This paper presents a strategic model of common value elections with endogenous information acquisition. It proves that majoritarian elections can fail to aggregate information when voters have heterogeneous skills. Informational inefficiencies can be partially corrected by improving the skills of the electors as the population increases, or by limiting participation to the most competent citiz...

This paper examines whether decentralization increases the responsiveness of public investment to local needs using a unique database from Bolivia. Empirical tests show that investment patterns in human capital and social services changed significantly after decentralization. These changes are strongly and positively related to objective indicators of need. Nationally, these changes were driven...

Preventive policy measures such as bailouts often pass parliament very narrowly. We present a model of asymmetric information between politicians and voters which rationalizes this narrow parliamentary outcome. A successful preventive policy impedes the verifi cation of its own necessity. When policy intervention is necessary but voters disagree ex-ante, individual politicians have an incentive...

We study the role of intergroup mobility in the emergence of conflict. Two groups compete for the right to allocate society’s resources. We allow for costly intergroup mobility. The winning group offers an allocation, which the opposition can accept or reject, and wage conflict. Agents can also switch group membership. Expropriating a large share of resources increases political strength by att...

We study a model of imperfectly discriminating contests with two ex ante symmetric agents. We consider four institutional settings: Contestants move either sequentially or simultaneously and in addition their types are either public or private information. We find that an effort-maximizing designer of the contest prefers the sequential to the simultaneous setting from an ex ante perspective. Mo...

We introduce a general framework in which politicians choose a (possibly infinite) sequence of binary policies. The two competing candidates are exogenously committed to particular actions on a subset of these issues, while they can choose any policy for the remaining issues to maximize their winning probability. Citizens have general preferences over policies, and the distribution of preferenc...

Some people have a concern for a fair distribution of incomes while others do not. Does such a concern matter for majority voting on redistribution? Fairness preferences are relevant for redistribution outcomes only if fair-minded voters are pivotal. Pivotality, in turn, depends on the structure of income classes. We experimentally study voting on redistribution between two income classes and s...

We provide a unified analysis of the canonical rational voting model with privately known political preferences and costs of voting. Focusing on type-symmetric equilibrium, we show that for small electorates, members of the minority group vote with a strictly higher probability than do those in the majority, but the majority is strictly more likely to win the election. As the electorate size gr...

This paper models voters’ preferences over central versus local education policies when there are private alternatives. Education is financed by income taxes and individuals are mobile between communities. Public education levels are chosen by majority vote. Contrary to conventional wisdom, centralisation may benefit the rich and poor, while the middle class prefer decentralised education. The ...

It is often important to take country specific institutional features into account in a political economic analysis. We do so in an analysis of Albania. It is argued that the politico-economic system there is characterized by the existence of clans. We study the role of clans by estimating vote functions. The results show major differences across clans in response to government policies. Estima...