French politicians, like those in democracies around the world, were enthralled by the success of Democratic candidate Barack Obama in the 2008 US Presidential elections. Part of that thrall sprung from the candidate’s embrace of internet campaigning and his use of Web 2.0 tools to communicate...

Cleavage structures, party systems, and voter alignments : an introduction / by Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan -- pt. 1. The English-speaking democracies. Class voting in the Anglo-American political systems / by Robert R. Alford -- Class voting in New Zealand : a comment on Alford's...

Do political parties benefit electorally from a personal vote cultivated by their candidates? How do these benefits vary across electoral systems? This paper explores these questions, so far underaddressed despite their importance, through a comparative analysis of parties' electoral gains from...

This study investigates the extent to which contemporary democracies are representative of the policy preferences expressed by the majority of electors, parties and governments there in. The analysis concentrates on parties' and governments' manifestos in 34 democracies with data provided by the...

We speak often of 'representative democracy' and we tend to regard it as the dominant form of government in the modern West. But who or what is represented by the electoral systems of the modern democratic state? Although we may be prone to regard contemporary democracies as embodying...

We study voting over higher education finance in an economy with risk averse households who are heterogeneous in income. We compare four different systems and analyse voters' choices among them: a traditional subsidy scheme, a pure loan scheme, income contingent loans and graduate taxes. Using...