Does the rise of commercial mass media threaten or enhance the power of traditional political bosses in developing democracies? While access to outside information might increase political competition or prompt voters to reject corrupt politicians, bosses who can dominate local broadcasters may see an electoral benefit. I test this hypothesis by exploiting geographical variation in the coverage...

We present a structural model of political advertising in equilibrium. Candidates’ choose advertising based on its marginal impact on the probability of winning the election, the returns from winning and the cost of advertising. The voter model takes the form of an aggregate discrete choice model in which advertising affects a voter’s incentive to vote for either candidate or not to vote at all...

Abstract Despite evidence that women win when they run for office, the number of in US House Representatives has not increased substantially. I argue because engage strategic behavior by emerging locations where are most likely to win. While is a necessary condition increasing women's representation it sufficient condition. Analyzing regularly scheduled elections between 1992 and 2014, demonstr...

The objective of this paper is to estimate a dynamic game of electoral competition and to evaluate the role that term limits play in gubernatorial elections. In our model candidates from two parties compete in a sequence of statewide elections. Candidates differ in their ideological positions and competence. Both dimensions are initially unobserved, but are revealed through observed incumbents’...

Drawing on network theory, this study considers the content of U.S. presidential debates and how candidates’ language differentiates them. Semantic network analyses of all U.S. presidential debates (1960–2004) were conducted. Results reveal that regardless of party affiliation, election winners were more central in their semantic networks than losers. Although the study does not argue causation...

We study a one-dimensional Hotelling-Downs model of electoral competition with the following innovation: a fraction of candidates have “character” and are exogenously committed to a campaign platform; this is unobservable to voters. Character is desirable, and a voter’s utility is a convex combination of standard policy preferences and her assessment of a candidate’s character. This structure i...

Each election revives the issue of party candidates’ and leaders’ appeal, their ‘electability’ in almost all electoral systems, everywhere around world. Therefore, study leaders an...

We study a citizen-candidate-entry model with private information about ideal points. We fully characterize the unique symmetric equilibrium of the entry game and show that only relatively “extreme” citizen types enter the electoral competition as candidates, whereas more “moderate” types never enter. It generally leads to substantial political polarization, even when the electorate is not pola...

This paper shows how political parties differentiate to reduce electoral competition. Two parties choose platforms in a unidimensional policy space, and then candidates from these parties compete for votes in a continuum of constituencies with different median voters. Departing from their parties’ platforms is costly enough that candidates do not take the median voter’s preferred position in ev...

Few voting systems in the world possess a feature set as rich as the Hungarian electoral law, which incorporates three distinct sets of districts, a mixed-member system, a two-round system (2RS) (using two different criteria for run-off qualification), two potentially separate legal thresholds, two different sets of rules for proportional representation (PR), plus a few additional twists relate...