How do parties motivate candidates to exert effort in closed-list elections? If each candidate's primary goal is winning a seat, then those in safe and hopeless list positions have weak incentives to campaign. We present a model in which (i) candidates care about both legislative seats and the...

The concept of electoral competition plays a central role in many subfields of political science, but no consensus exists on how to measure it. One key challenge is how to conceptualize and measure electoral competitiveness at the district level across alternative electoral systems. Recent...

Previous investigations of strategic voting equilibria in mass electorates (Cox 1987, 1994; Palfrey; Myerson and Weber) have looked only at elections held under plurality rule electoral laws. This paper investigates such equilibria in multi-member districts operating under various largest-...

We have two goals in this paper. The specific one is to provide a unified account of several prominent institutional theories of the Congress, but especially to present a model that is consistent with both the Cox-McCubbins theory of party cartels (2005; 2007) and the Aldrich-Rohde theory of...