We present a model of electoral competition with uninformed voters. There is a market for news with ideological media outlets. We consider two market structures: monopoly and duopoly. We show that if each party has the support of an outlet, either party has the same probability of winning the...

This paper examines the incentives of ideological media outlets to acquire costly information in a context of asymmetric information between political parties and voters. We consider two market structures: a monopoly media market and a duopoly one. We show that if each party has the support of a...

We explore the role of the motivation of politicians in democracies when long-term policies are socially desirable. Politicians receive utility from holding office and from the success of their projects. We refer to the two extreme types of politicians as populists and policy success-seekers....

The modern Condorcet jury theorem states that under weak conditions, when voters have common interests, elections will aggregate information when the population is large, in any equilibrium. Here, we study the performance of large elections with population uncertainty. We find that the modern...

We study the electoral impact of biased endorsements in large Poisson elections with two candidates. Under fairly general conditions, we derive analytical approximations for the asymptotic voting equilibria. We show that, when the electorate is sufficiently polarized, manipulating public...

We introduce a framework to examine, both theoretically and empirically, electoral maldistricting. Maldistricting is defined as districting in pursuit of a policy at the expense of social welfare. Analysis is performed on the set of implementable (via some district map) legislatures, which are...

We provide a game-theoretical model of manipulative election campaigns with two political candidates and a continuum of Bayesian voters. Voters are uncertain about candidate positions, which are exogenously given and lie on a unidimensional policy space. Candidates take unobservable, costly...

This paper documents the existence of Political Forecast Cycles. In a theoretical model of political selection, we show that governments release overly optimistic GDP growth forecasts ahead of elections to increase the reelection probability. The bias arises from lack of commitment if voters are...

Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of a democratic system, but elections are common in other regimes as well. Such an election might be a pure farce, with the incumbents getting close to 100% of the vote. In other instances, incumbents allow opposition candidates to be on the ballot and...

Politicians may pander to public opinion and may renounce undertaking beneficial long-term projects. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a triple mechanism involving political information markets, reelection threshold contracts, and democratic elections. An information market is used to...