I exploit a large natural experiment in Australia that saw the House of Representatives expand from 125 districts to 148 districts. This required substantial changes to electoral boundaries, which, for the first time, were determined by a body that was not subject to ministerial discretion. As a...

This paper shows that union members are consistently more supportive of redistribution than other citizens. This is partly because union members are drawn predominantly from socio-economic strata characterized by relatively low incomes and relatively high exposure to labor-market risks, but it...

We use voting experiments to examine the effects of different primary types on voter turnout, voter choice and election outcomes. We use monetary incentives to induce our participants' preferences for candidate and party, eliminating the incentive for expressive voting, allowing us to focus...

We introduce a solution concept in the context of large elections with private information by embedding a model of boundedly rational voters into an otherwise standard equilibrium setting. A retrospective voting equilibrium (RVE) formalizes the idea that voters evaluate alternatives based on...

I develop a model of strategic entry by candidates for office in runoff elections under aggregate uncertainty. I introduce aggregate uncertainty by making candidates unsure of the distribution of voter preferences in the electorate. The set of three candidate equilibria expands and equilibrium...

The direct democratic choice of an examination standard, i.e., a performance level required to graduate, is evaluated against a utilitarian welfare function. It is shown that the median preferred standard is inefficiently low if the marginal cost of reaching a higher performance reacts more...

We study information aggregation with a biased election organizer who recruits voters at some cost. Voters are symmetric ex-ante and prefer policy a in state a and policy b in state B, but the organizer prefers policy a regardless of the state. Each recruited voter observes a private signal...