Political parties are active when citizens choose among candidates in elections, and when winning candidates choose among policy alternatives in government. But the inextricably linked institutions, incentives, and behavior that determine these multistage choices are substantively complex and...

I conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether voters focus on the problem of electoral selection or if they instead focus on electoral sanctioning. If voters are forward-looking but also uncertain about politicians' unobservable characteristics, then it is rational to focus on...

This paper develops a model of campaign contributions and electoral competition. Contributors have separable preferences over policy and the electoral success of the candidate they support, as in influence buying. Policy preferences are single peaked over a single policy dimension. A candidate's...

Quantifying the value that legislators give to reelection relative to policy is crucial to understanding electoral accountability. We estimate the preferences for office and policy of members of the US Senate, using a structural approach that exploits variation in polls, position-taking and...