We present and test a theory of prospective and retrospective pocketbook voting. Focusing on two large reforms in … Sweden, we establish a causal chain from policies to sizeable individual gains and losses and then to voting. The Social … Democrats proposed budget cuts affecting parents with young children before the 1994 election, but made generous promises to the …

between two potential policy outcomes of an election participate in large-scale elections when voting is costly? Using a … understanding of this form of costly punishment to help explain a puzzle of voting behavior: why do people who are indifferent … simple voting experiment, we show that many voters are willing to engage in voting as a form of punishment, even when voting …

ideological policy dimension. Voters achieve this outcome by following a simple lexicographic voting strategy. They cast their …

The theory of economic voting has extensively explored the influence of national economic conditions on votes for the … of voting swings in the sense of change in votes for non-governing parties. This is owed to the limitations of the theory … the incumbent at the heart of the theory of economic voting explains only a marginal part of total electoral volatility. …

hold them accountable through retrospective voting. Political institutions determine the rules for legislative bargaining … corruption, the features of electoral cycles. The paper discusses both theory and evidence, and concludes with some speculations …

elections, we show that when time constraints are binding, bicameralism might lead to a decline in the legislator's bargaining …

at the moment of voting, but not for past selves who anticipate the vote-sale. We also allow keeping or breaking promises …. The more effective promise treatment reduces vote-selling in the smallest-stakes election by 10.9 percentage points …

We study the returns to political office using data from Finnish parliamentary elections in 1970-2007 and municipal … elections in 1996-2008. The discontinuity of electoral outcomes in individual candidate votes allows us to estimate the causal …