Title: Factions and political competition
Description: "This paper presents a new model of political competition where candidates belong to factions.  Before elections, factions compete to direct local public goods to their local constituencies.  Voters view the public goods as a credible signal that their local candidate is in the right (i.e., powerful) faction.  The model of factional competition delivers a rich set of implications relating the internal organization of the party to the allocation of resources.  Several key theoretical predictions of the model find a counterpart in our empirical analysis of newly coded data on the provision of water services in Mexico"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.