We provide a model of dark money in elections. An ideologically extreme donor with private information about candidate ideology and quality can advertise on behalf of a candidate. Advertising reveals information about candidate quality to voters, who can learn from either donor-funded or neutral...

Do donor-funded politicians benefit their donors disproportionately? If so, how? This paper examines the impact of electing donor-funded politicians using a novel dataset that uniquely links campaign donors with recipients of public contracts during mayors' incumbency period in Colombia. Using a...

Stefanie Gäbler prepared this study while she was working at the ifo Center for Public Finance and Political Economy. The study was completed in March 2020 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It consists of six distinct empirical essays...

The current political situation in Sudan has deteriorated with the secession of its Southern part, the Darfur dilemma and the growing public feelings of deprivation, political disparities, elitism that possess the whole country. However, evidence proves that the situation is an accumulation of...

With elections looming in the Philippines, first-time voters are confronted with a serious dilemma: distrust and doubt with the government; hence, political cynicism. Hence, the purpose of the study is to characterize political cynicism as perceived by college students who are first-time voters...

One frequently overlooked aspect of the U.S.-style electoral college system is that it discourages election fraud. In a presidential election based on the popular vote, competing political parties are motivated to manipulate votes in areas where they hold the most significant influence, such as...

This paper examines political action committees? motivations for giving campaign contributions to candidates for political office. First, the paper estimates the effect of campaign contributions received by candidates on the outcomes of the 1996 elections to the U.S. House of Representatives....

In the third decade of the 21st century, digitization, global events, challenges from authoritarian states, and difficulties of particular democracies to function properly confront democracy with a new series of challenges and opportunities that will force it to reinvent itself. The last decades...

This paper introduces excluding outlier voters (EOV) as a general mechanism for revealing true preferences in social choices, and for discouraging voters from strategic voting and manipula-tion. This mechanism is general in that it can be implemented with any voting system. The paper...