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...

Data from the first post-Arab Spring elections reveal that support for Islamic parties came from richer districts and individuals. We show that standard public finance arguments help explain the voting pattern in these elections and others in the Muslim world. Our model predicts that a voter's...

An organization must make a binary choice in each of two periods. The optimal choice depends on an unknown state of nature. The leader of the organization has a stock of political capital and observes a private signal of the state. The leader faces an inter-temporal choice problem. She may...

We study a model of the rise and fall of illiberal democracies. Voters value both liberty and economic security. In times of crisis, voters may prefer to elect an illiberal government that, by violating constitutional constraints, offers greater economic security but less liberty. However,...

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 possible...

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