Abstract Building on agency-theoretical perspectives of public bureaucracies, we argue that politician–bureaucrat preference alignment can have important implications for bureaucrats’ pay. We study such private gains to bureaucrats from their political with elected politicians using detailed data all 1,632 top administrators active in Norwegian municipalities over a period 25 years (1991–2015)....

Remote voting systems implementing the homomorphic tallying paradigm have proven to be the best option for elections with a small range of candidates. In this paper, we propose a new homomorphic tallying remote voting system that makes use of elliptic curve cryptography. The proposed system is suitable for multiple choice elections. Detailed security and performance analysis are provided.

Sznajd model of opinion formation in socities has found many applications, primarily in politics. Here, we review the basic model, show that its natural extension to two dimensions exhibits a phase transition, and then focus on its application to proportional elections where our model predicts the exponent for the power law distribution of number of votes obtained by different candidates in Bra...

The fair way to decide an election between two candidates a and b is majority rule; if more than half the electorate prefer a to b, then a is elected; otherwise b is elected. Arrow’s theorem asserts that no fair election procedure exists for choosing from among three or more candidates. This note gives an exposition of Arrow’s theorem. It also describes the relation of election procedures betwe...

Why do some elections spark violence whilst others do not? That is a question that has gained increased interest from scholars during the last few years. However, because of the field’s relative novelty, and despite the vast literature on democratization and civil war, it is still a question that is not fully comprehended. In this thesis, a theory claiming that clientelism should increase the r...

We establish existence and continuity properties of equilibria in a model of dynamic elections with a discrete (countable) state space and general policies and preferences. We provide conditions under which there is a representative voter in each state, and we give characterization results in terms of the equilibria of an associated “representative voting game.” When the conditions for these re...

This paper uses a large panel data set to examine the relation between elections and fiscal policy. We find evidence of political budget cycles in both developed and developing countries: government spending increases before elections while revenues fall, leading to a larger deficit in election years. We demonstrate that political budget cycles are much larger in developing countries than in de...

We study the complexity of voting control problems in multi-peaked elections. In particular, we focus on the constructive/destructive control by adding/deleting votes under Condorcet, Maximin and Copeland voting systems. We show that the NP-hardness of these problems (except for the destructive control by adding/deleting votes under Condorcet, which is polynomial-time solvable in the general ca...