To the extent that election campaigns are simply advertising campaigns, they should not contribute directly to social … welfare. Yet election campaigns are often very costly. Why do such costly campaigns arise as the norm? If they do not benefit … society, should campaign expenditures be limited? However, costly election campaigns can benefit society indirectly by …

This paper introduces a novel theoretic approach towards understanding election fraud under autocracies, by suggesting … a signaling model of election fraud and testing its basic implications on unique datasets from Russian and cross …

In this paper, citizens vote in order to influence the election outcome and in order to signal their unobserved …

Politicians differ in their ability to implement some policy. In an election, candidates make commitments regarding the …

types to voters. We identify two novel implications of models in which signalling incentives are important. First, because … reelection. This generates a skew distribution of signals leading to an incumbency advantage in the probability of election …. Second, voters can exploit the signalling behavior of politicians by precommitting to a higher threshold for signals received …