Using data on elections to the United States House of Representatives (1946-1998), this paper exploits a quasi-experiment generated by the electoral system in order to determine if political incumbency provides an electoral advantage – an implicit first-order prediction of most principalagent theories of politician and voter behavior. Candidates who just barely won an election (barely became th...

This paper uses a case study of the 1993 Russian parliamentary elections to explore the influence of proportional representation and plurality electoral systems on party formation in a post-communist regime. The mixed PR-plurality electoral system used by Russia in the 1993 elections is a particularly useful case for such analysis for it allows the simultaneous study of these two electoral syst...

We study the comparative statics of the incumbency advantage in a model of electoral selection and strategic challenger entry. The incumbency advantage arises in the model because, on average, incumbents have greater ability than challengers. This is true for two reasons: high-ability candidates are more likely to win election (electoral selection) and high-quality incumbents deter challengers ...

The youth generation in Africa is booming, with one-third of the population aged between 15 and 35. At the same time, youth tend to be disengaged from the democratic process. Young people vote less frequently, stand as candidates less often and remain underrepresented in electoral managerial functions. Electoral management bodies (EMBs) in Africa play a critical role in promoting youth particip...

Over the past few years Papua New Guinea has implemented a series of major political reforms in the electoral, political party and parliamentary arenas. In what constitutes an extremely ambitious attempt to change the way Papua New Guinea’s political system works, the broad aim of this process of political engineering is to strengthen political parties, promote more broadly supported candidates...

We study the impact of campaign spending limits for candidates in Canadian federal elections. We first demonstrate that spending limits are binding mostly for incumbent candidates. We then use this information to produce endogeneity-corrected estimates for the impact of incumbent spending on electoral vote shares. Furthermore, we examine the impact of spending limits on broader measures of elec...

In this paper we analyze a two-candidate electoral competition in which a candidate can either lie about his private policy preference in order to get elected, or pander to post-election external influences in choosing a policy to implement. Both the pre-election announcement and post-election implementation are a candidate’s strategic choices. We show that, in equilibrium, different types of c...

This article explicates the mechanisms through which presidential elections shape the legislative party system, an issue that has received little attention to date. The authors argue that presidential elections exert their influence through two distinct channels. First, they affect the incentives of candidates, voters, and parties to coordinate within electoral districts. Second and most import...

Do voters use ballot paper information on the personal characteristics of political candidates as cues in low-information elections? Using a unique dataset containing 4423 political candidates from recent elections in Germany, we show that candidates’ occupations do play an important role in their electoral success. The occupational impact is far greater than gender or doctoral degree effects f...

We analyze an electoral competition model with two offi ce motivated candidates where a) one of the two candidates enjoys a non-policy advantage and b) voters use shortcuts (e.g. interest-group/media endorsements) to infer the policy platforms of the competing candidates. That is, voters have imperfect information about the candidates’policy proposals: they do not observe the exact policy propo...