́electoral prospects improve? We study this question with a natural experiment from the German federal state of Hesse. The … experiment is the abolishment of an explicit electoral threshold (the so called "five percent hurdle") for local elections in … elections, but local politicians from large mainstream parties had the ability to adjust municipal political institutions in …

' electoral prospects improve? We study this question with a natural experiment from the German federal State of Hesse. The … experiment is the abolishment of an explicit electoral threshold (the so called "five percent hurdle") for local elections in … elections, but local politicians from mainstream parties had the ability to adjust municipal political institutions in such as …

We provide a game-theoretical model of manipulative election campaigns with two political candidates and a continuum of …-efficient candidate wins the election even if she is more distant from the electorate than her opponent is. In contrast to the existing … election campaign models that do not support information manipulation in equilibrium, our paper rationalizes misleading …

The literature on the rational PBC suggests that politicians systematically manipulate economic and fiscal conditions … before elections to increase their chances of eelection. Most tests of this theory look for evidence of pre-election …

We quantify the implications of voter bias and electoral competition for politicians' gender composition. Unfavorable … election year, we find that female candidates obtain fewer votes in municipalities with higher gender earnings gaps. We show … districts. We find empirical support for such a strategic party response to voter gender bias. Simulating our calibrated model …

voters' capacity to identify and empower well-suited politicians. In our model, candidates are heterogeneous in two … concentration of power in the hands of the election winner is optimal if and only if the conflict of interest is small. …