This paper studies the choice of electoral rules, in particular, the question of minority representation. Majorities tend to disenfranchise minorities through strategic manipulation of electoral rules. With the aim of explaining changes in electoral rules adopted by US cities (particularly in...

Inversions--in which the popular vote winner loses the election--have occurred in 4 US Presidential elections. We show that rather than being statistical flukes, inversions have been ex ante likely since the 1800s. In elections yielding a popular vote margin within one percentage point (which...

Under majoritarian election systems, securing participation and representation of minorities remains an open problem, made salient in the US by its history of voter suppression. One remedy recommended by the courts is Cumulative Voting (CV): each voter has as many votes as open positions and can...

Extremely narrow election outcomes--such as could be reversed by rejecting a few thousand ballots--are likely to trigger dispute over the results. Narrow vote tallies may generate recounts and litigation; they may be resolved by courts or elections administrators (e.g., Secretaries of State...

This paper studies the manipulation of electoral maps by political parties, known as gerrymandering. At the core of our analysis is the recognition that districts must have the same population size but only voters matter for electoral incentives. Using a novel model of gerrymandering that allows...

One frequently overlooked aspect of the U.S.-style electoral college system is that it discourages election fraud. In a presidential election based on the popular vote, competing political parties are motivated to manipulate votes in areas where they hold the most significant influence, such as...

In recent years, voter ID laws and convenience voting have generated heated partisan debates. To shed light on these policy issues, we survey the recent evidence on the institutional determinants and effects of voter turnout and broaden the perspective beyond the most debated rules. We begin by...

We estimate the impact of a political party's ability to unilaterally redistrict Congressional seats upon partisan seat share allocations in the U.S. House of Representatives. Controlling for stateXdecade and year effects, we find an 8.2 percentage point increase in the Republican House seat...

We present a theoretical model of a parliamentary democracy, where party structures, government coalitions and fiscal policies are endogenously determined. The model predicts that, relative to proportional elections, majoritarian elections reduce government spending because they reduce party...

The paper presents empirical findings regarding the economic policy consequences of constitutional arrangements, in three different dimensions. First, the data are consistent with several theoretical predictions about the consequences of electoral rules and forms of government for fiscal policy...