The literature on the rational PBC suggests that politicians systematically manipulate economic and fiscal conditions … before elections to increase their chances of eelection. Most tests of this theory look for evidence of pre-election …

keeping can(not) be observed. We identify the causal effects of transparency in a laboratory experiment. Transparency leads to …

We model an election in which parties nominate candidates with observable policy preferences prior to a campaign that …

investigated by scholars, empirical findings are mixed at best. This is partly because of the non-random nature of election timing … exploiting a natural experiment in Japan, where the timing of both executive and legislative elections in municipalities is fixed …

evolution of confirmation bias can lead to more pandering before the first election. Finally, we show that when confirmation …This paper considers the implications of an important cognitive bias in information processing, confirmation bias, in a … political agency setting. In the baseline two-period case where only the politician's actions are observable before the election …

election outcome and voter turnout. We apply our framework to study the influence of the endorser's bias and the entry of new … endorsers on the extent of electoral manipulation. With a single endorser, a rise in bias affects the election outcome in a non …-monotonic way and reduces voter welfare. Importantly and surprisingly, manipulating election outcomes becomes easier, the larger is …