How do parties motivate candidates to exert effort in closed-list elections? If each candidate’s primary goal is winning a seat, then those in safe and hopeless list positions have weak incentives to campaign. We present a model in which (i) candidates care about both legislative seats and the...

We have two goals in this paper. The specific one is to provide a unified account of several prominent institutional theories of the Congress, but especially to present a model that is consistent with both the Cox-McCubbins theory of party cartels (2005; 2007) and the Aldrich-Rohde theory of...