A campaign model in which candidates can make law announcements for reforms in the next term will be considered. Acquiring information about these laws incurs the candidates a certain cost. The conditions under which a candidate acquires information about a given law during the campaign will be...

When reelection is uncertain, the election mechanism may provide insufficient incentives to politicians to implement the socially desirable policy. In this paper, we show that incentive contracts which the candidates offer themselves during the campaign can help to alleviate the problem even if...

Based on contribution patterns to parties in Germany and elsewhere, we suggest that democracies should use a mixed system where private funding can play a larger role than public funding. In Germany the high level of public funding for parties can be reduced without expecting undesirable effects...