Costas Roumanias (University of Macedonia-Department of Economics) has posted Auctioning Public Office on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
A microfoundation for modeling political competition as an auction is given in a framework that treats campaign spending and promises as integral parts of a signaling mechanism that transmits information about unobserved characteristics of candidates to the voters. Auction theoretic analysis is then applied, to derive results about the laws governing political campaigns and make predictions about the level of campaign expenditures and promising under varying electoral environments. The degree of commitment, which can arise endogenously in our model and the time horizon are shown to be crucial for the mixture of instruments used for signaling.
Timely–especially here in Illinois.