This paper proposes a structural approach to measuring the effects of electoral accountability. We estimate a political agency model with imperfect information in order to identify and quantify discipline and selection effects, using data on U.S. governors. We find that the possibility of...

Traditional political economy has paid primary attention to the structuring of the principal-agent relationship between citizens and politicians and the role of competition and institutions in disciplining political agents. However, as the electoral control of politicians and the credibility of...

We estimate the causal effect of the electoral system on corruption by leveraging a specificity of the French electoral law where the electoral system for municipal councils depends on municipal population. Specifically, municipalities with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants use an individual majority...

Who will vote quadratically in large-N elections under quadratic voting (QV)? First, who will vote? Although the core QV literature assumes that everyone votes, turnout is endogenous. Drawing on other work, we consider the representativeness of endogenously determined turnout under QV. Second,...

How should a society choose between two social alternatives if participation in the decision process is voluntary and costly and monetary transfers are not feasible? Considering symmetric voters with private valuations, we show that it is utilitarian-optimal to use a linear voting rule: votes...

In US Presidential elections, each state is assigned a number of electors according to population, and all electors from the 50 states and District of Columbia form the Electoral College. The candidate who wins the majority of electoral votes from the College becomes President. The US...

This paper discusses the recent decisions of the High Court and Court of Appeal of Hong Kong in Chan Yu Nam v. Secretary for Justice (10 December 2009 and 7 December 2010 respectively) on the validity of corporate voting used to return members for functional constituency seats on the Legislative...