Recent research has documented that competent-looking political candidates do better in U.S. elections and that babyfaced individuals are generally perceived to be less competent than maturefaced individuals. Taken together, this suggests that babyfaced political candidates are perceived as less...

This paper presents a detailed analysis of voters' responses to municipality and regional-level unemployment and economic growth, using panel data on 284 municipalities and 9 regions, covering Swedish general elections from 1982 to 2002. The preferred specification suggests that a reduction in...

Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that the act of voting makes people more positive toward the party or candidate they have voted for. Following Mullainathan and Washington (2009), I test this prediction by using exogenous variation in turnout provided by the voting age restriction. I improve...

The two major earthquakes which struck northwestern Turkey in 1999, caused enormous amounts of death and destruction, and exposed rampant government corruption involving construction and zoning code violations, as a factor magnifying the disaster. The opposition parties and one of the incumbent...

We set up a probabilistic voting model to explore the hypothesis that tax competition improves public sector efficiency and social welfare. In the absence of tax base mobility, distortions in the political process induce vote-maximising politicians to create rents to public sector employees....

We set up a model of elections or referendums with two alternatives to study how voter turnout and election outcomes are affected by the publication of exit polls on election day. We find that the introduction of an exit poll influences the incentive to vote both before and after the poll is...

The paper considers public funding of political parties when some voters are poorly informed about parties? candidates and campaigns are informative. For symmetric equilibria, it is shown that more public funding leads parties to chose more moderate candidates, and that an increase in the...

In this paper we study the functioning of representative democracy when politicians are better informed than the electorate about conditions relevant for policy choice. We consider a model with two states of the world. The distribution of voters' preferred policies shifts with the state. The two...

This paper examines why fiscal policy is procyclical in developing as well as developed countries. We introduce the concept of fiscal transparency into a model of retrospective voting, in which a political agency problem between voters and politicians generates a procyclical bias in government...

Using unique survey data that allows us to observe both voters' and politicians' preferences for local public spending as well as voting decisions, this paper tests if voters typically support parties in which the politicians' preferences are closest to their own. Doing so would be rational for...