Framing effects and bounded rationality imply that election campaigns may be an important determinant of election outcomes. This paper uses a two-party setting and simple game theoretic models to analyse the strategic interaction between the parties’ campaign decisions. Alternations of power...

Models of nomination politics in the USA often find ‘gridlock’ in equilibrium because of the supermajority requirement in the Senate for the confirmation of presidential nominees. A blocking coalition often prefers to defeat any nominee. Yet empirically nominations are successful....

EU legislative analysis has been enriched by insightful controversies over the interpretation of the policy process. This debate has concentrated on the interpretation of the process by focusing on the identification of the agenda setter and the relevance of voting weights, but little attention...

A plethora of strategies and initiatives have been proposed to address the development deficits in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). However, the resulting analyses have failed to converge on the actual causes of these shortfalls and to identify optimum solutions. As a result, disparities between the...

This article introduces a novel dataset on the agenda of the European Council, the most powerful political body and core informal agenda setter of the EU. Using the approach taken by the Comparative Agendas Project, we trace political issue attention over a 38-year period (1975–2012). The...

The American president’s foreign policy agenda represents a complex mix of policy preferences driven both by necessity and choice. It would seem that, given the ability of other actors to substantially influence the nature of the president’s foreign policy agenda, and given the...

This paper argues that the formation of regional integration frameworks can be best understood as a dominant state’s attempt to create a preferred regional framework in which it can exercise exclusive influence. In this context, it is important to observe not only which countries are included...

Scholars of Congress and other legislative institutions have posited that majority agenda-setting is one of the primary mechanisms by which a majority party demonstrates its power over legislation. However, this line of work has difficulty explaining why the floor median would delegate such...

The main objective of this study was to investigate the effects of television viewing on public opinion of devolution. The specific objective was to examine the devolution content transmitted on television channels. It was important to determine how devolution is presented on television channels...

This paper models a purely informational mechanism behind the incumbency advantage. In a two-period electoral campaign with two policy issues, a specialized incumbent and an unspecialized, but possibly more competent challenger compete for election by voters who are heterogeneously informed...