Representative democracy does not necessarily eliminate political corruption. Existing models explain the survival of rent-taking politicians by ideological divisions in the electorate and/or informational asymmetries. The current paper demonstrate that rent extraction can persist even if voters...

Politicians bias public policies to favor particular election districts. According to the traditional common pool model, districts facing low tax shares should receive relatively large government projects. We suggest a swing-voter model where the number of voters on the ideological cut point,...

We present an electoral agency model that, in a stylized way, captures the public finance structure of Norwegian municipal governments. It drives the following main implication: increasing partisan bias in favor of the incumbent reduces efficiency in public production, and more so the higher the...

As with the market for goods and services, democratic competition involves political parties offering their services (policy programs) to citizen-consumers who vote for their preferred partisan supplier. Little is known about the partial effect of a shift in parties' seat shares for given voter...

How do parties motivate candidates to exert effort in closed-list elections? If each candidate’s primary goal is winning a seat, then those in safe and hopeless list positions have weak incentives to campaign. We present a model in which (i) candidates care about both legislative seats and the...