Framing effects and bounded rationality imply that election campaigns may be an important determinant of election outcomes. This paper uses a two-party setting and simple game theoretic models to analyse the strategic interaction between the parties' campaign decisions. Alternations of power...

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept the 2014 General Elections in India and emerged as a single party with absolute majority, a result not witnessed since 1984. Not only did it win a majority of seats, it also managed to increase its vote share in almost all states between 2009 and 2014....

The two major earthquakes which struck northwestern Turkey in 1999, not only caused enormous amounts of death, destruction and suffering, but also exposed rampant government corruption involving construction and zoning code violations. The incompetence shown by the government in providing...

What might have caused the post-2007 election violence in Kenya? Was it election irregularities as widely claimed or could it have been simmering ethnic-rivalries waiting to spill over? While not directly focusing on the post-election violence, we investigate a number of issues that divided...

Framing effects and bounded rationality imply that election campaigns may be an important determinant of election outcomes. This paper uses a two-party setting and simple game theoretic models to analyse the strategic interaction between the parties’ campaign decisions. Alternations of power...

This paper studies the effects of power-concentrating institutions on the quality of political selection, i.e., the voters' capacity to identify and empower well-suited politicians. In our model, candidates are heterogeneous in two unobservable quality aspects: ability and public-spiritedness....

This paper analyzes local political cycle in Czech municipalities over the period between 1997 and 2013. We apply the system GMM and the difference GMM estimators to identify distortion in current and capital expenditures per capita in electoral and pre-electoral years, while focusing on various...

Using microdata that serve as the foundation of the ifo Business Climate Index, Germany's leading business cycle indicator, I examine whether political uncertainty influences how firm owners perceive their present state and future development of business. I use state election months as...

This paper presents a rational political budget cycle model for an open economy, in which devaluations are delayed in the pre-election period so as to increase the electoral chances of the party in office. By concentrating on closed economies, previous political cycle models had overlooked the...

We use a change in the voting procedures of one of the two chambers of the Swiss parliament to explore how transparency affects the voting behavior of its members. Until 2013, the Council of States (Ständerat) had voted by a show of hands. While publicly observable at the time of the vote,...