In the vivid imagination of Delaware courts, the shareholder franchise is “the ideological underpinning” upon which corporate power rests. A corporate election to choose who should lead the firm is “corporate democracy” at work, since such elections give shareholders the power “to turn...

Are campaigns for different offices isolated events, or do candidates observe and learn from each other? For example, when choosing which issues to emphasize, do candidates focus solely on their own strengths and their constituents' desires, or do they emulate one another? The answers to these...

The effect of campaign tone, in particular negative campaigns, have been studied extensively of late. One aspect that has been largely neglected is the effect of campaign tone on citizen understanding of a candidate's message. Citizen understanding of candidate priorities is highly consequential...

Open ballot PR election lead to a great amount of intra-party competition. In order to get elected, candidates have to make more votes than candidates from the same party and of course be on a party list that makes at least one seat; how candidates from other parties do is irrelevant. After...

Does political trust increase the likelihood of political donations in a social network? This paper assesses this question by using two large-n studies (the General Social Survey and National Election Study) to assess the power of political trust in predicting how likely people are to donate to...

Ballot initiatives are consequential and common, with total spending on initiative campaigns in the US rivaling that of Presidential campaigns. Observational studies using regression approaches on observational data have alternately found that initiative campaign spending cannot affect...

Which factors influence the topics addressed by candidates in political debates? This study investigates the question of how the level of elective office influences the content of political debates by employing computer content analysis to investigate the issue emphasis of political campaign...

The impact of a campaign on voters' decisions depends, in part, on when voters make their decisions. Voters who decide at the start of a campaign will be much less influenced by the campaign than those who decide at the end. But what explains when voters make their decisions? We address this...

This paper examines the effects of campaign spending limits on political competition and incumbency advantage. We study a reform in Brazil that imposed limits on campaign spending for mayoral elections. These limits were implemented with a discontinuous kink which we exploit for causal...