In multi-party systems, parties often form alliances before elections. What brings competing parties to coalesce into new entities? I present a model of electoral competition in which parties can form pre-electoral alliances and decide how binding these should be. Parties face a dynamic...

Vote-buying is widely used by parties in developing countries to influence the outcome of elections. We examine the impact of vote-buying on growth. We consider a model with a poverty trap where redistribution can promote growth. We show that vote-buying contributes to the persistence of poverty...

Using actual voting records of simultaneous elections held for Indian federal and regional assemblies -- where same political parties contest against each other in both type of elections -- we identify swing voters. We find that the representatives supported by swing voters outperform...

In dieser Dissertation wird die Wechselwirkung zwischen der Wirtschaft und den Wahlen, Politikern und Politik untersucht. Um die Wähler über die Folgen ihrer Wahlentscheidung zu informieren, ist das Verständnis der Dreiecksbeziehung zwischen der Wirtschaft, den politischen Akteuren und den...

We study the determinants of voting outcomes on the provision of public consumption through marginal income taxes in the context of the simple linear growth model. We provide analytical results on how the dynamic politicoeconomic equilibrium maps the economic fundamentals to policies and...

We formulate a model to explain why the lack of political competition may stifle economic performance and use the United States as a testing ground for the model’s predictions, exploiting the 1965 Voting Rights Act which helped break the near monpoly on political power of the Democrats in...

Investigating the strategic advantage of negatively interdependent preferences in action monotonic games, we derive characterizing conditions both for general action monotonic games and for the subclass of action monotonic games with spillovers. Examples demonstrate the generality of our...

The theory of economic voting has extensively explored the influence of national economic conditions on votes for the incumbent party during elections. Such literature has never, however, explored the potential effects of economy on other types of voting swings in the sense of change in votes...

Higher economic growth was generated during Democratic presidencies compared to Republican presidencies in the United States. The question is why. Blinder and Watson (2016) explain that the Democratic-Republican presidential growth gap (D-R growth gap) can hardly be attributed to the policies...

In the period after the break of the Great Recession a series of drastic changes in the political systems of many affected countries occurred: the predominant role of systemic parties in forming political outcomes was challenged and many previously non-systemic voices gained significant...