Using geo-referenced terror events and ethnicity information, this article seeks to explore if and how elections … contribute to violence in Iraq. Analyzing the December 2005 and March 2010 parliamentary elections and the January 2009 … governorate elections, I assess whether partisan and/or ethnic competition over votes increased violence in a predicatable manner …

This paper examines the role played by sitting presidents during United States midterm congressional elections between … appearances may have positive effects on both a candidate's vote share and the level of voter turnout on election day. I conclude … from an appearance by President Obama during the 2010 midterm elections …

The paper proposes a mechanism explaining how elections may stabilize an autocratic regime even if they are evidently … unfree and unfair. Instead of being meaningless rituals, non-democratic elections can help the autocrats in managing and … communicating the public information about the regime's pop- ularity. We show how optimally rigged elections allow moderately …

elections are competitive. In such contexts, voters should attach more importance to their own choice and rely less on … “heuristics.” Three aspects of election competitiveness are considered: the fragmentation and polarization of the party system and … the proportionality of the electoral system. Elections are more competitive when there are many parties in competition …

experimental results indicate a strong behavioral tendency to use a retrospective voting rule even when the rule is not … sequentially rational. Additional experiments suggest two reasons. Retrospective voting is a simple heuristic that voters use to …

In French national elections, the presence of a national economic vote is clear. However, the character of the economic … vote is less clear at the regional level. Assuming regional elections are second order, voters may wish to signal the … political data at regional level from all the French regional elections (including 2010). The empirical results show that French …