This paper presents a model of electoral competition focusing on the formation of the public agenda. An incumbent government and a challenger party in opposition compete in elections by choosing the issues that will key out their campaigns. Giving salience to an issue implies proposing an...

This paper analyzes a two-alternative voting model with the distinctive feature that voters have preferences over margins of victory. We study voting contests with a finite as well as an infinite number of voters, and with and without mandatory voting. The main result of the paper is the...

Recent studies of American politics evidence that political polarization of both the electorate and the political elite have moved "almost in tandem for the past half century" McCarty, Poole and Rosenthal, 2003:2), and that party polarization has steadily increased since the 1970s. On the other...