terms of both its causes and its consequences. Chapter 3 discusses a variety of conditions that lead to a market for votes, including the availability of cost-efficient alternatives to vote buying. In this chapter, I explore a few of the political and institutional factors that can make vote buying a more or less attractive strategy for parties and candidates vis-à-vis some of these alternative...

We develop a model of elections in proportional (PR) and majoritarian (FPTP) electoral systems. The model allows an endogenous number of candidates, differentiation in a private value dimension, or ideology, and in a common value dimension, which we interpret broadly as quality or competence. Voters are fully rational and strategic. We show that the quality of candidates running for office in P...

The pioneering model of electoral competition was developed by Harold Hotelling and Anthony Downs. The model developed by Hotelling and Downs and many subsequent models in the literature about electoral competition have assumed that candidates embody policies and, if a voter is not indifferent between the policies embodied by two candidates, then the voter’s choices are fully determined by his ...

I develop a model of activism and polarization in the context of electoral competition. Two candidates simultaneously announce policy platforms and seek the support of ideologically inclined party activists. Activists compete to influence electoral outcomes by expending costly support for their respective candidates. I show that the presence of activists always moderates the platform choice of ...

How do voters’ behavioural biases affect political outcomes? We study this question in a model of Downsian electoral competition in which office-motivated candidates have private information about the benefits of policies, and voters may infer candidates’ information from their electoral platforms. If voters are Bayesian, candidates have strategic incentives to ‘anti-pander’ – they choose platf...

Mexico’s recent presidential election put the whole electoral system, from candidates to citizens and authorities, to the test. Soon after election-day, one of the losing candidates and other observers alleged that fraudulent practices of different sorts took place on July 2. Beyond and above the use of fraud claims as a political strategy, do these claims hold any water? There are no definitiv...

The Impact of Incumbency on Turnout: Evidence from Italian Municipalities We analyze how having an incumbent among candidates affects electoral turnout. We use a rich data set providing information on the electoral results of Italian municipal elections over the period 1993-2011. Endogeneity issues are handled through an instrumental variable approach using the mayor term-limit as an instrument...

Presidential candidates choose advertising strategically across markets based on each state’s potential to tip the election. The winner-take-all rules in the Electoral College concentrate advertising in battleground states, ignoring the majority of voters. We develop an empirical games approach to estimate an equilibrium model of competition between candidates and to compare outcomes under the ...

Path-Breakers: How Does Women’s Political Participation Respond to Electoral Success? This paper analyzes the effect of a woman’s electoral victory on women’s subsequent political participation. Using the regression discontinuity afforded by close elections between women and men in India’s state elections, we find that a woman winning office leads to a large and significant increase in the shar...

For the first time in Irish electoral history, the 1999 local elections required candidates to publicly declare their campaign expenditures. Drawing on these data, we explore patterns in campaign spending and assess their impact, both on candidate success and on turnout. First, examining the elections contested by 1,838 candidates from 180 local constituencies and 34 councils, we identify both ...