We argue that anti-corruption laws may provide an efficiency rationale for why political parties should meddle in the distribution of political nominations and government contracts. Anti-corruption laws forbid trade in spoils that politicians distribute. However, citizens may pay for gaining...

We argue that anticorruption laws may provide an efficiency rationale for why political parties should meddle in the distribution of political nominations and government contracts. Anticorruption laws forbid trade in spoils that politicians distribute. However, citizens may pay for gaining...

We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties....

We study the role of beauty in politics. For the first time, focus is put on differences in how women and men evaluate female and male candidates and how different candidate traits relate to success in real and hypothetical elections. We have collected 16,218 assessments by 2,772 respondents of...

We apply a regression discontinuity design to estimate the returns to being elected to parliament or to a municipal council. We present a bootstrap approach for measuring electoral closeness in any electoral system, and apply it to the Finnish proportional open list system. Getting elected to...

Previous research has established that good looking political candidates win more votes. We extend this line of research by examining differences between parties on the left and on the right of the political spectrum. Our study combines data on personal votes in real elections with a web survey...

Political candidates on the right are more beautiful or are seen as more competent than candidates on the left in Australia, Finland, France, and the United States. This appearance gap gives candidates on the right an advantage in elections, which could in turn influence policy outcomes. As an...