This paper studies a model of how political parties use resources for campaigning to inform voters. We show existence of equilibrium under mild assumptions for an arbitrary number of parties. The main result is that if the parties are more extreme, then they spend less resources on campaigning...

A firm may induce voters or elected politicians to support a policy it favors by suggesting that it is more likely to invest in a district whose voters or representatives support the policy. In equilibrium, no one vote may be decisive, and the policy may gain strong support though the majority...

This paper utilizes a simple model of redistributive politics with voter abstention to analyze the impact of nonpartisan 'get-out-the-vote' efforts on policy outcomes. Although such efforts are often promoted on the grounds that they provide the social benefit of increasing participation in the...

This paper utilizes a simple model of redistributive politics with voter abstention to analyze the impact of nonpartisan ‘get-out-the-vote’ efforts on policy outcomes. Although such efforts are often promoted on the grounds that they provide the social benefit of increasing participation in...

A firm may induce voters or elected politicians to support a policy it favors by suggesting that it is more likely to invest in a district whose voters or representatives support the policy. In equilibrium, no one vote may be decisive, and the policy may gain strong support though the majority...

We study the effect of power sharing over income redistribution among different socio-economic groups in a model of redistributive politics with fairness concern. We prove that a unique pure-strategy equilibrium exists under fairly general conditions; and we show that equilibrium transfers...

In using their citizen candidate framework, Besley and Coate (2001) find that if citizen candidates with sufficiently extreme preferences are available, lobbying has no in fluence on equilibrium policy. I show that this result does not hold in a model with ideological parties instead of citizen...

A Sender wants to persuade multiple Receivers with homogeneous preferences and a common belief about the state of the world to vote in favor of a proposal. Prior to the vote Sender commits to a communication strategy which sends private, potentially correlated, signals to Receivers that are...

Countries that elect their policy-makers by means of Plurality Voting tend to have a two-party system. We conduct laboratory experiments to study whether alternative voting procedures yield a two-party system as well. Plurality Voting is compared with Approval Voting and Dual Voting, both of...

We extend approval voting so as to elect multiple candidates, who may be either individuals or members of a political party, in rough proportion to their approval in the electorate. We analyze two divisor methods of apportionment, first proposed by Jefferson and Webster, that iteratively...