An economic argument in favor of direct democracy in a social choice setting with pure common values, private noisy information about an unobservable payoff-relevant state of the world, and costless voting is essentially one about information aggregation: if all citizens vote according to their...

I review the main theoretical arguments and empirical evidence of the relationship between electoral rules and turnout, as well as the puzzles that have emerged from that literature. I then highlight some recent theoretical, methodological, and empirical advancements using subnational data that...

In an indirect voting system, a “majority inversion” occurs if a majority decision of locally elected delegates differs from that of the entire society. In the context of an apportionment problem, we point out a close relationship between reducing the probability of majority inversion and...

This paper discusses the implications of strategic voting for institutional design in environments where the only role of elections is to aggregate information. We adopt a mechanism design perspective, which assumes that prior to a standard voting game, a fictitious designer has to select the...

Struggles over the single-seat preferential election method IRV (Instant Runoff Voting) go on in public arenas and scientific journals, with focus on two “anomalies”. “Monotonicity failures” are preference distributions that allow a startling strategic voting called Pushover or its...

The role of institutions as determinants of rent seeking success is well established. In this paper, we focus on institutions that have received little attention in the literature, namely electoral institutions. We examine three measures of electoral institutional structure that are hypothesized...

The role of institutions as determinants of rent seeking success is well established. In this paper, we focus on institutions that have received little attention in the literature, namely electoral institutions. We examine three measures of electoral institutional structure that are hypothesized...

Any electoral system has an electoral formula that converts vote proportions into parliamentary seats. Pre-electoral polls usually focus on estimating vote proportions and then applying the electoral formula to give a forecast of the parliament's composition. We here describe the problems...