In modern elections, ideologically motivated candidates with a wealth of information about individual voters and sophisticated campaign strategies are faced by voters who lack awareness of some political issues and are uncertain about the exact political positions of candidates. We study to what...

We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties....

Open ballot PR election lead to a great amount of intra-party competition. In order to get elected, candidates have to make more votes than candidates from the same party and of course be on a party list that makes at least one seat; how candidates from other parties do is irrelevant. After...

How do parties choose issues to emphasize in campaigns, and when does electoral competition force parties to address issues important to voters? Empirical studies have found that although parties focus disproportionately on favourable issues in campaigns, they also spend much of the 'short...

Information affecting a candidate's reputation might have significant electoral consequences. Do candidates respond to the release of information? Using Brazilian elections and audits as an exogenous source of information, I show that both incumbent and challenger increase their campaign...