This paper extends the political agency approach to an environment in which voting may be divided between informed and instrumental, informed and ‘expressive’ and uninformed due to ‘rational irrationality’. It constructs a model where politicians may be good, bad or populist. Initially the existence of only good and populist politicians is assumed and the incentives for good politicians to pool...

Prior research found that people's assessments of relative competence predicted the outcome of Senate and Congressional races. We hypothesized that snap judgments of "facial competence" would provide useful forecasts of the popular vote in presidential primaries before the candidates become well known to the voters. We obtained facial competence ratings of 11 potential candidates for the Democr...

This paper studies how a politician’s preferences and abilities to influence public and private sector productivity affect her choices over economic policies. Extremism between policies of leftand right-wing incumbents increases with ability, because voters are more willing to re-elect competent politicians. Positive correlations between certain ability dimensions and preferences amplify politi...