In this short note, we use data from different elections in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia between 1975 and 2010 to show that the social democrats generally profit from higher voter turnout at the expense of the conservatives. We deal with the endogeneity of voter turnout by using...

The formation of party preferences is a complex and not yet fully understood process based on a number of factors. This process, which is of great interest for both social and political science, is usually studied using questionnaire data which has proven to be a very reliable yet often costly...

In this paper we test the hypothesis that intergovernmental grants allocated to co-partisans buy more political support than grants allocated to local governments controlled by opposition parties. We use a rich Spanish database containing information about the grants received by 617...

We use a change in the voting procedures of one of the two chambers of the Swiss parliament to explore how transparency affects the voting behavior of its members. Until 2013, the Council of States (Ständerat) had voted by a show of hands. While publicly observable at the time of the vote,...

In economics and other social sciences, complex processes are often represented by numerical models of reality which more or less well reflect behavioral relationships and interactions. Such attempts are the subject of a lecture course 'Mathematical Theory of Democracy' by the author at the...

Independent candidates are not allowed in Tanzania. This restriction has raised debate which dominates multipartism and its efficacy in the country. Since the inception of multipartism in 1992, there have been three major cases on independent candidates. In the first two cases, the High Court...

Building on models of electoral competition with reputational mechanisms, I show that term limits decrease the vote share of candidates from parties less able to reward or punish candidates. Candidates suffer by not being able to credibly commit to policies far from their own preferences....

Using data from 1869-1928, we estimate the effect of party control of state elected offices on the entry, exit, circulation, and content of Republican and Democratic daily newspapers. We exploit changes over time in party control of the governorship and state legislatures in a...

As one of the strongest determinants of the vote choice of United States citizens, party identification has been the object of extensive scholarly attention. Despite fifty years of research, its place in the funnel of causality and its applicability outside the United States remains unclear. In...

This Article examines what law can do to enable an electorate comprised of mostly ignorant voters to obtain meaningful representation and to hold elected officials accountable for the government's performance. Drawing on a half-century of research by political scientists, we argue that political...