We report on a statistical analysis of the engagement in the electoral processes of all Brazilian cities by considering the number of party memberships and the number of candidates for mayor and councillor. By investigating the relationships between the number of party members and the population of voters, we have found that the functional form of these relationships are well described by sub-l...

It has been a standard result of the stochastic, or probabilistic, spatial model of voting that vote maximizing candidates, or parties, will converge to the electoral mean (the origin). This conclusion has appeared to be contradicted by empirical studies. Here, a more general stochastic model, incorporating ‘exogeneous’ valence, is constructed. Contrary to the standard result, it is shown in Th...

Building on models of electoral competition with reputational mechanisms, I show that term limits decrease the vote share of candidates from parties less able to reward or punish candidates. Candidates suffer by not being able to credibly commit to policies far from their own preferences. Assuming that the major parties can provide better discipline of their members than third parties, the impl...

We develop a model of intra-party candidate selection under partisan electoral competition and voter uncertainty. Candidates for office belong to parties, which are factions of ideologically similar candidates. Each party’s candidate for a general election can be selected either by a “centralized” mechanism that effectively randomizes over possible candidates, or by voters in a primary election...

We introduce a framework of electoral competition in which voters have general preferences over candidates’ characteristics and policies. Candidates’ immutable characteristics (such as gender, race or previously committed policy positions) are exogenously differentiated, while candidates can choose any policy for the remaining issues to maximize their winning probability. Voters have general pr...

To win elections, candidates attempt to mobilize supporters and persuade swing voters. With what magnitude each operates across American elections is not clear. I argue that the influence of swing voters should depend upon change in the candidates across elections and that the consequences of changes in composition should depend upon the relative balance of campaign expenditures. I estimate a B...

We introduce a tractable multi-issue model of electoral competition in which candidates are exogenously committed to particular positions on a subset of issues, while they can choose a sequence of binary positions for the remaining issues to maximize their winning probability. A majorityefficient position is defined as one where a candidate cannot make a majority of the electorate better off, t...

Previous work has shown that individuals agree across cultures on the traits that they infer from faces. Previous work has also shown that inferences from faces can be predictive of important outcomes within cultures. The current research merges these two lines of work. In a series of cross-cultural studies, the authors asked American and Japanese participants to provide naïve inferences of tra...

We present a structural model of political advertising in equilibrium. Candidates choose advertising across media markets in order to maximize the probability of winning the national election. The voter model takes the form of an aggregate random coefficients discrete choice model in which advertising affects a voter’s incentive to vote for either candidate or not to vote at all. We estimate th...

Does the religious affiliation of candidates act as a voting cue? Prior research suggests that voters choose which candidate to support under low-information circumstances where the media chooses to report the “horse-race” of politics and candidates choose to maximize votes by keeping their political positions ambiguous (Downs 1957; Page1976). Therefore, voters use candidate characteristics as ...