We develop a model of electoral competition in which two purely opportunistic candidates select their policy position and invest in the quality of their platform. Policy positions are observed and, during the electoral campaign, the press reveals some information about quality. We demonstrate that when information is imperfect and quality endogenous, the Black-Downs median voter theorem fails t...

Nearly half of the world’s presidential democracies choose their chief executives using a majority-runoff electoral rule (MRO), while most others used single-round plurality. What difference does it make? On the one hand, critics of MRO assert that the lower threshold of the first round inflates the number of presidential candidates, and with it the size of the party system. A fragmented party ...

The contemporary world has witnessed technological advances, such as Online Social Networks (OSN), whose influence in almost every action of the human being is remarkable. Among the human activities most significantly impacted by OSNs are: entertainment, human relationships, education, and political activities, including those related to electoral campaigns and electoral preferences prediction....

Recent research finds that naive survey participants’ rapid evaluations of the facial competence of United States Congressional candidates predict aggregate vote margins. The predictive power of facial competence has generated considerable interest because it seems to indicate a causal relationship between face and vote choice. Because there is no a priori reason to expect that candidate facial...

Most political scholars agree that organized groups play a key role in modern democracy. One aspect of special interest politics that has caught the attention of both academic researchers and the public at large, especially in the US, are campaign contributions. Candidates to various federal and state o¢ ces receive monetary donations from various corporations and pressure groups.1 What do cand...

This article examines the use of the Internet by a range of political actors in the 2004 European Parliament election in Britain—candidates, citizens, parties, government, pressure groups, and the media. Specifically, it surveys the structure of online political communications and the amount and nature of electoral information and engagement opportunities available to citizens in the framework ...

This paper shows that politicians may not offer to provide a socially desirable public good because the benefits of the public good cannot be targeted to voters as easily as pork barrel spending. We present a Downsian model where candidates care only about the spoils of office. We compare a winner-take-all system, where all the spoils go to the winner, to a proportional system, where the spoils...

Although in theory, competitive legislative elections are supposed to prevent criminal or venal candidates from winning or retaining office, in practice voters frequently elect and reelect such candidates. This surprising pattern is sometimes explained by reference to voters’ underlying preferences, which are thought to favor criminal or corrupt candidates because of the patronage they provide....

Although in theory, elections are supposed to prevent criminal or venal candidates from winning or retaining office, in practice voters frequently elect and re-elect such candidates. This surprising pattern is sometimes explained by reference to voters’ underlying preferences, which are thought to favor criminal or corrupt candidates because of the patronage they provide. This paper tests this ...