This paper deals with the impact of electoral competition on politicians' outside earnings. We propose a simple theoretical model with politicians facing a tradeoff between allocating their time to political effort or to an alternative use generating outside earnings. The model has a testable...

Measuring the effect of ballot access restrictions on electoral competition is complicated because the stringency of ballot access regulations cannot be treated as being exogenous to candidates' entry decisions. This paper exploits the 1968 U.S. Supreme Court decision to strike down Ohio's...

We combine Duverger's Law (1954) with Demsetz's (1968) theory of natural monopoly to provide a novel perspective on electoral competitiveness in a single member district, plurality rule system. In the framework we develop, competitiveness depends on the contestability of elections, which...

Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that, by coordinating voting behavior,these interest groups increase the winning set, which is defined as the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the...

We study electoral competition among politicians who are heterogeneous both in competence and in how much they care about (what they perceive as) the public interest relative to the private rents from being in office. We show that politicians may have stronger incentives to behave...