Essays on Political Economy

88 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005.Political competition and candidate strategies are examined in this dissertation. In chapter 1, a theoretical model of informative campaigning, both positive and negative, is developed. It is argued that some information on a candidate can be transmitted more efficiently by his opponents and the negative campaigning, on average, facilitates a more informed choice by the electorate. In the model, voters have incomplete information about candidates' qualities. Each candidate can either lead a "positive"' campaign (interpreted as issue-oriented, indicating his quality) or a "negative" campaign, by revealing detrimental information about his competitor. Voters receive the information that candidates choose to reveal and rationally update their belief about the remaining issues. We derive the equilibrium behavior of candidates in this framework and compare it to stylized facts of negative campaigning reported in the empirical literature. In chapter 2, electoral competition under uncertain commitment is studied. Traditional models of electoral competition assume either that candidates are committed to their campaign promises or that commitment is not possible. This paper generalizes the existing literatures by assuming that the commitment is ex ante uncertain. I show that even a small degree of ex post non-commitment possibility will compel policy moderation toward the median. In chapter 3, candidates' implementation efforts prior to an election is examined. During an election campaign, candidates make promises to the decisive voter (or group of decisive voters) that they will implement certain policies or carry out certain projects that are most valued by the decisive voters. However, for the voters, a full commitment of the candidates is uncertain if the candidates are less congruent or not congruent at all. Therefore, the candidate must provide some assurance to the voters during the election campaign by exerting some efforts. I show that a congruent candidate needs not exert any ex ante efforts. However, when a candidate is not congruent at all, this candidate must exert the ex ante efforts to provide sound policy implementation details.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD