We identify an exogenous source of variation in exposure to campaign advertising in the 2000 presidential election, based on residence in battleground states. If exposure to campaign advertising makes a potential voter significantly more likely to vote, then we should see significantly greater...

Recent work in political science has taken up the question of issue voting under conditions of uncertainty – situations in which voters have imperfect information about the policy positions of candidates. We move beyond the assumption of a particular spatial utility function and develop a...

We provide a set of new models of three different processes by which political parties nominate candidates for a general election: nominations by party leaders, nominations by a vote of party members, and nominations by a spending competition among potential candidates. We show that more extreme...

In this paper we present a structural approach to the study of government formation in multi-party parliamentary democracies. The approach is based on the estimation of a stochastic bargaining model which we use to investigate the effects of specific institutional features of parliamentary...

Since its introduction in 1973, major league baseball's designated hitter (DH) rule has been the subject of continuing controversy. Here, we investigate the political and socio–demographic determinants of public opinion toward theDHrule, using data from a nationwide poll conducted during...

What is the marginal effect of competitiveness on the power of electoral incentives? Addressing this question empirically is difficult because challenges to incumbents are endogenous to their behavior in office. To overcome this obstacle, we exploit a unique feature of Kansas courts: 14...

The 2000 presidential race included two major party candidates – Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore – and two prominent third-party candidates – Ralph Nader of the Green Party and Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party. Although it is often presumed that Nader spoiled the 2000...

Using data on authorizations from the 2005 Highway Bill, we show that the legislative allocation of pork barrel spending by U.S. state (measured by the value of transportation earmarks per capita) greatly favors smaller states. We exploit the difference between two versions of the bill: the...

In addition to mobilizing supporters to vote, partisan campaigns use get-out-the-vote tactics as a means to boost support for their candidate. Although observational studies have attempted to estimate the effects of grassroots campaigning on political attitudes, they are unable to establish...

We study a political-economic model of federations with both federal and supplemental regional provision of a local (impure) public good with spillover effects. Regional differences in average income levels and externalities of provision induce differences in preferences over federal and...