We study whether incumbents facing uncontested elections channel public spending towards co‐partisan officials more than is the case of incumbents that are worried about their chances of re‐election. To do so, we draw on data detailing capital transfers allocated by Spanish regions to local...

We study whether incumbents facing uncontested elections channel public spending towards co‐partisan officials more than is the case of incumbents that are worried about their chances of re‐election. To do so, we draw on data detailing capital transfers allocated by Spanish regions to local...

Information affecting a candidate's reputation might have significant electoral consequences. Do candidates respond to the release of information? Using Brazilian elections and audits as an exogenous source of information, I show that both incumbent and challenger increase their campaign...

Electoral competition is essential to democracy. Yet the incumbency rate in state-house legislative campaigns is nearly 95 percent. This report examines campaign contribution limits and the impact limits can have on electoral competition. The research on which this report is based was inspired...

We study a one dimensional Hotelling-Downs model of electoral competition with the following innovation: a fraction of candidates have character and are exogenously committed to a campaign platform; this is unobservable to voters. However, character is desirable, and a voter's utility is a...

We consider a model of (spatial) voting with endogenous timing. In line with what is observed in actual political campaigns, candidates can decide endogenously when and where to locate. More specifically, we analyze endogenous timing in a two-period n-candidate spatial-voting game on the unit...

I study a one-dimensional Hotelling-Downs model of electoral competition in which unelectable fringe candidates with extreme policy platforms are an integral part of the political process. When the preferences of voters change over time, and there are restrictions on political parties changing...