Using time-series cross-section data on state-level registration and turnout, "motor voter" registration programs mandated by the National Voter Registration Act are found to be effective in enhancing voter participation in the states that have already adopted them. A "duration" specification...

Two parties choose redistricting plans to maximize their probability of winning a majority in the House of Representatives. In the unique equilibrium, parties maximally segregate their opponents' supporters but pool their own supporters into uniform districts. Ceteris paribus, the stronger party...

A ranking of journals is manipulable if a particular journal's position can be improved by making additional citations to other journals. We introduce a simple ranking method that is not manipulable and is invariant to citation intensities, journal scaling and article-splitting. The ranking of...

This paper experimentally examines behavior in a two-player game of attack and defense of a weakest-link network of targets, in which the attacker’s objective is to successfully attack at least one target and the defender’s objective is diametrically opposed. We apply two benchmark contest...

Rational choice theories of electoral participation stress that an individual's decision to vote depends on her expected net benefit from doing so. If this instrumental motive is relevant, then turnout should be higher in elections where more is at stake. We test this prediction, by studying how...

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of individual resource endowments for explaining individual and group variation in African political participation. Drawing on new data for more than 27 000 respondents in 20 emerging African democracies, the empirical findings suggest surprisingly...

Political economics predicts that the rich oppose redistribution and vote for conservative parties. Although this seemingly fits the data well in most countries, I show that the relationship breaks down when we control for unobservable characteristics. Using Norwegian survey data, I study to...

Numerous studies suggest that communication may be a universal means to mitigate collective action problems. In this study, we challenge this view and show that the communication structure crucially determines whether communication mitigates or intensifies the problem of collective action. We...

The literature on the behavior of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has focused on static voting patterns. We find statistical support for a dynamic pattern using a panel reaction function to analyze MPC votes over the 1997-2008 period. We find that internal and external...

In innovation contests, the progress of the competing firms in the innovation process is usually their private information. We analyze an innovation contest in which research firms have a stochastic technology to develop innovations at a fixed cost, but their progress is publicly announced. We...