This paper develops a model where rational economic agents face uncertainty regarding the timing of elections and which party will emerge victorious should an election occur. This electoral uncertainty affects the macroeconomy, where the size and direction of the impacts are dependent on the...

Environmental outcomes can be shaped by underlying politics, we test whether pre-determined election timings affect these outcomes. To conduct our analysis, we combined elections data with remote sensing data on crop burning, forest fires, slash and burn activity, and tree cover for the period...

Political economists debate the existence of a political business cycle (PBCs), in which politicians stimulate the economy to improve their re-election chances, only to cause a post-election slowdown. For developing countries, scholars have found evidence of election-year policy tinkering. Yet...

This paper documents that surprise election outcomes - measured as deviations between realised vote shares and expected vote shares based on a newly constructed dataset of opinion polls and party and candidate vote shares close to election day - are causing non-negligible short-term contractions...

The future looked bright for Argentina in the early twentieth century. It had already achieved high levels of income per capita and was moving away from authoritarian government towards a more open democracy. Unfortunately, Argentina never finished the transition. The turning point occurred in...

I examine the provision of free and fair elections using a decision-theoretic model in which election observers provide a noisy information signal concerning fraud. Monitoring an election is not always worth the cost and so democracy is not always sustainable. A strong preference for fair...

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...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of primary voting systems on the ability of agent-representatives to deviate within the median voter model. While conclusions are consistent with the results found in Gerber and Morton (1998), this paper extends their analysis by including the...

In their survey of the legislator shirking literature, Bender and Lott (1996) point to 4 areas of relative consensus regarding legislator voting: 1. legislators almost always represent their constituents' interests, 2. when legislators do diverge from constituent interests, the adverse economic...

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...