...Joshua Ferrer Do elected or appointed local officials produce better outcomes for their constituents? Elections should improve representation by providing a direct link to voters. However, some argue that citizens have too little information to select good leaders and hold them accountable...

... results from a nationwide experiment conducted during the 2020 general election in the United States. Experimental sites were ethnically diverse locations in metro areas, including both presidential battlegrounds as well as places with no closely contested races. A total of 298 billboards were randomly...

... for Congress, therefore, requires us to compare declared candidates to the unobserved, latent pool of potential candidates (Fowler and McClure, 1989). We define the candidate pool for each party in a given district and election year as the set of individuals who could seriously contend...

...Peter Bils Voters rely on executive politicians to craft effective solutions to difficult problems such as crises. Executives are frequently criticized, however, for exaggerating the degree of action required to address a problem. In this paper, I develop a model of elections in which the incumbent...

...B. K. Song In this paper, I estimate the effects of first rank using a regression discontinuity design in the context of three multimember district (MMD) elections, in Korea, Spain, and Japan. By analyzing MMD elections, I can estimate the effects of first rank separately from those of incumbency...

... not abruptly decline in 1994 but instead decreases gradually from 1980 through recent elections. Furthermore, once incumbent and challenger ideology are examined separately, the results on incumbents do not match those for challengers. Depending on the specification and ideology measure, incumbent...

... satisfaction with mayors, and increase support for protest and recall elections. Aggregate behavioral measures find a reduction in participatory budgeting attendance, but no changes in the probability of protest or recall initiation. Although village leaders are frustrated with mayoral performance...

... 2021 A. Fouirnaies Licensed re-use rights only Elections European politics comparative politics democratization political economy information systems and groups communication media The press is one of the core institutions of modern democracy. Newspapers report on the actions...

...Jasper Cooper Using two large cross-national micro datasets on extortion and commodity flows, I provide evidence of corruption cycles around elections in five West African states. In democracies but not in autocracies, police and other officials extort bribes that are 30% higher in the buildup...

... with largely accurate information. Media coverage voting behavior elections political economy biases We gratefully acknowledge peerless research assistance from Giuliana Pardelli, CJ Yetman, Jeff Arnold, Arndt Leininger, William Pollock, and Johanna Willmann who all worked on data collection...

...Suzanne K. Barth; Nikolas Mittag; Kyung H. Park The study of how voters respond to ethnic heuristics is complicated by the possibility that candidates differ along other dimensions that affect voter choice. This paper focuses on down-ballot statewide elections in which voters are plausibly ill...

...Andrew M. Engelhardt Many analyses of the 2016 presidential election suggest that Whites’ racial attitudes played a central role in explaining vote choice, and to a degree greater than preceding years. Most explanations for this outcome emphasize the role that Donald Trump’s campaign played...

...Brenton Kenkel I develop a theory of fundraising competition between candidates whose ability to raise money depends on the policy they will enact if elected. Unlike in existing models of money in politics, there is no exchange of policy favors for donations; donors merely have better information...

...Daniel J. Moskowitz; Benjamin Schneer Does electoral competitiveness boost turnout in U.S. House elections? Using an individual panel of turnout records compiled from the voter files of all 50 states, we exploit variation in district competitiveness induced by the 2012 redistricting cycle...

... spending elections Many theories of democratization predict that extensions of the right to vote to the poor will be associated with increases in government expenditure. Either poorer citizens demand higher transfer payments since they bear a relatively low share of the tax burden (Acemoglu...

...Bernard L. Fraga; Eitan D. Hersh Most elections in the United States are not close, which has raised concerns among social scientists and reform advocates about the vibrancy of American democracy. In this paper, we demonstrate that while individual elections are often uncompetitive, hierarchical...

.... W. Cox Licensed re-use rights only Elections electoral behavior voting behavior campaign finance political parties Second, several scholars (e.g., Lee, 2009 , 2013; Roberts and Smith, 2003) have argued that Newt Gingrich’s strategy of opposing the vast bulk of the majority...

... around Benin’s 2015 legislative elections. Behavioral and attitudinal data reveal that voters reward good-performing incumbents only if they are coethnics, and punish bad performers only if they are noncoethnics. Coethnics are also more (less) likely to accurately recall performance information...

... for the majority party in U.S. state legislatures. Furthermore, there appears to be a pronounced downstream majority-party disadvantage. To establish these findings, we propose a technique for aggregating the results of close elections to obtain as-if random variation in majority-party status. We argue...

...Ben Lockwood This paper considers the implications of an important cognitive bias in information processing, confirmation bias, in a political agency setting. When voters have this bias and when only the politician’s actions are observable before the election, it decreases pandering...