We show evidence of prejudiced voting in the 2008 presidential election. We then go deeper to test if black threat theory explains some of this behavior. The theory finds empirical support, especially in the south. We also show that black concentration in an area works interactively with the...

While officials involved in graft, bribery, extortion, nepotism, or patronage typically like to keep their deeds private, the fact that corruption can have serious effects in democracies is no secret. Numerous scholars have brought into the limelight the impact of corruption on a range of...

The Finnish National Election Study of 2003 revealed that in Finland most voters do not identify with parties and are self-described as independents. In this article it is asserted that partisan attachments affect Finnish parties’ optimal positions despite the large amount of independents. To...

Following the 2006 post-electoral crisis, important changes were made to the Constitution and several secondary laws in Mexico. Unfortunately, this new legislation has at least three drawbacks: (1) a weakening of electoral institutions, (2) a reduction in freedom of speech and access to the...

Legislators trade influence to attain approval of their most preferred bills. The classical example is found in pork barrel politics with concentrated benefits and diffuse costs where logrolling agreements involving two (or more) legislators can load costs onto legislators excluded from the...

We propose a mechanism explaining how elections may legitimize autocratic government even if they are undeniably not free and not fair. We advocate the concept of elections as a mechanism to manipulate public beliefs about the true popularity of an autocratic government. Instead of being...

Theories of parties and lawmaking typically require measures of legislators' preferences for empirical analysis. However, existing methods for generating estimates of these preferences presume that legislators care only about their own policy preferences and not about their constituency or party...

One of the premises of democratization is that political parties are able to contest in elections. As local governments are able to control a large amount of resources, the results of local elections can be crucial to a party's prospects in national elections. In Taiwan, local elections used to...

The political salience of ethnicity in Africa is well-established, but these identities are by no means the sole determiners of individuals’ political preferences and behaviors, either. Substantial variation exists within and between countries in terms of individuals’ likelihood of voting...