Journalism is widely believed to be crucial for holding elected officials accountable. At the same time economic theory has a hard time providing an instrumental explanation for the existence of "accountability journalism". According to the common Downsian reasoning, rational voters should not...

This paper considers the implications of an important cognitive bias in information processing, confirmation bias, in a political agency setting. In the baseline two-period case where only the politician's actions are observable before the election, we show that when voters have this bias, it...

Democracies delegate substantial decision power to politicians. Using a model in which an incumbent can design, examine and implement public policies, we show that examination takes place in spite of, rather than thanks to, elections. Elections are needed as a carrot and a stick to motivate...

We explore how public opinion polls affect candidates' campaign spending in political competition. Generally, polls lead to (more) asymmetric behavior. Under a majority rule there always exists an equilibrium in which the initially more popular candidate invests more in the campaign and thereby...

We measure the importance of candidate characteristics listed on ballots for a candidate's position on a slate, for preferential votes received by a candidate, and, ultimately, for getting elected. We focus on the effects of gender, various types of academic titles, and also several novel...

This paper studies the impact of the staggered introduction of digital television in Kenya between 2013 and 2017 on electoral behavior in times of political uncertainty. I construct a geocoded dataset of Kenyan polling stations and TV reception. After studying the determinants of signal...

We construct an election game to study the electoral impacts of biased candidate endorsements. We derive a set of testable predictions. We test these in a laboratory experiment and find that observed election outcomes and vote shares are well predicted. We find no support, however, for our...

When does an incentive exist for an incumbent to experiment with a risky reform policy in the presence of future elections? To address this question, we study a dynamic game between two political parties with heterogeneous preferences and a voter. The voter elects a party that then chooses a...

The increasing cost of campaigns and its implications for the performance of the electoral process are issues of paramount importance in modern democracies. We propose a theory of electoral accountability where candidates choose whether to propose a socially beneficial policy and whether to pay...

A number of recent formal models predict a positive effect of political knowledge on turnout. Both information acquisition and turnout, however, are likely to be determined by a similar set of variables, rendering hard the identification of a causal link in empirical investigations. Available...