In contrast to previous empirical work on electoral cycles, which implicitly assumes the executive has full discretion over fiscal policy, this paper contends that under separation of powers an unaligned legislature may have a moderating role. Focusing on the budget surplus, we find that...

Within this framework of pure redistriubtion (dividing one unit of a homogeneous good among identical individuals), the paper analyses the redistributions that arise from Downsian two-party electoral competition. It appears that the strategic behavior of vote-maximizing parties lead them to...

This paper studies the impact of considering the incentives of candidates to strategically affect the outcome of a voting procedure. First we show that every non-dictatorial voting procedure that satisfies unanimity, is open to strategic entry or exit by candidates: there necessarily exists some...

Cet article etudie les consequences d'un altruisme non reciproque et demontre que l'exploitation du samaritain par le beneficiaire depend du niveau d'altruisme et non du montant des transferts. Un modele caracterise les conditions dans lesquelles un dilemme du prisonnier se transforme en un...

This paper studies a model of how political parties use resources for campaigning to inform voters. We show existence of equilibrium under mild assumptions for an arbitrary number of parties. The main result is that if the parties are more extreme, then they spend less resources on campaigning...

Earlier studies estimating the demand for local public services by means of the median voter model have typically assumed exogenous regressors and static set-ups. Furthermore, the commonly used log-linear specification of the demand function has in most cases not been supported by a well-defined...

A couple of months before the Swedish election in 1998, the incumbent government distributed 2.3 billion SEK to 42 out of 115 applying municipalities. This was the first wave of a four-year long grant program intended to support local investment programs aimed at an ecological sustainable...

I analyze a dataset of news from the New York Times, from 1946 to 1997. Controllingfor the incumbent President's activity across issues, I find that during the presidentialcampaign the New York Times gives more emphasis to topics that are owned by theDemocratic party (civil rights, health care,...

We model a two-alternative election in which voters may acquire information about which is the best alternative for all voters. Voters differ in their cost of acquiring information. We show that as the number of voters increases, the fraction of voters who acquire information declines to zero....

The relatively low voter turnout rates in the June 2004 European Parliamentary elections in many of the post-communist states surprised observers. While the average turnout rate for these new-EU member states barely surpassed 30%, turnout exhibited much variance at the national and sub-national...