This paper studies the effect of a politician's ideological strength on campaign contributions that the politician receives from interest groups. If interest groups care mainly about current, or short-run, policy outcomes, they will make campaign contributions to ideologically neutral...

Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that the presence of these interest groups increases the winning set, which is the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the incumbent. Therefore interest...

Asymmetric information between voters and legislative representatives poses a major challenge to the functioning of representative democracy. We examine whether representatives are more likely to serve long-term campaign donors instead of constituents during times of low media attention to...