Many have observed that political candidates running for election are often purposefully expressing themselves in vague and ambiguous terms. In this paper, we provide a simple formal model of this phenomenon. We model the electoral competition between two candidates as a two-stage game. In the...

This paper characterizes a unique mixed strategy Nash equilibrium in a one-dimensional Downsian model of two-candidate elections with a continuous policy space, where candidates are office motivated and one candidate enjoys a non-policy advantage over the other candidate. We show that if...

We analyze conditions under which candidates' reputations may affect voters' beliefs over what policy will be implemented by the winning candidate of an election. We develop a model of repeated elections with complete information in which candidates are purely ideological. We analyze an...

Participatory democracy is a process of collective decision making that combines elements from both direct and representative democracy: Citizens have the power to decide on policy proposals and politicians assume the role of policy implementation. The aim of this paper is to understand how...