The key theoretical idea in this paper is that activist groups contribute resources to their favored parties in response to policy concessions from the parties. These resources are then used by a party to enhance the leader’s valence — the electoral perception of the quality of the party...

This paper investigates the merits of different democratic institutions when politics is uni-dimensional, there is uncertainty both about the preferences of the future electorate and the future polarization of political parties, and politicians have better information about the state of the...

Formal work on the electoral model often suggests that parties or candidates should locate themselves at the electoral center (or origin). Recent research has found no evidence of such convergence. In order to explain non-convergence, the stochastic electoral model is extended by including...

Two specialists on the electoral geography of post-Soviet Russia analyze spatial voting patterns from the March 2000 Russian presidential election by reference to the underlying socioeconomic traits of Russia?s regions. In an effort to gauge the extent to which regional variations in voter...

Historically, elections in emerging markets are perceived as chaotic and volatile for investment performance. In this paper we explore the performance and volatility of equity and foreign exchange markets in emerging economies during election cycles. We evaluated returns and volatility four...

This paper explores the interdependency of political institutions from the voter's perspective. Specifically, we are interested in three questions: (1) Does the partisan identity of the local mayor influence the voter's decision in the subsequent town council election?; (2) Does this partisan...

In this paper, we unveil targeted repression against journalists as an elaborate strategy used by modern autocrats to mitigate the risk of mass protests during autocratic elections-a common threat to their rule. Repression is deployed to discipline the media before elections to secure favorable...

This paper explores the interdependency of political institutions from the voter's perspective. Specifically, we are interested in: Does the partisan identity of the mayor influence the voter's decision in the subsequent town council election?; Does this partisan identity influence the vote in...

This paper analyses a new framework for decision-making in e-democracies that exploits the power of Internet based public knowledge, which is called briefly e-cognocracy. This is not a procedure to improve technical aspects using the Internet (e.g. e-voting); it is rather a procedure to add a...