Intra-party contests, such as the US primaries, are often used to select a candidate for a subsequent cross-party election. A more accurate selection may improve the quality of the candidate but detract more resources from the subsequent campaign. We model this trade-off as a problem of contest...

When a counter-proposal is made to an initiative to change the Swiss constitution, the citizenry makes three binary majority choices: the initiative versus the status quo, the initiative versus the counter-proposal, and the status quo versus the counterproposal as a tie-breaker. If there is a...

Over the last couple of decades, non-majoritarian institutions (NMIs) have been introduced in many countries. Of late, they have been criticized as promoting technocracy to the detriment of democracy. A number of political scientists even argue that they would strengthen populists and be, hence,...

We propose six axioms concerning when one candidate should defeat another in a democratic election involving two or more candidates. Five of the axioms are widely satisfied by known voting procedures. The sixth axiom is a weakening of Kenneth Arrow’s famous condition of the Independence of...

This paper studies the effect of partisan politics on stock returns in the U.S. by exploring different measures of corporate taxes. The results support the partisan politics cycle effect on equity returns. The cross-sectional analysis shows that the measures of corporate taxes impact stock...

This paper explores the implications of voter loss-aversion and imperfect recall for the dynamics of electoral competition in a simple Downsian model of repeated elections. The interplay between the median voter’s reference point and political parties’ choice of platforms generates a dynamic...