happend on basis of the assumptions that more restrictive per mil levels increase road safety. The benefit of lower blood–alcohol levels, however, depends on whether...

We analyze a unidimensional model of two-candidate electoral competition where voters have imperfect information about the candidates' policy proposals, that is, voters cannot observe the exact policy proposals of the candidates but only which candidate offers the most leftist/rightist platform....

We demonstrate that the Hotelling–Downs model with runoff voting always admits symmetric mixed strategy equilibria for any (even or odd) number of office-motivated candidates (provided they are at least four). In specific, (a) we show that the game does not admit any symmetric atomless...

This paper characterizes a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium in a one-dimensional Downsian model of two-candidate elections with a continuous policy space, where candidates are office motivated and one candidate enjoys a non- policy advantage over the other candidate. We assume that voters have...