Candidate Ballot Information and Election Outcomes: The Czech Case We measure the importance of candidate characteristics listed on ballots for a candidate’s position on a slate, for preferential votes received by a candidate, and, ultimately, for getting elected. We focus on the effects of gender, various types of academic titles, and also several novel properties of candidates’ names. Using d...

The European Union (EU) is facing the challenge of enlargement to almost double its size; which has strong implications for the balance of power among member states. Building on the work of Shapley (1977) and Owen (1972), we present a measure of power that is based on players’ preferences and number of votes. We apply this measure to the Council of Ministers to see who wields power now and who ...

This paper proposes a dynamic politico-economic theory of intergenerational contracts, whose driving force is the intergenerational conflict over government spending. Embedding a repeated probabilistic voting setup in a standard OLG model with human capital accumulation, we find that the empowerment of elderly constituencies is key in order to enforce productive policies. The paper characterize...

This paper analyzes a spatial voting model in which ideological differences stem not from competing private interests, but from a spectrum of private opinions regarding which policies will best achieve a common objective–in essence synthesizing the canonical approaches of Condorcet and Downs. In equilibrium, voters who lack confidence in their information remain ideologically moderate and absta...

On the Influence of Extreme Parties in Electoral Competition with Policy-Motivated Candidates* We study and compare equilibrium platforms in models of one-dimensional electoral competition with two and four policy-motivated parties. We first analyse the plurality game, where the party that gets the most votes is elected and implements its proposed platform. Restrictions on the set of credible a...

Cheap talk models provide a strategic analysis of information transmission between the expert and the decision maker when their preferences are not perfectly aligned. Although the majority of these models analyze the case of a single decision maker, in many important settings the decision-making authority is shared between several agents. Here we consider a commonly used procedure: ultimatum ba...

This paper formulates and analyzes a general model of elections in which candidates receive private signals about voters’ preferences prior to committing to political platforms. We fully characterize the unique pure-strategy equilibrium: After receiving her signal, each candidate locates at the median of the distribution of the median voter’s location, conditional on the other candidate receivi...

In the paper “Entry Barriers in Politics, or: Why Politics, Like Natural Monopoly, Is Not Organised as an Ongoing Market-Process,” an analytical framework for dealing with processes of political competition is presented. The idea goes back to Tullock’s model of democracy as franchise-bidding for natural monopoly. To this, basic insights of New Institutional Economics and Austrian Ecomomics are ...

Trading votes for votes is believed to be ubiquitous in committees and legislatures, and yet we know very little of its properties. We return to this old question with a laboratory experiment and a simple theoretical framework. We posit a family of minimally rational trading rules such that pairs of voters can exchange votes when mutually advantageous. Such rules always lead to stable vote allo...

Models of expressive voting postulate that voters will ‘consume’ ideological or moral stances on issues by voting for them, even when they are against the voter’s own narrow self interest, if the probability of being a decisive voter is low. When a voter is unlikely to sway the outcome of the vote, the odds that a voter will incur any real personal cost (a higher tax burden, for example) from h...