In this paper I study the strategic implications of coalition formation in an assembly. A coalition forms a voting bloc to coordinate the voting behavior of its members, acting as a single player and affecting the policy outcome. In a game of endogenous coalition formation, I show that voting...

Members of an assembly that chooses policies on a series of multidimensional ideological issues have incentives to coalesce and coordinate their votes, forming political parties. If an agent has an advantage to organize a party at a lower cost, a unique party forms and the policy outcome moves...

I provide an axiomatic foundation for the assumption of specific utility functions in a multidimensional spatial model, endogenizing the spatial representation of the set of alternatives. Given a set of objects with multiple attributes, I find simple necessary and sufficient conditions on...

We present an electoral theory on the public provision of local public goods to an imperfectly informed electorate. We show that electoral incentives lead to the efficient provision of local public goods only if the electorate is not well informed. An informed electorate induces candidates to...

Given a set of alternatives with multiple attributes, I characterize the set of preference profiles that are representable by weighted versions of a class of utility functions indexed by a parameter δ 0, where δ ≥ 1 corresponds to the set of Minkowski’s metric functions. In light of the...

This work follows the citizen candidate model of Besley and Coate (1997) to show that for a unidimensional policy issue, a moderate default policy rules out equilibrium outcomes in which there is an uncontested candidate

This paper studies the advantages that a coalition of agents obtains by forming a voting bloc to pool their votes and cast them all together. We identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for an agent to benefit from the formation of the voting bloc, both if the agent is a member of the...

We study repeated legislative bargaining in an assembly that chooses its bargaining rules endogenously, and whose members face an election after each legislative term. An agenda protocol or bargaining rule assigns to each legislator a probability of being recognized to make a policy proposal in...

This work studies the effect of the value of the status quo in the candidates' decisions and policy outcomes in a representative democracy with endogenous candidates. Following the citizen-candidate model due to Besley and Coate (1997) we show, for a unidimensional policy issue and for both an...