In multi-party systems, parties often form alliances before elections. What brings competing parties to coalesce into new entities? I present a model of electoral competition in which parties can form pre-electoral alliances and decide how binding these should be. Parties face a dynamic...

In winner-take-all tournaments, agents' performance is determined jointly by effort and luck, and the top performer is rewarded. We study the impact of the ''shape of luck'' -- the details of the distribution of performance shocks -- on incentives in such settings. We are concerned with the...

This paper studies the nonparametric identification and estimation of voters' preferences when voters are ideological. We establish that voter preference distributions and other parameters of interest can be identified from aggregate electoral data. We also show that these objects can be...

How do voters allocate costly attention to alternative political issues? And how does selective ignorance of voters interact with policy design by politicians? We address these questions by developing a model of electoral competition with rationally inattentive voters. Rational inattention...

This paper studies how voters optimally allocate costly attention in a model of probabilistic voting. The equilibrium solves a modified social planning problem that reflects voters' choice of attention. Voters are more attentive when their stakes are higher, when their cost of information is...

How do voters allocate costly attention to alternative political issues? And how does selective ignorance of voters interact with policy design by politicians? We address these questions by developing a model of electoral competition with rationally inattentive voters. Rational inattention...

This paper studies the nonparametric identification and estimation of voters' preferences when voters are ideological. We establish that voter preference distributions and other parameters of interest can be identified from aggregate electoral data. We also show that these objects can be...

The theory of economic voting has extensively explored the influence of national economic conditions on votes for the incumbent party during elections. Such literature has never, however, explored the potential effects of economy on other types of voting swings in the sense of change in votes...

The theory of economic voting has extensively explored the influence of national economic conditions on votes for the incumbent party during elections. Such literature has never, however, explored the potential effects of economy on other types of voting swings in the sense of change in votes...