Vote buying is a form of political clientelism involving pre-electoral transfers of money or material benefits from candidates to voters. Despite the presence of secret ballots, vote buying remains a pervasive during elections in developing countries. While prior literature has focused on how...

In this paper, we present a citizen candidate model of representative democracy with endogenous lobbying. We find that lobbying induces policy compromise and always affects equilibrium policy outcomes It; particular, even though the policy preferences of lobbies are relatively extreme lobbying...

The role of electoral incentives vs. selection is ideally analyzed in a setting where the same legislators are selected to decide on policies under different electoral rules and where voter preferences on policies can be precisely measured. This is the first paper to look at such a situation....

In their pursuit of being elected, politicians might not provide their constituents with independent viewpoints, but just try to outguess popular opinion. Although rational voters see through such populism, candidates can not resist resorting to it when the spoils of office are too large. For an...

This paper studies a very pure form of "vote purchasing". We consider whether it may be in the interest of a party to discriminate between groups that, possibly except for size, are identical in all welfare relevant spects, i.e. the groups are assumed to have the same income, needs, etc. To...

This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of the conditions of self-enforcing democracy by analyzing the recent wave of autocratic transitions. Based on a game-theoretic framework, we work out the conditions under which governments may induce the diverse public authorities to...

Politicians have limited ability to influence policy. This provides an incentive for politicians to feign, whereby they propose policies that voters demand but then exert little effort toward progressing such policies. This feigning behavior is more likely to occur when the politician's...