We argue that standard models of voting do a bad job explaining the frequency of very close mass elections with high turnout. We instead model head-to-head elections as a competition between incentive schemes to turn out voters and elucidate conditions under which parties might prefer close...

We consider a canonical two-period model of elections with adverse selection (hidden preferences) and moral hazard (hidden actions), in which neither voters nor politicians can commit to future choices. We prove existence of electoral equilibria, and we show that office holders mix between...