Among those advocating the use of particular electoralmechanisms to reduce the prospects for conflict and strengthendemocracy in societies that are deeply divided in ethnic orreligious terms, there are two main approaches, one associatedwith Arend Lijphart, one with Donald Horowitz....

Consider a group of people confronted with a dichotomous choice (for example, a yes or no decision). Assume that we can characterize each person by a probability, p <Subscript>i</Subscript>, of making the ‘better’ of the two choices open to the group, such that we define ‘better’ in terms of some linear...</subscript>

In re-analyzing the Ferejohn and Fiorina (1974) examination of ‘rational’ abstention we found that admitting mixed strategies does not affect findings as to the optimal behavior of voters who are expected utility maximizers but does significantly affect our expectations as to behavior of...

Niemi (1969), in an important but neglected paper, found that when orderings were drawn from a simulation based on the impartial culture, the greater the proportion of voter orderings that were single-peaked (a condition he called partial single-peakedness), the more likely was there to be a...

One paradox of voting states that, in a general election, in which many citizens vote, the probability that a single voter can affect the outcome is so small that in general citizens have no rational reason for voting. However, if all citizens accept this reasoning, then none will vote, and so...

We provide a natural extension of the Borda count to the n-dimensional spatial context, an algorithm to find the spatial Borda winner based on the notion of an inverse Borda count, the result that the Borda winner and the Condorcet winner coincide in unidimensional space when all alternatives on...