This paper presents a model of electoral competition focusing on the formation of the public agenda. An incumbent government and a challenger party in opposition compete in elections by choosing the issues that will key out their campaigns. Giving salience to an issue implies proposing an...

This paper explores the labor market returns to working on a victorious political campaign. Using unique administrative data from Brazil, we track the earnings and employment of campaign workers before and after close elections spanning nearly 20 years. We identify sizable returns to working for...

This paper studies the manipulation of electoral maps by political parties, known as gerrymandering. At the core of our analysis is the recognition that districts must have the same population size but only voters matter for electoral incentives. Using a novel model of gerrymandering that allows...

We analyze a model of political competition in which the elite forms endogenously to aggregate information and advise the uninformed median voter which candidate to choose. The median voter knows whether or not the endorsed candidate is biased toward the elites, but might still prefer the biased...

We analyze the incentives created by debt financing in political campaigns. Debt is a significant source of funding for political campaigns, with almost half of all campaigns relying on some form of debt. Moreover, indebted politicians raise more funds in subsequent elections, especially from...

Social Choice traditionally employs the preferences of voters or agents as primitives. However, in most situations of constitutional decision-making the beliefs of the members of the electorate determine their secondary preferences or choices. Key choices in US political history, such as the...

Early results on the emptiness of the core and the majority-rule-chaos results led to the recognition of the importance of modeling institutional details in political processes. A sample of the literature on game-theoretic models of political phenomena that ensued is presented. In the case of...