Depending on the design of the domestic pension system and the type of immigrants, voters will decide differently on immigration policy. In this paper, we investigate the voting outcome of three groups of heterogenous voters (skilled workers, unskilled workers, and retirees) under Beveridgian or...

This paper studies a model of how political parties use resources for campaigning to inform voters. We show existence of equilibrium under mild assumptions for an arbitrary number of parties. The main result is that if the parties are more extreme, then they spend less resources on campaigning...

This paper presents a theoretical model of rational retrospective voting, which is tested empirically on pooled cross-sectional and panel data from the Swedish Election Studies between 1985 and 1994 supplemented with time series on inflation and unemployment. Compared with the cross-sectional...

Increasing number of studies is focusing attention to constitutional analysis of European Union institutions and distribution of intra-institutional and inter-institutional influence in the European Union decision making. Most of the studies are related to distribution of voting power in the EU...

We evaluate the degree of gradualism and inaction in UK monetary policy over the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) period (1997-2007) at the quarterly and the monthly frequency. After accounting for misspecification in standard Taylor rules, we find little evidence for gradualism. A measure of...

This paper both theoretically and experimentally studies the properties of plurality and approval voting when the majority is divided as a result of information imperfections. The minority backs a third alternative, which the majority views as strictly inferior. The majority thus faces two...

This paper provides a theoretical model of pre-electoral budget cycle and tests its empirical implications. Whenelections approach, incumbent policy-makers have an incentive to signal their competency by acting on economicvariables. Rational voters incorporate the knowledge of such mechanisms in...

In the literature on electoral politics full convergence of policy platforms is usually regarded as socially optimal. Thereason is that risk-averse voters prefer a sure middle-of-the-road policy to a lottery of two extremes with the sameexpectation. In this paper we study the normative...

Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that, by coordinating voting behavior,these interest groups increase the winning set, which is defined as the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the...

A firm may induce voters or elected politicians to support a policy it favors by suggesting that it is more likely to invest in a district whose voters or representatives support the policy. In equilibrium, no one vote may be decisive, and the policy may gain strong support though the majority...