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This paper studies a sequential election contest, such as the American presidential primary, in which several elections occur one at a time until a single winner emerges. The conventional wisdom is that such a system benefits a candidate favored in the initial elections because of momentum. This paper uncovers a potentially opposing force if participation is costly & candidates exit when they have unfavorable future prospects. A candidate with friendly elections at the end of the contest will typically benefit from the resulting game theoretic competition. Tension between this strategic effect & momentum helps explain several empirical regularities of presidential primaries. 1 Table, 4 Figures, 21 References. Adapted from the source document.

This paper argues that long-run trends in geographic segregation are inconsistent with models where residential choice depends solely on local public goods (the Tiebout hypothesis). We develop an extension of the Tiebout model that predicts as mobility costs fall, the heterogeneity across communities of individual public good preferences and of public good provision must (weakly) increase. Given the secular decline in mobility costs, these predictions can be evaluated using historical data. We find decreasing heterogeneity in policies and proxies for preferences across (i) a sample of U.S. municipalities (1870–1990); (ii) all Boston-area municipalities (1870–1990); and (iii) all U.S. counties (1850–1990).

Explaining the outcome of presidential elections is central to any model of American government. Previous researchers have found that economic conditions explain a substantial portion of the variation in vote outcomes. We make two contributions to this literature. First, we show that state partisan predisposition is the most important explanatory variable for the period 1972–1992. Several states are simply out of reach for one of the parties, no matter how favorable is the information about their candidate. Second, we find that national economic indicators have an effect on votes that is an order of magnitude larger than state‐level aggregates. Presidents who try to curry favor with certain states through pork barrel projects are unlikely to be rewarded with large vote margins. Our model does a reasonable job forecasting the state‐level vote for the 1996 election when the actual economic conditions are used as regressors. None the less we are skeptical that these type of models can accurately forecast the Electoral College winner because of the wide confidence intervals on each state's vote forecast and the potential error in predicted economic conditions.