While our experimental results do not show convincingly the superiority of our model over alternative hypotheses, these results do not reject the rational expectations approach to handling incomplete information in elections. This is not to say, of course, that our model provides the most...

This essay reports the results of ninety 3-person and 5-person bargaining experiments using several alternative vote trading scenarios. These experiments are designed to test: (1) Riker and Brams' controversial hypothesis that vote trading can yield inferior outcomes as against the alternative...

With the model of the electoral process described in Section 1, and a social welfare function defined by symmetrically weighting and summing individual utility functions, two factors, in addition to the density of preferences and the form of the weighting function, affect the performance of the...

Over a variety of experimental designs, including vote trading games and committee games with both spatial and finite alternatives, the Competitive Solution has received considerable support. But the experiments that we report here do not replicate that support. Hence, while we maintain our...

Just as the two-headed eagle of imperial and contemporary Russia looks in two different directions, this essay has two objectives: to evaluate, on the basis of the American experience, the prospects for stable democratic federalism in Russia and to reconsider the insights into federalism offered...

Political scientists in the pluralist tradition disagree sharply with public and social choice theorists about the importance of institutions and with William Riker in particular, who argues inLiberalism against Populism that the liberal institutions of indirect democracy ought to be preferred...

Taking the view that constitutions are devices whereby people coordinate to specific equilibria in circumstances that allow multiple equilibria, we show that a constitutional secession clause can serve as such a device and, therefore, that such a clause is more than an empty promise or an...