Face Value? Experimental Evidence that Candidate Appearance Influences Electoral Choice

An Experimental Study of Electoral Incentives and Institutional Choice

I investigate the extent to which reputational incentives affect policy choices in the context of a controlled laboratory experiment. In theory, asymmetric information and outcome unobservability undermine electoral delegation by creating incentives for politicians to pander. Under the right conditions, it may be preferable to remove such incentives by removing accountability altogether. The da...

Electoral Bias and Policy Choice: Theory and Evidence

This paper develops an approach to studying how bias in favor of one party due to the pattern of electoral districting a¤ects policy choice. We tie a commonly used measure of electoral bias to the theory of party competition and show how this a¤ects party strategy in theory. The usefulness of the approach is illustrated using data on local government in England. The results suggest that reducin...

Candidate Motivation and Electoral Competition

Standard intuition from formal models of candidate competition suggests that candidates with more ‡exibility will dominate those with less, and consequently almost always win elections. An implication of this tenet is that candidates motivated by winning o¢ce will outperform candidates motivated by policy outcomes. In this paper we explore this logic formally and show that it is partly true but...

Taking a different perspective: mindset influences neural regions that represent value and choice.

Most choices are complex and can be considered from a number of different perspectives. For example, someone choosing a snack may have taste, health, cost or any number of factors at the forefront of their mind. Although previous research has examined neural systems related to value and choice, very little is known about how mindset influences these systems. In the current study, participants w...

Experimental Evidence about Whether (and Why) Electoral Closeness Affects Turnout