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...

Electoral legislation varies across countries and within countries over time, and across different types of elections in terms of how it allows publication of intermediate election results including turnout and candidates' vote shares during an election day. Using a pivotal costly voting model...

Why do the electorate vote or abstain from voting under competitive authoritarianism? Elite rent seeking and rent distribution are recognized as main determinants of turnout in authoritarian elections, but the logic of voting decision on the side of an oppositional electorate remains...

We introduce a democratic procedure with voting-based proposals called ”Pendular Voting”. It works as follows: An agenda-setter chooses a proposal meant to replace a given status quo. In the first stage, a random sample of the population votes on the proposal. The result is made public,...

We fully characterize in a mass election model the set of candidates that can win with positive probability in equilibrium when the voters are allowed to vote for as many candidates as they want. If at most two candidates can win for some undominated strategy profile (“in the race”...

We analyze how the introduction of the voting advice application (VAA) smartvote affects voter turnout, voting behavior and electoral outcomes. The Swiss context offers an ideal setting to identify the causal effects of online information with aggregate real world data because smartvote was...

We consider a test of expressive voting developed by Brennan and Lomasky (1993). They point out that in presidential elections the probability of a tie, and casting a decisive vote, increases “multi-billionfold” as the election becomes increasingly close. They conjecture that if voters are...

We study a model of endogenous means testing where households differ in their income and where the in-kind transfer received by each household declines with income. Majority voting determines the two dimensions of public policy: the size of the welfare program and the means-testing rate. We...