Essays on electoral competition and voting behavior

Election is one of the most important political institutions in democracy. However, electoral institutions take different variations in terms of rules and settings, and rational political actors choose their best strategies depending on the different electoral institutions. In this sense, it is an important issue to understand how different institutional aspects in elections affect political actors' strategic behavior. This dissertation examines how information, electoral campaigns, development in legislature, and timing of elections determine voting behavior and electoral competition both theoretically and empirically.; The first chapter studies the incumbency advantage in the presence of strategic challengers. I develop a dynamic model of infinitely repeated elections that incorporates asymmetric information and strategic campaigning by challengers. The results in the paper predict that the level of campaign activities from challengers has a non-monotonic relationship with the performance of incumbents, and moreover, the equilibrium dynamics of the model predict a growing incumbency advantage over time.; The second chapter is an empirical analysis of U.S. state politics. In this paper I investigate how legislative professionalization affects the likelihood of forming a divided government. I show that it is important to separate two different effects of professionalization on the composition of divided governments: the direct institutional effect and the indirect effect through the growing incumbency effect. I argue that there is a positive effect of legislative professionalization through the incumbency advantage and a negative effect due to voters' policy considerations. I analyze data on state legislative election outcomes from 1967 to 2001, and find that when the benefit of incumbency is controlled for, a higher level of legislative professionalization reduces voters' incentives to elect a divided government.; In a constitutional setting where policies are decided by bargaining between the executive and the legislature, some moderate voters prefer divided government to unified government since moderate policies are more likely under divided government than under unified government. The third chapter extends this theoretical explanation for split-ticket voting to an environment with incomplete information and a district electoral system.