Despite recent advances, no general methods for computing bargaining power in non-cooperative games exist. We propose a number of axioms such a measure should satisfy and show that they characterise a unique function. The principle underlying this measure is that the influence of a player can be assessed according to how much changes in this player's preferences affect outcomes. Considering specific classes of games, our approach nests existing measures of power. We present applications to cartel formation, the non-cooperative model of the household, and legislative bargaining.

We demonstrate that political geography has value to firms. We do so by exploiting shocks to political maps that occur around redistricting cycles in the United States. These shocks keep some firms in Congressional districts that are largely unchanged at one extreme and reassign other firms to largely different sets of constituents at the other extreme. Our main finding is that firms suffer from being reassigned into districts that are competitive across parties relative to safer districts. The effects are not trivial in magnitude. Moreover, they do not depend on whether firms retain the same politician or make campaign contributions.

This article empirically investigates the impact of globalization on voting behavior. Specifically, combining individual-level data from the first nine waves of the European Social Survey, party-level information from the Comparative Manifesto Project, and country-level data from Eurostat, we study the individual determinants of the vote for trade protectionist parties. Our findings show, firstly, that protectionist parties mainly receive electoral support from less-educated voters, unemployed individuals and members of labor unions. Secondly, we test the compensation principle using a macro measure of a country's compensation potential and find, contrary to expectations, no significant evidence that a greater potential to mitigate the labor market adjustment costs resulting from economic openness deters the propensity to vote for protectionist parties in national elections.

The determinants of the number of parties competing in any given first-past-the-post election have been widely studied. Much less clear are the conditions required for two parties to dominate all elections across separate districts and at different levels of government. In this paper, I propose a novel model of party formation and show that two parties can only dominate all elections if they provide sufficient opportunities for members while limiting the success of defectors. More specifically, I establish three conditions for two-parties dominance: i) parties must be divided into a left-wing and a right-wing camp in any two-party equilibrium, ii) voters at the national level cannot be too concentrated in the centre relative to the most radical districts, and iii) politicians need to be sufficiently motivated by the desire to win elections at higher levels of government. Furthermore, I establish the existence of a specific two-party equilibrium featuring a centre-left and a centre-right party. I use this equilibrium to illustrate that primaries can reduce the likelihood of entry of third parties. An extension that introduces regionalism shows that high salience of this second dimension of policy is by itself not enough to rule out two-party equilibria.

Asylum policies are interdependent across countries: Policy choices in one country can affect refugee flows into neighbouring countries and may provoke policy changes there, in an a priori unknown direction. We formulate a dynamic model of refugees' location choices and of the strategic interaction among destinations that we fit to Syrian refugee migration to Europe. We find that south and southeastern European countries view recognition rates as strategic substitutes, whereas the same policies can be strategic complements in northern Europe. Our findings imply that regression frameworks which use cross-country variation to estimate effects of recognition rates on immigration underestimate (overestimate) the effect if this policy is a strategic substitute (complement).

In many countries political parties control who can become a candidate for an election. In this gatekeeping role parties may be tempted to put their own interests first, particularly when voters have little information about candidates. This paper uses a theoretical model to demonstrate that electoral incentives can discipline parties to nominate high-quality candidates even when voters are initially unable to observe quality themselves. In equilibrium voters elect candidates that are ex-ante preferred by the party leader with lower probability. This effectively neutralises the bias of the party leader and induces her to use her superior information to select candidates according to the preferences of the median voter. This result requires that electoral competition is sufficiently strong. If competition is weak, nothing can prevent the party leader from following her own preferences. As ideological alignment between the median voter and a party reduces the degree of competition that this party faces, the median voter can be better off when parties are polarized. Excessively strong competition can be harmful, however, as some politicians cease to be viable candidates and the party leader is less able to select on quality. Allowing the party leadership to nominate candidates strategically makes the benefits of introducing primaries less clear than previously argued in the literature.

Interest groups seem to achieve large policy favours for small sums of campaign contributions. This has long puzzled observers. I provide an explanation of this so called "Tullock paradox" that is robust to competition among opposing interests. In the model, I allow interest groups to specify their donations as very general functions of policies and donations by other groups. This allows potential donors to influence the policy choice of an incumbent through threats of contributions to the campaign of a challenger. It is therefore possible that the incumbent chooses policies that favour a particular interest group even if this group has not made any actual donations. When lobbies face a small amount of uncertainty about the policy that the incumbent will choose, I am able to provide a clear characterisation of equilibrium. Policies are always skewed in favour of the group with deeper pockets. This group may also use actual donations on top of threats in order to increase its influence over policies. The weaker lobby, on the other hand, does not promise any money for any policy the incumbent may implement. Outcomes nevertheless differ from the case with only one interest group as the weaker group can become active if the stronger group tries to exert even more pressure.