Institutions matter for the political choice of policies, and hence the consideration of the median voter's preferences should not be considered sufficient. We study theoretically and empirically how different electoral systems affect the level of openness of a country or city, zooming on the labor market as the main source of heterogeneous…

The electoral success of the Right in poor nations is typically attributed to non-policy appeals such as clientelism. Candidate profiles are usually ignored, because if voters value class-based descriptive representation, it should be the Left that uses it. In this article we develop and test a novel theory of policy choice and candidate…

In 1974, a federal court ordered that public schools in Jefferson County, KY be desegregated. To achieve racial integration, students were assigned to a busing schedule that depended on the first letter of their last name. This led to quasi-random variation in the number of years of busing and, for the initial cohorts, whether individuals were…

We propose a model of political competition not over policy programs, but over ideologies: models of the world that organize voters’ experiences and guide the inferences they draw from observed outcomes. Policy-motivated political parties develop ideologies, and voters choose the ideology that best explains their observations. Preferences over…

To enact a policy, a leader needs votes from committee members withheterogeneous opposition intensities. She sequentially offers transfers in ex-change for votes. The transfers are either promises paid only if the policypasses or paid up front. With transfer promises, a vote costs nearly zero.With up-front payments, a vote can cost…

In this paper we study two measures of newspaper partisan behavior and content. The first uses explicit expressions of partisan support in the editorial section. The second is based on coverage and commentary of partisan activities, institutions and actors. We use these measures to describe the levels of relative partisan behavior during the…

Diversity and Evidence in Minipublics. A select sample of citizens, a minipublic, advises a policymaker on the desirability of a policy by discovering citizen-specific evidence. A citizen's incentives to seek evidence hinge on the diversity of the minipublic and the political uncertainty regarding policy adoption. What is the…

Can the ultra-rich shape electoral results by controlling media outlets that openly propagate their political interests? How consumers discount slanted media coverage is a question gaining urgency as a growing number of billionaires mix ownership of major media outlets with business interests and political agendas. We study this question in the…