Though few voters appear to hold consistent ideological views, the roll call votes of congressmen and senators can be well predicted by ideological terms. An explanation for this puzzle is that ideology allows candidates to succinctly explain their views. Because it is difficult to explain...

One approach to avoiding the implications of Arrow's paradox is to impose restrictions on the preferences of voters. A restriction often assumed in the literature is that voters' preferences can be represented by a choice among points in a space, where voters' preferences are convex. We claim...

The authors extend the standard Downsian framework to suppose that voters consider the identity of each candidate's supporters when deciding whom to support, rather than considering only the announced policy positions of the candidates. In particular, they posit the existence of a class of...