This paper attempts to model elections by incorporating voter judgments about candidate and leader competence. The proposed model can be linked to Madison’s understanding of the nature of the choice of Chief Magistrate (Madison, James Madison: writings. The Library of America, New York, <CitationRef CitationID="CR43">1999</CitationRef>...</citationref>

We develop a stochastic model of electoral competition in order to study the economic and political determinants of trade policy. We model a small open economy with two tradable goods, each of which is produced using a sector-specific factor (e.g., land and capital) and another factor that is...

Formal models of elections have emphasized the convergence of party leaders towards the centre of the electoral distribution. This paper attempts to resolve the apparent disparity between the formal result and the perception of political divergence by considering a model incorporating valence....

Social Choice traditionally employs the preferences of voters or agents as primitives. However, in most situations of constitutional decision-making the beliefs of the members of the electorate determine their secondary preferences or choices. Key choices in US political history, such as the...

Previous analyses have shown that if a point is to be a core of a majority-rul e voting game in Euclidean space when preferences are smooth, then the utility gradients at the point must satisfy certain restrictive symmetry conditions. In this paper, these results are generalized t o the case of...

In the model presented here, $n$ parties choose policy positions in a space $Z$ of dimension at least two. Each party has true preferences on $Z$ that are unknown to other agents. In the first version of the model considered the party declarations determine the lottery outcome of coalition...