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...

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...