What explains significant variation across countries in the use of vote buying instead of campaign promises to secure voter support? This paper explicitly models the tradeoff parties face between engaging in vote buying and making campaign promises, and explores the distributional consequences...

We consider a model of common-value sequential voting in which voters are differentiated in their information. We ask whether the intuition as in the simultaneous-voting case---voters with no information would vote so as not to influence the outcome---would be valid to imply long voting in our...

We analyze the impact of elected competitors from the same constituency on legislative shirking in the German Bundestag from 1953 to 2017. The German electoral system ensures that there is always at least one federal legislator per constituency with a varying number of elected competitors from...

This Article examines the merits of vote buying at a more detailed level than has been done previously. Various scenarios are played-out of how an actual election would function if vote buying were permitted. The Article concludes, in line with past scholarship, but for different reasons, that...

Does stiffer electoral competition reduce political rent-seeking behavior? For a microanalysis of this question, I construct a new data set spanning the years 2005 to 2012 covering biographical and political information of German members of parliament (MPs) and including attendance rates in...

Intra-party contests, such as the US primaries, are often used to select a candidate for a subsequent cross-party election. A more accurate selection may improve the quality of the candidate but detract more resources from the subsequent campaign. We model this trade-off as a problem of contest...

Intra-party contests, such as the US primaries, are often used to select a candidate for a subsequent cross-party election. A more accurate selection may improve the quality of the candidate but detract more resources from the subsequent campaign. We model this trade-off as a problem of contest...