Essays on political economy and information

This dissertation is composed of three papers. The first paper investigates a common criticism of competitive elections: To have a chance at victory, candidates pander to voters and choose the most popular platform, regardless of it being optimal for the voters. Voters share common values over the policy outcome of the election, but possess arbitrarily little information about which policy is best for them. Voters elect one of the candidates, effectively choosing between the two policies proposed by the candidates. I show that there exists a sequential equilibrium where both candidates propose the ex-post optimal policy as their platform. If there is a positive probability, however small, that each candidate is of a type committed to truth-telling, the equilibrium outcome is unique: all strategic candidates propose the ex-post optimal platform in all sequential equilibria. This result is robust to the introduction of strategic voting, policy-motivated candidates, and heterogeneous preferences. The analysis suggests that electoral competition facilitates information aggregation, thus extending the Condorcet Jury Theorem to the case of endogenous platforms.;The second paper studies the role of mass media in deterring politicians' corruption under the assumption that even a non-corrupt politician can be indicated by the media as involved in a corruption scandal. If the anti-defamation law is so stringent that in equilibrium there exists at least one scandal that would not be worth publishing by the media even if it were to be true, then corruption is larger than without any anti-defamation protection. In this case, the perfect Bayesian equilibrium mechanism involves punishing the politician if the media remain silent regarding his conduct.;Finally, the last paper (joint with Laurent Bouton) studies the set of equilibria in runoff elections with three candidates. The analysis shows that there are always incentives for all the voters to concentrate their vote on only two candidates. We identify the properties of equilibria where more than two candidates receive a positive share of the votes: first, there is no equilibrium where all the voters vote for their most preferred candidate; second, equilibria where supporters of the front runner vote for the opponent candidate who is weaker in a second round are not robust to deviations on the distribution of preferences (there is no push over effect).