We experimentally study the impact of adding an explicit nil vote option to the ballot in both compulsory and voluntary voting settings. We investigate this issue in an informational voting setting, in which some voters are uninformed and face the swing voter’s curse, implying that they can...

This paper discusses the implications of strategic voting for institutional design in environments where the only role of elections is to aggregate information. We adopt a mechanism design perspective, which assumes that prior to a standard voting game, a fictitious designer has to select the...

The paper considers public funding of political parties when some voters are poorly informed about parties' candidates and campaigns are informative. For symmetric equilibria, it is shown that more public funding leads parties to chose more moderate candidates, and that an increase in the...

We challenge the prevailing view that pure informational lobbying (in the absence of political contributions and evidence distortion or withholding) leads to better informed policymaking. In the absence of lobbying, the policymaker may prioritize the more-important or ex ante morepromising...

We develop a model of strategic information transmission from an outside expert with informational superiority to a group of people who make a decision by voting on a proposal. An outside expert who observes the qualities of a proposal sends a cheap talk message to decision makers with limited...

We develop a model of strategic information transmission from an expert with informational superiority to decision makers who vote on a proposal. We show that an expert's simple cheap talk strategy can be surprisingly effective in persuading decision makers by polarizing or unifying their...

This paper examines the political economy of redistribution when voters have asymmetric information about the redistributive preferences of politicians and the latter cannot make credible policy commitments. The candidates in each party are endogenously selected by a process of Nash Bargaining...

We study the implications of state dependent costs of policy mismatch in political agency models where politicians have reputational concerns over their preferences and the "good'' politician shares the same objectives of the voters. We find that state-dependent costs can make pandering...

Whom should an interest group lobby in a legislature? I develop a model of informational lobbying in which a legislature must decide on the allocation of a local publicly-provided good across districts. An interest group chooses sequentially to search and provide information on districts'...