To explore the propagation of undesirable policies in a form of populist extremism, we construct a social learning model featuring agency problems. Politicians in different countries sequentially implement a policy. Voters learn the incumbent politician's type and the desirable policy by...

We construct a model in which an incumbent and a challenger decide whether to focus on policy or ability in electoral campaigning, and a media outlet then decides whether to gather news. We show that a candidate's strategy on which issue to focus on (i.e., campaign messages) can be a signal...

This study examines how an endogenous change in political trust affects the performance of a representative democracy. To this end, we construct a two-period political agency model in which voters face uncertainty about the distribution of politicians' types (model uncertainty) as well as each...