Leaders of undemocratic regimes allow elections in order to co-opt powerful groups in society and secure their own grip on power. However, they do not allow fair elections. They manipulate the electoral system in order to over-represent the geographic areas, and the groups within them, to whom...

From the wide range of voting schemes, two electoral rules, proportional representation (PR) and plurality (PL) attract primary interest. This paper examines the relationship between proportionality, voter information and a conception of the power of competing political parties under the...

Since the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement on December 14th in Paris 1995, the political but also general social scene of Bosnia and Herzegovina has been overwhelmed with the issues of reforms and changes in regard to the Constitutional settlement agreed in Dayton. The Bosnian-Herzegovinian...

The fragmentation of the party system has confronted the German mixed-member proportional electoral system with a trilemma. It can only ensure two out of three goals: proportionality, guaranteed representation of district winners, and a fixed and predictable size of the Bundestag. This paper...

This paper studies the manipulation of electoral maps by political parties, known as gerrymandering. At the core of our analysis is the recognition that districts must have the same population size but only voters matter for electoral incentives. Using a novel model of gerrymandering that allows...

Is corruption systematically related to electoral rules? A number of studies have tried to uncover economic and social determinants of corruption but, as far as we know, nobody has yet empirically investigated how electoral systems influence corruption. We try to address this lacuna in the...