For decades, a central element of the Republican Party brand has been to call for fiscal responsibility through balanced budgets. We ask if the Republican Party has ever lived up to these ideological principles. Medicare Part D and paying for the recent Afghanistan and Iraq wars are striking...

Candidates running for election may not choose policy positions to solely maximize their chances of winning. We study one possible reason for this: a value associated with winning that is influenced by policy and congressional committee assignments, where the latter are also affected by policy....

Individual members of Congress can have different policy preferences from the party leadership or special interest groups (SIGs), and the latter two may pressure members to shift their positions. To study this tension, we develop and estimate a multi-stage election model that incorporates party...

The deregulation in campaign finance, stemming from the 2010 United States Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission , has led to nonprofit organizations with anonymous donors spending on advertisements targeting candidates. I study the effects of this “dark...