Politics must address multiple problems simultaneously. In an ideal world, political competition would force parties to adopt priorities that reflect the voters' true concerns. In reality, parties can run their campaigns in such a way as to manipulate voters' priorities. This phenomenon, known as priming, may allow parties to underinvest in solving the issues that they intend to mute. We develop a model of endogenous issue ownership in which two vote‐seeking parties (a) invest in policy quality to increase the value of their platform and (b) choose a communication strategy to prime voters. We identify novel feedback between communication and investment. In particular, we find that stronger priming effects can constrain parties to invest more resources in all issues. We also identify the conditions under which parties prefer to focus on their “historical issues” or to engage in “issue stealing.”

We develop a model of electoral competition in which two opportunistic candidates select their policy position and invest in quality. Policy positions are observed and, during the campaign, the press reveals some information about quality. We demonstrate that when information is imperfect, the Black-Downs median voter theorem fails to hold. For intermediate information levels, the unique equilibrium is such that candidates propose policies different from the median voter's bliss point. By contrast, convergence to the median occurs when quality is (almost) always or (almost) never revealed. We also show that a profit-maximising press may collect more information than socially optimal. * We thank Enriqueta Aragon es, Isabelle Brocas, Benoit Crutzen, Per Krusell, Johan Lagerlöf, G erard Roland, Howard Rosenthal, Lo€ c Sadoulet, Nicolas Sahuguet, Raphael Thomadsen, two anonymous referees, the editor and seminar participants at the CEPR workshop in Hydra, the EEA conference in Venice, Columbia, Rochester and ULB for comments and discussions. Micael Castanheira is a member of ECORE, the newly created association between CORE and ECARES. He is ÔChercheur Qualifi e du FNRSÕ and gratefully acknowledges their financial support.

We present a benchmark model for the optimal speed of transition from a state-owned to a private market economy, based on the consumption-savings decision in a closed economy. We abstract from frictions to focus on the macroeconomic conditions for accumulation of private capital and closure or restructuring of state-owned enterprises. It is shown that hard budget constraints compensate for too slow speed of enterprise closure but that an excess speed of closure may slow down transition because of output contraction effects. This will especially be the case if such a deviation occurs at early stages of transition.

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