The paper considers public funding of political parties when some voters are poorly informed about parties' candidates and campaigns are informative. For symmetric equilibria, it is shown that more public funding leads parties to chose more moderate candidates, and that an increase in the...

Political competition, party strategy and communication in the era of social media are growing issues. Due to the increasing social media presence of parties and voters alike, direct communication is more important for party competition. This paper aims to improve the methodological approach...

Promise competition is prevalent in many economic environments, but promise keeping is often difficult to observe. We study the value of transparency for promise competition and ask whether promises still offer an opportunity to honor future obligations when outcomes do not allow for observing...

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...

Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that, by coordinating voting behavior, these interest groups increase the winning set, which is defined as the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the...

Rational voters update their subjective beliefs about candidates' attributes with the arrival of information, and subsequently base their votes on these beliefs. Information accrual is, however, endogenous to voters' types and difficult to identify in observational studies. In a large scale...

This article analyses the dynamics of electoral promises, building on an electoral competition model with endogenous policies. It extends the Grossman-Helpman (1994) model [Grossman G., Helpman E. [1994], "Protection for sale", American Economic Review, 84, 4, 833-850] to include sanctions from...

We introduce a framework of electoral competition in which voters have general preferences over candidates' characteristics and policies. Candidates' immutable characteristics (such as gender, race or previously committed policy positions) are exogenously differentiated, while candidates can...

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...

We consider alternative methods of measuring the competitiveness of a majoritarian electoral system in the context of an analysis of Indian State elections. Our analysis highlights a number of weaknesses in the construction and interpretation of commonly used measures such as the effective...