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...

A burgeoning line of inquiry suggests that news firms adjust the substantive content of news to follow their audience’s political preferences. However, scholars currently disagree over the ability of audience political preferences to influence substantive content in traditional news sources....

Based on the 3-way and 5-way groupings of Turkey’s 81 provinces obtained in Akarca and Başlevent (2011), we report the regional vote shares of the main parties in the Turkish party system in each nationwide election held between 1999 and 2009. The vote shares reveal that conservative...

This paper proposes a dynamic politico-economic theory of debt, government finance and expenditure. Agents have preferences over a private and a government-provided public good, financed through labor taxation. Subsequent generations of voters choose taxation, government expenditure and debt...

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...

Ghana’s 2008 elections have been hailed by national and international observers as a model for Africa. This perception has prevailed despite persistent concerns about 'ethnic block voting' and electoral fraud. Electoral malpractice and vote rigging along ethnic lines in Ghana's virtual...

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...

Electoral platform convergence is perceived unfavorably by both the popular press and many academic scholars. This paper provides a formal account of these perceived negative effects. We show that when parties do not know voters' preferences perfectly, voters prefer some platform divergence to...

This Article examines the merits of vote buying at a more detailed level than has been done previously. Various scenarios are played-out of how an actual election would function if vote buying were permitted. The Article concludes, in line with past scholarship, but for different reasons, that...