Valence uncertainty and the nature of the candidate pool in elections

Political parties in US politics are becoming increasingly polarized, with a growing number of extreme candidates entering electoral races. Why would extremists challenge more moderate opponents, since their chances of winning are supposedly very slim? I develop a model of electoral competition and endogenous entry to show that extremists rely on the possibility that the campaign might …

Group incentives and rational voting

Our model describes competition between groups driven by the choices of self-interested voters within groups. Within a Poisson voting environment, parties observe aggregate support from groups and can allocate prizes or punishments to them. In a tournament style analysis, the model characterizes how contingent allocation of prizes based on relative levels of support affects equilibrium …

Bargaining with a biased autocrat

This paper presents a specific dynamic extension to the model outlined by Jackson and Morelli (Political bias and war. The American Economic Review 97(4): 1353–1373). In particular, we focus on the implications of a long-lived leader who possesses bias towards or against war that potentially differs from the country (s)he represents. Bargaining and war outcomes are characterized in this…

Storable votes and judicial nominations in the US Senate

We model a procedural reform aimed at restoring a proper role for the minority in the confirmation process of judicial nominations in the US Senate. We propose that nominations to the same level court be collected in periodic lists and voted upon individually with storable votes, allowing each senator to allocate freely across the list a fixed number of total votes. Although each nomina…

Are non-competitive elections good for citizens?

Many regimes, particularly autocracies, hold elections where the ruling regime’s victory is a foregone conclusion. This paper provides a formal analysis of how these non-competitive elections affect citizen welfare compared to a non-electoral baseline. To do so, I first develop a game-theoretic framework that captures many extant theories of why regimes hold non- competitive elections, w…

Partisan optimism and political bargaining

Partisan voters are optimistic about electoral outcomes: their estimates of the probability of electoral success for their party are substantially higher than the average among the electorate. This has large potential implications for political bargaining. Optimistic electoral expectations make costly bargaining delay look more favourable, which may induce partisans to punish their part…

Ambition, personalist regimes, and control of authoritarian leaders

Why do elites in some authoritarian regimes but not others remove from power the leaders who harm their interests? We develop a formal theory explaining this. The theory shows how elites’ ambition prevents them from controlling authoritarian leaders. Because ambitious elites are willing to stage coups to acquire power even when the leader is good, ambition renders elites’ claims that th…

Now or later? A dynamic analysis of judicial appointments

Observing substantial variations in Senate confirmation durations, existing studies have tried to explain when the Senate takes more or less time to confirm presidential nominees. However, they have largely ignored the president’s incentives to nominate someone who he expects will be delayed and do not specify conditions under which delay occurs. To improve on existing literature, I develop…

Policy dynamics and electoral uncertainty in the appointments process

By incorporating electoral uncertainty and policy dynamics into three two-period models of the appointments process, we show that gridlock may not always occur under divided government, contrary to the findings of static one-shot appointments models. In these cases, contrary to the ally principle familiar to students of bureaucratic politics, the president or the confirmer is willing to…

Participation and boycott in authoritarian elections

The existence of authoritarian elections raises a number of questions regarding the strategies of political opposition. What explains the choice of strategy among key opponents of a regime? What determines when opposition groups willingly participate in elections and when they engage in electoral boycott? To understand the opposition’s strategic choices, we develop a formal model of gov…

Working smart and hard? Agency effort, judicial review, and policy precision

The lion’s share of policy in the United States is made by administrative agencies. Agencies not only make policy choices, they must also implement policy effectively. Oversight institutions play an integral role in the policymaking process by monitoring, through review of agency policy actions, both policymaking tasks. Through analysis of a formal model I develop a theory of policymaking…

Ideology signaling in electoral politics

This paper considers an electoral model in which an incumbent and a challenger have ideological policy preferences that are private information. The incumbent may bias pre-electoral policies to signal preferences to the electorate with the aim of affecting the outcome of the election. When the two candidates are of completely different types, such a policy bias can occur only in a moder…

How uncertainty about judicial nominees can distort the confirmation process

Why are judicial nominees allowed to refuse to answer questions about important issues that could come before the courts? We address this question by examining the information environment surrounding judicial nominations. Using the Supreme Court as our example, we formulate a model that departs from the existing literature by incorporating the fact that the Senate often does not know what…

May’s theorem in one dimension

This paper provides three versions of May’s theorem on majority rule, adapted to the one- dimensional model common in formal political modeling applications. The key contribution is that single peakedness of voter preferences allows us to drop May’s restrictive positive responsiveness axiom. The simplest statement of the result holds when voter preferences are single peaked and linear (n…

Comparative Political Studies, Volume 50, Number 5, April 2017

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00104140

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Comparative Political Studies, Volume 50, Number 3, March 2017

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00104140

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Comparative Political Studies, Volume 50, Number 6, May 2017

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00104140

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Evaluation, Volume 23, Number 2, April 2017

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ISBN/ISSN

13563890

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Evaluation, Volume 23, Number 1, January 2017

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13563890

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Critical Social Policy, Volume 37, Number 1, February 2017

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ISBN/ISSN

02610183

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