We propose a mechanism linking legislative gridlock to voters' support for candidates who hold extreme policy positions. Moderate voters rationally discount extreme policy proposals from co-partisans on gridlocked policy issues because on these issues policy change is unlikely. We test our...

The majority runoff system is widely used around the world. Yet, our understanding of its properties and of voters’ behavior is limited. In this paper, we fully characterize the set of strictly perfect voting equilibria in large three-candidate majority runoff elections. Considering all...

We study an election with two perfectly informed candidates. Voters share common values over the policy outcome of the election, but possess arbitrarily little information about which policy is best for them. Voters elect one of the candidates, effectively choosing between the two policies...

Voters use the press to keep politicians accountable. By endogenizing the response of the voters, this paper provides a theoretical foundation to disentangle the effects of media regulation on corruption and clarify under which circumstances regulation reduces or increases corruption. The...