We introduce a framework of electoral competition in which voters have general preferences over candidates' characteristics and policies. Candidates' immutable characteristics (such as gender, race or previously committed policy positions) are exogenously differentiated, while candidates can...

Direct democracy is extraordinarily popular and has become a pervasive policymaking tool at the state and local level. Repeated surveys have demonstrated that Americans strongly approve of allowing people to vote on citizen-proposed laws, a method currently allowed in about half of all states...

We consider a two-period overlapping generations model in which individual voters differ by age and by productivity, In such a setting, a redistributive Pay-As-You-Go system is politically sustainable, even when the interest rate is larger than the rate of population growth. The workers with...

We analyze a vote-buying model where the members of a committee vote on a proposal important to a vote buyer. Each member incurs a privately-drawn disutility if the proposal passes. We characterize the cheapest combination of bribes that guarantees the proposal passes in all equilibria. When...