As with the market for goods and services, democratic competition involves political parties offering their services (policy programs) to citizen-consumers who vote for their preferred partisan supplier. Little is known about the partial effect of a shift in parties' seat shares for given voter...

Representative democracy does not necessarily eliminate political corruption. Existing models explain the survival of rent-taking politicians by ideological divisions in the electorate and/or informational asymmetries. The current paper demonstrate that rent extraction can persist even if voters...

We present an electoral agency model that, in a stylized way, captures the public finance structure of Norwegian municipal governments. It drives the following main implication: increasing partisan bias in favor of the incumbent reduces efficiency in public production, and more so the higher the...