This research note engages the current research on measuring media bias. I present a reanalysis of the results found in Groseclose and Milyo (2005) and show that the original parameter estimates of the ideological positions of media outlets are not stable over time. Using the same data but...

Traditional international relations theory holds that states will join only those international institutions with which they generally intend to comply. Here we show when this claim might not hold. We construct a model of an authoritarian government's decision to sign the UN Convention Against...

In the United States, competitive elections are often concentrated in particular places. These places attract disproportionate attention from news media and election campaigns. Yet many voting studies only test stimuli in uncompetitive environments, or only test for average effects, and simply...

This article considers the hypothesis that media-driven political interest shapes party identification, the timing of vote decisions, and electoral participation. To estimate the effect of media-driven political interest, we make a key distinction between political interest as a lifetime...

We use evidence from the Second Reform Act, introduced in the United Kingdom in 1867, to analyze the impact on electoral outcomes of extending the vote to the unskilled urban population. Exploiting the sharp change in the electorate caused by franchise extension, we separate the effect of reform...

There are nearly half a million elected officials in American local governments, and the timing of local elections varies enormously even within the same state. Some local elections are held simultaneously with major federal and state races, while others are held at times when no higher level...

Experimental research shows that while most voters have some form of spatial preferences, individuals differ in the type of spatial preferences they have: many voters prefer candidates closer to themselves in a policy space (proximity voting), others prefer candidates that are on the same side...

Legislators trade influence to attain the approval of their most preferred bills. A classic example can be found in pork barrel politics with concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, in which logrolling agreements can load costs onto legislators excluded from winning coalitions. I model the...

This paper uses exogenous variation in electoral rules to test the predictions of strategic voting models and the causal validity of Duverger's Law. Exploiting a regression discontinuity design in the assignment of single-ballot and dual-ballot (runoff) plurality systems in Brazilian mayoral...

In Condorcet's model of information aggregation, a group of people decides among two alternatives <italic>a</italic> and <italic>b</italic>, with each person getting an independent bit of evidence about which alternative is objectively superior. I consider anonymous procedures, in which the group's decision depends only on the...