How do parties choose issues to emphasize in campaigns, and when does electoral competition force parties to address issues important to voters? Empirical studies have found that although parties focus disproportionately on favourable issues in campaigns, they also spend much of the 'short...

We study the strategic interaction between candidates to office and the print media, exploring the following tension: while the media is instrumental for candidates to communicate with voters, candidates and media outlets have conflicting preferences over the contents of media reporting. We...

One feature of legislative bargaining in naturally occurring settings is that the distribution of seats or voting weights often does not accurately reflect bargaining power. Game-theoretic predictions about payoffs and coalition formation are insensitive to nominal differences in vote...

Traditionally, the virtue of democratic elections has been seen in their role as means of screening and sanctioning shirking public officials. This paper proposes a novel rationale for elections and political campaigns considering that candidates incur psychological costs of lying, in particular...