We study the effects of social media political advertising by randomizing subsets of 36,906 Facebook users and 25,925 Instagram users to have political ads removed from their news feeds for six weeks before the 2020 US presidential election. We show that most presidential ads were targeted...

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...

In most national elections, voters face a key choice between continuity and change. Electoral turnovers occur when the incumbent candidate or party fails to win reelection. To understand how turnovers affect national outcomes, we study the universe of presidential and parliamentary elections...

The role of citizens' initiatives figures prominently in contemporary debates on constitutional change. A basic question is why are initiatives necessary in a representative democracy where candidates must already compete for the right to control policy? This paper offers one answer to this...

We develop a model of elections in which parties choose their ideological position and the ideology of their candidates. Tighter candidate selection reduces policy uncertainty for voters. We show that weak institutional con- straints, as in a Presidential regime, induce parties to allow their...

How important are political parties in motivating and disciplining elected officials? Using a difference-in-discontinuity design, we study how shocks to incumbents're-election probabilities affect legislative behavior in a setting where parties fully control candidate selection. We find that...

Democratic representation is constrained by the alternatives available to voters. In this paper, we develop a methodology to gauge the extent to which the "supply side" of politics hinders voter welfare. Using rich data on thousands of candidates in three Brazilian legislative elections, we...

Wirtschaftspolitik in einer sozialen Marktwirtschaft möchte Wohlstand schaffen und verteilen. Dies zeigt sich in den Wahl- und Regierungsprogrammen auf Bundesebene seit 2002, allerdings mit sehr unterschiedlichen Akzenten. Zur Analyse wird deshalb die relative Häufigkeit der Begriffe...