Politicians as experts, electoral control, and fiscal restraints

Electoral control and the human capital of politicians

Expertise and experience are frequently held to be universally desirable political attributes. But under what conditions can voters benefits from improvements in the human capital of their politicians? We address this question in a model of electoral control with two districts, built upon three premises. First, both human capital (quality) and effort are key inputs of a politician’s performance...

The Electoral Consequences of Large Fiscal Adjustments

The conventional wisdom regarding the political consequences of large reductions of budget de…cits is that they are very costly for the governments which implement them: they are punished by voters at the following elections. In the present paper, instead, we …nd no evidence that governments which quickly reduce budget de…cits are systematically voted out of o¢ ce in a sample of 19 OECD countri...

Why Politicians Like Electoral Institutions: Self-interest, Values, or Ideology?

International Scrutiny and Pre - Electoral Fiscal Manipulation in Developing Countries

Weighted electoral control

Although manipulation and bribery have been extensively studied under weighted voting, there has been almost no work done on election control under weighted voting. This is unfortunate, since weighted voting appears in many important natural settings. In this paper, we study the complexity of controlling the outcome of weighted elections through adding and deleting voters. We obtain polynomial-...