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. …

database includes the level of funding, as well as the origin of the resources the politicians have at their disposal. The …

We construct an election game to study the electoral impacts of biased candidate endorsements. We derive a set of … testable predictions. We test these in a laboratory experiment and find that observed election outcomes and vote shares are … well predicted. We find no support, however, for our prediction that the relationship between election outcome and the …

Politicians have limited ability to influence policy. This provides an incentive for politicians to feign, whereby they …

-tier political agency model with voters, politicians and bureaucrats. In the model's hierarchy, politicians are constrained by … election while bureaucrats are controlled by the budget. Bureaucrats' discretion provides them with political power to force … politicians to make compromise. If voters and bureaucrats prefer different types of politicians, i.e., they have a conflict of …

of experimentation is suboptimal, taking decisions by direct democracy, or electing risk-loving politicians, could …

We develop a simple two period model to study the importance of motivational differences among politicians in … describing the role of elections and explaining policy choices. In our model, politicians differ in their motives of running … public office. Good politicians care about policies while bad politicians care about rent extraction. Voters want to control …

have a down-up characteristic. We show that voters cannot motivate politicians to invest in down-up policies by their … macroeconomic developments. Finally, we comment on practical issues when such contracts are used in election races …