Invalid Ballots and Electoral Competition

Pandering and electoral competition

We study an election with two perfectly informed candidates. Voters share common values over the policy outcome of the election, but possess arbitrarily little information about which policy is best for them. Voters elect one of the candidates, effectively choosing between the two policies proposed by the candidates. We explore under which conditions candidates always propose the voters’ optima...

Translating into Votes: The Electoral Impacts of Spanish-Language Ballots

Policy Persuasion and Electoral Competition

The paper studies the impact of biased media news on policy outcomes in the classical Hotelling-Downs setup of winner-take-all elections with state-dependent payoffs. When voters and the two parties do not observe this state but an ideologically biased media does, it can indulge in two forms of cheap talk messaging: policy advice (that comes before parties commit to platforms) and party endorse...

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...

Electoral Competition and Information Aggregation

This paper investigates a common criticism of competitive elections: Candidates pander to voters and choose the most popular platform, regardless of it being optimal for the voters. I study an election with two perfectly informed candidates. Voters share common values over the policy outcome of the election, but possess arbitrarily little information about which policy is best for them. Voters ...