How does presidentialism affect various forms of representation? All else being equal, presidentialism is likely to impede the prospects for ‘mandate’ representation but enhance the prospects for ‘accountability’ representation. The degree of mandate or accountability...

Much research in political science suggests that social identity can be an important factor in motivating behavior. If voters care about social identity, when will politicians find it in their interests to make group-based appeals? Do social identity concerns affect the policy platforms offered...

There are two distinct views on how candidate (or party) issue strategies influence mass evaluations. One is the view underlying the classic spatial model that the proximity between the voter's own issue positions and the positions taken by the candidates drives the evaluation. The other view is...

We show that the median legislator in the US House is unambiguously closer to the majority party median than to the minority party median. An important implication of this finding is that the median legislator is predisposed to support the majority party's policy agenda. Thus, in the event that...

Political scientists most often deal with ordered variables: political parties range from left to right, social classes from lower class to upper class, age groups from youngest to eldest, and so on. We propose a series of powerful tools in order to compare several distributions of such a...