This paper studies the role of autonomy and reciprocity in explaining control averse responses in principal-agents interactions. While most of the social psychology literature emphasizes the role of autonomy, recent economic research has provided an alternative explanation based on reciprocity....

Since voters are often swayed more by the personal image of politicians than by party manifestos, they may cast votes that are in opposition to their policy preferences. This results in the election of representatives who do not correspond exactly to the voters' own views. An alternative voting...

Voter turnout has declined in many industrialized countries, raising the question of whether electoral institutions increase voter turnout. We exploit an electoral reform in the Austrian state of Burgenland as a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of opening hours of polling...

Nowhere in the U.S. is federalism more evident than in the administration of elections, as the Constitution and historical practice leave this largely in the hands of the states (and even counties within states). Consequently, voters across jurisdictions are likely to have different experiences...

Electoral clientelism and vote buying are widely perceived as major obstacles to economic development. This is because they may limit the provision of public goods. In this paper, we review the literature on clientelism and vote buying and propose the use of field experiments to evaluate...

Studies of voting behavior in advanced industrial societies have demonstrated that voters rely on a plethora of information sources, including retrospective evaluations of parties, party identification and strong social networks, in making complex voting decisions. However, there is less...