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...

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...

What explains significant variation across countries in the use of vote buying instead of campaign promises to secure voter support? This paper explicitly models the tradeoff parties face between engaging in vote buying and making campaign promises, and explores the distributional consequences...

We model an election between two Downsian mainstream candidates and a third inflexible politician. There is uncertainty about the state of the world. Candidates receive signals on the state and propose a policy to implement. There are two classes of voters: ideological, who are biased towards...

Do established parties change political institutions to disadvantage smaller, nonmainstream parties if the latters ́electoral prospects improve? We study this question with a natural experiment from the German federal state of Hesse. The experiment is the abolishment of an explicit electoral...

The electoral competitiveness among candidates vying for single elected positions (e.g. president, members of parliament single member districts, or candidates for the party leadership) lacks an appropriate measurement. This paper reevaluates previous measurements and proposes a new indicator...

We construct an election game to study the electoral impacts of biased candidate endorsements. We derive a set of testable predictions. We test these in a laboratory experiment and find that observed election outcomes and vote shares are well predicted. We find no support, however, for our...

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...

Recent developments in information and communication technologies allow candidates for office to engage in sophisticated messaging strategies to influence voter choice. We consider how access to different technologies influence the choice of policy platforms by candidates. We find that when...