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We present a model of two‐candidate elections in which candidates are office‐motivated, campaigning is voluntary and costly, and one candidate has a valence advantage. In equilibrium, the order of campaign announcements matters: Each candidate would prefer to announce his or her position after the other candidate has announced his or hers. The fundamental predictions of the model are (1) the impact of valence and campaigning costs on candidates' equilibrium behaviors is in general ambiguous, requiring further specification of the details of the electoral situation, and (2) in general, equilibrium platform announcements are essentially independent of the location of the median voter's ideal point. In addition, the model is consistent with elections in which both, only one, or neither candidate actively campaigns, and, finally, even when one candidate has a large valence advantage, there might be no equilibrium in which he or she will win the election with certainty.

I study how the possibility of voters contributing to candidates in response to the candidates' policy proposals affects the equilibrium policy in winner-take-all political competition. More specifically, I allow each partisan voter to contribute to her preferred candidate where the amount contributed depends on the relative positions of the two candidates. Candidates then use the donations to build valence through campaigning, which in turn affects the voting decision of impressionable voters. Since candidates are concerned with raising money as well as picking a policy position preferred by the median voter, I show that campaign contributions may lead to divergent equilibria in winner-take-all elections when politicians are policy-motivated, albeit only under stylized utility functions and donor densities. Further, under symmetric voter and donor densities, if either the donor density is single-peaked or the voter utility is concave, a unique equilibrium exists in which both candidates propose the ideal policy of the median voter. Adapted from the source document.

Empirical election studies conclude that party elites' images with respect to competence, integrity and party unity – attributes that we label character-based valence – affect their electoral support (Stone and Simas, 2010). We compile observations of media reports pertaining to governing party elites' character-based valence attributes, and we relate the content of these reports to mass support for the governing parties. We present pooled, time-series, analyses of party support and valence-related media reports in six European polities which suggest that these reports exert powerful electoral effects during election campaigns but little effect during off-election periods. This finding, which we label the Election Period Valence Effect, is consistent with previous work concluding that citizens are also more attentive to policy-based considerations and to national economic conditions around the time of elections. These findings have implications for political representation and for understanding election outcomes.