We consider a canonical two-period model of elections with adverse selection (hidden preferences) and moral hazard (hidden actions), in which neither voters nor politicians can commit to future choices. We prove existence of electoral equilibria, and we show that office holders mix between...

Can public mood swings that make all voters undergo an ideological shift towards a policy, hurt the electoral performance of that policy? The answer depends interestingly on the operations of an apolitical, viewership-maximizing dominant media. The media chooses news quality about fundamental...

We argue that standard models that solve the paradox of voting do a bad job explaining the frequency of very close elections. We instead model head-to-head elections as a competition between incentive schemes to turn out voters. We show that elections are either heavily contested, and decided by...