How do parties motivate candidates to exert effort in closed-list elections? If each candidate’s primary goal is winning a seat, then those in safe and hopeless list positions have weak incentives to campaign. We present a model in which (i) candidates care about both legislative seats and the...

As with the market for goods and services, democratic competition involves political parties offering their services (policy programs) to citizen-consumers who vote for their preferred partisan supplier. Little is known about the partial effect of a shift in parties' seat shares for given voter...

How important are political parties in motivating and disciplining elected officials? Using a difference-in-discontinuity design, we study how shocks to incumbents're-election probabilities affect legislative behavior in a setting where parties fully control candidate selection. We find that...