Pork barrel spending is typically attributed to the strategic behavior of political elites hoping to be electorally rewarded by voters residing in their districts. Such behavior is expected to depend on the incentives imposed by the electoral system. We estimate the causal effect of local...

This paper proposes a theoretical framework to assess the presence of the swing voter's curse in proportional representation (PR) systems. Using individual survey data that contains detailed information on coalition expectations and preferences, this framework is then used to estimate its...

Ideology is widely considered to be an important factor in shaping policy outcomes and in influencing election outcomes. We propose a theory of the coalition-directed vote. The argument suggests that voters anticipate the post-election bargains negotiated among potential members of the governing...

Despite multiple opportunities to address the issue, the Supreme Court has declined to take action on partisan gerrymandering. Here we argue that the Court has successfully laid out several intellectual paths toward effective regulation - but that the best route for applying such reasoning goes...

We combine Duverger's Law (1954) with Demsetz's (1968) theory of natural monopoly to provide a novel perspective on electoral competitiveness in a single member district, plurality rule system. In the framework we develop, competitiveness depends on the contestability of elections, which...

We analyze voter preferences for eight General Elections for the Danish parliament by using survey data to investigate the possible presence of five types of social choice paradoxes that may occur in list systems of proportional representation. Two serious paradoxes fail to manifest themselves,...

When collective choices are made in more than one round and with different groups of decision-makers, so-called election inversions may take place, where each group have different majority outcomes. We identify two versions of such compound majority paradoxes specifically, but not exclusively,...

We use Hotelling's spatial model of competition to investigate the position-taking behaviour of political candidates under a class of electoral systems known as scoring rules. In a scoring rule election, voters rank all the candidates running for office, following which the candidates are...