2015 first using an auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) model and then allowing for asymmetric adjustment by adapting NARDL panel estimation techniques. After finding evidence of asymmetry at the party level, the NARDL results uncover two new stylized facts for ENP at the national party...

Recent developments in information and communication technologies allow candidates for office to engage in sophisticated messaging strategies to influence voter choice. We consider how access to different technologies influence the choice of policy platforms by candidates. We find that when...

We consider campaign competition in which candidates compete for votes among a continuum of voters by engaging in persuasive efforts that are targetable. Each individual voter is persuaded by campaign effort and votes for the candidate who targets more persuasive effort to this voter. Each...

Electoral contests in Latin America are often characterized by attempts by political parties to sway the outcome of elections using vote buying – a practice that seems to persist during elections throughout the region. Much of the literature on this subject focuses on how party machines use...

This paper provides a theoretical model for the coattail effect, where a popular candidate for one branch of government attracts votes to candidates from the same political party for other branches of government. I assume a political agency framework with moral hazard in order to analyze the...

I investigate the impact of proportional representation (PR) and majoritarian rule (MR) on voter turnout and minority representation using theory and experiments. Numerous empirical studies have compared turnout across PR and MR. However, the empirical evidence is mixed. I show theoretically and...

Voting Theory generally concludes that -in first-past-the-post elections- 1) All votes should go to effective candidates (Duverger's Law); 2) Parties' platforms should converge (Median Voter Theorem). Observations, though, suggest that such predictions are not met in practice. We show that...

We study a one dimensional Hotelling-Downs model of electoral competition with the following innovation: a fraction of candidates have character and are exogenously committed to a campaign platform; this is unobservable to voters. However, character is desirable, and a voter's utility is a...

In this chapter, we assess recent contributions of computational models to the study of politics. We focus primarily on agent-based models developed by economists and political scientists. These models address collective action problems, questions related to institutional design and performance,...