It can be advantageous for an office motivated party A to spend effort to make it public that a group of voters will lose from party A’s policy proposal. Such effort is called inverse campaigning. The inverse campaigning equilibria are described for the case where the two parties can...

A conclave is a voting mechanism in which a committee selects an alternative by voting until a sufficient supermajority is reached. We study experimentally welfare properties of simple three-voter conclaves with privately known preferences over two outcomes and waiting costs. The resulting game...

This paper studies electoral effects of exposure to religious minorities in the context of Muslim communities in Germany. Using unique data on mosques' construction and election results across municipalities over the period 1980-2013, we find that the presence of a mosque increases political...

We study communication in committees selecting one of two alternatives when consensus is required and agents have private information about their preferences. Delaying the decision is costly, so a form of multiplayer war of attrition emerges. Waiting allows voters to express the intensity of...

Failures of government policies often provoke opposite reactions from citizens; some call for a reversal of the policy while others favor its continuation in stronger form. We offer an explanation of such polarization, based on a natural bimodality of preferences in political and economic...

A conclave is a voting mechanism in which a committee selects an alternative by voting until a sufficient supermajority is reached. We study experimentally welfare properties of simple three-voter conclaves with privately known preferences over two outcomes and waiting costs. The resulting game...

It can be advantageous for an office motivated party A to spend effort to make it public that a group of voters will lose from party A s policy proposal. Such effort is called inverse campaigning. The inverse campaigning equilibria are described for the case where the two parties can...

This paper considers electoral behavior and institutional capture when voters choose between a populist and non-populist politician. Populist politicians provide voters with a utility boom followed by a subsequent bust, as in Dornbusch and Edwards (The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin...

This paper analyses a model of electoral competition with lobbying, where candidates hold private information about their willingness to pander to lobbies, if elected. I show that this uncertainty induces risk-averse voters to choose candidates who implement policies biased in favor of the...

This paper studies electoral effects of exposure to religious minorities in the context of Muslim communities in Germany. Using unique data on mosques' construction and election results across municipalities over the period 1980-2013, we find that the presence of a mosque increases political...