Incumbent malfeasance is a major challenge in many developing democracies. However, voters often do not punish malfeasant politicians. We develop a simple model showing that electoral accountability requires that the local media market structure incentivize media stations to report incumbent malfeasance to voters. The model’s predictions are tested in Mexico, where we exploit plausibly exogenou...

Both Black and White voter turnout increases 2-3 percentage points with each Black Democrat on the ballot. Given the groups' representations in the population, the White response is numerically greater. Whites of both parties are less likely to vote for their parties' candidate when s/he is Black. The turnout findings are not explained away by voter, election, or politician characteristics. How...

Standard election models robustly predict that candidates should adopt moderate policies, especially if they value winning o¢ ce, and that this is good for voter welfare. Empirical polarization is therefore both inexplicable and troubling. This paper shows that if voter di¤erences re‡ect beliefs about an underlying truth variable, rather than idiosyncratic preferences, then polarization is the ...

We study the impact of campaign spending limits for candidates in Canadian federal elections. We first demonstrate that spending limits are binding mostly for incumbent candidates. We then use this information to produce endogeneity-corrected estimates for the impact of incumbent spending on electoral vote shares. Furthermore, we examine the impact of spending limits on broader measures of elec...

Tâ ÇÉÅ wx W|xâ Revue des Études de la Langue Française Revue semestrielle de la Faculté des Langues Étrangères de l'Université d'Ispahan Cinquième année, N° 8 Printemps-Eté 2013, ISSN 2008- 6571 ISSN électronique 2322-469X Cette revue est indexée dans: Ulrichsweb: global serials directory http://ulrichsweb.serialssolutions.com Doaj: Directory of Open Access Journals http://www.doaj.org ...

Village elections in China present scholars with the case of a single-party regime that allows voters to reject candidates regularly. Using a micro survey of 698 voters in 30 rural election districts, the authors demonstrate that when some candidates can lose, voters participate. A comparison of models of voter turnout and running for office further demonstrates that even when competition is st...

The decentralization of lists has traditionally made it difficult to make a full accounting of the performance of the election system that would allow local election offices to gauge how well they are doing. Complete reporting of voter registrations, turnout at the precinct and election office level would improve the ability of election offices to diagnose where problems arise and for offices t...