This paper examines the effects of campaign spending limits on political competition and incumbency advantage. We study a reform in Brazil that imposed limits on campaign spending for mayoral elections. These limits were implemented with a discontinuous kink which we exploit for causal...

This thesis comprises four empirical research papers in the area of political economics. While the first two chapters deal with questions related to direct democracy, chapters three and four are about topics linked to representative democracy.

We propose a forensic approach to investigate the politico-economic forces that influence narrow vote outcomes in legislative assemblies. Applying nonparametric estimation techniques to a data set covering all roll call votes between 1990 and 2014, we can identify the existence of precise...

Introduction : removing the dead hand of pay-to-play -- Faux democracy : America's decline to history's default setting -- Documenting low quality American democracy : the income bias and international evidence -- The Buckley genre : constitutionally shielding vote buying -- The donor class buys...

We develop a model of policymaking in which a politician decides how much expertise to acquire or how informed to become about issues before interest groups engage in monetary lobbying. For a range of issues, the policymaker prefers to remain clueless about the merits of reform, even when...

"Let's be honest, we've all expressed opinions about difficult hot-button issues without always thinking them through. With so much media spin, political polarization, and mistrust of institutions, it's hard to know how to think about these tough challenges, much less what to do about them. One...

Understanding political finance reform / Pippa Norris and Andrea Abel van Es -- Brazil / Bruno Speck -- Britain / Justin Fisher -- India / Eswaran Sridharan and Milan Vaishnav -- Indonesia / Marcus Mietzner -- Japan / Matthew Carlson -- Russia / Grigorii V. Golosov -- South Africa / Richard...

We study the harmonization of the base remuneration for the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who were previously paid like national parliamentarians implying large differences between the delegations from the 27 member countries. Based on detailed information on individual MEPs between...

The paper considers public funding of political parties when some voters are poorly informed about parties' candidates and campaigns are informative. For symmetric equilibria, it is shown that more public funding leads parties to chose more moderate candidates, and that an increase in the...

This paper experimentally investigates the effect of limits on campaign spending and outcome in an electoral contest where two candidates, an incumbent and a challenger, compete for office in terms of the amount of campaign expenditure. The candidates are asymmetric only in that the incumbent...

This paper studies the effects on electoral competition of political parties relying on monetary donations and volunteer labour for their electioneering activities. It also examines whether a recorded decline in party activism increases special-interest influence on party policy platforms....

The political geography of campaign contributions -- The timing of presidential campaign contributions -- Participation in the early financing of presidential candidates -- A tale of two parties? : do republicans and democratic contenders have different geographical fundraising bases? -- Median...