In this paper, we have provided some support for several hypotheses about the determinants of which governors get reelected. The benefit from being a member of a particular party varies from state to state and from year to year. Personal characteristics such as age are also important. The logits...

Empirical research reports conflicting conclusions about whether primary election voters strategically account for candidates’ general election prospects when casting their votes. We model the strategic calculations of office-seeking candidates facing two-stage elections beginning with a...

Several recent spatial modeling studies incorporate valence issues—e.g., voters’ evaluations of the candidates’ competence, integrity, and charisma—that may give one of the candidates an electoral advantage that is independent of his policy positions. However to date all such models...

The author develops a general model of multiparty competition in which parties model voters' choices by means of probabilistic choice rules. The model is specified in terms of an issue salience coefficient which varies with the importance voters attach to issues, as opposed to unmeasured...

Advocates of consensual political institutions, i.e. institutions that promote compromise and powersharing among political parties, claim that these institutions promote moderation in government policy outputs. To date, however, there exists little research – either theoretical or empirical...

Existing models of multicandidate spatial competition with probabilistic voting typically predict a high degree of policy convergence, yet in actual elections candidates advocate quite divergent sets of policies. What accounts for this disparity between theory and empirical observation? I...

Several recent studies examine the degree to which congressional behavior affects candidates’ electoral fortunes (e.g., Carson, 2005). Research examining electoral competitiveness (Bond, Campbell, & Cottrill, 2001; Koetzle, 1998) and roll call voting (Bailey & Brady, 1998; Jones, 2003) finds that...

The author evaluates five single-winner voting systems according to their tendency to elect Condorcet candidates under alternative models of issue voting derived from behavioral research. These behavioral models posit that voters have both issue and nonissue motivations; within this framework,...

The United States presidential election of 1992 is an example of a multicandidate contest involving both Democratic and Republican candidates. Using a spatial modelling approach, I analyze candidate policy strategy for such elections, under the assumption that voters choose according to the...