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,...

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...

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...

We study the private gains to bureaucrats from their political alignment with elected politicians. Whereas existing studies generally rely on proxies for politician-bureaucrat political alignment, a rare feature of our data allows measuring it directly since 27% of bureaucrats ran for political...

We study the private gains to bureaucrats from their political alignment with elected politicians. Whereas existing studies generally rely on proxies for politician-bureaucrat political alignment, a rare feature of our data allows measuring it directly since 27% of bureaucrats ran for political...