Do incidents of ethnic polarization influence voter behavior? I address this question through the case study of India, the world's largest functional democracy. Specifically, I test whether prior events of Hindu-Muslim riots electorally benefit Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), a prominent Hindu...

Elections have emerged as a leading area for the application of biometric technology in developing countries, despite its high costs and uncertainty over its effectiveness. One-off voter registrations, as practiced in many countries and supported by donors, also often leave nothing behind in...

This article highlights a nefarious effect of elections during civil wars by demonstrating that they can facilitate the displacement of civilians. This occurs through two main mechanisms: they reveal information about civilians' loyalties directly to armed groups; and they threaten the status...

The current political situation in Sudan has deteriorated with the secession of its Southern part, the Darfur dilemma and the growing public feelings of deprivation, political disparities, elitism that possess the whole country. However, evidence proves that the situation is an accumulation of...

In "Are Voters Sensitive to Terrorism? Direct Evidence from the Israeli Electorate," Claude Berrebi and Esteban F. Klor analyze the causal effects of terrorist attacks on the political preferences of the Israeli electorate. In this comment, I discuss Berrebi and Klor's empirical approach -...

In this chapter, we assess recent contributions of computational models to the study of politics. We focus primarily on agent-based models developed by economists and political scientists. These models address collective action problems, questions related to institutional design and performance,...

We build a model of secession crises where voters may wish to accommodate the minority to prevent secession. We show the existence of a majority voting equilibrium with a government's type biased in favor of the minority. We propose a measure of secession risk and perform the comparative static...

This paper studies the effect of strengthening democracy, as captured by an increase in voting rights, on the incidence of violent civil conflict in nineteenth-century Colombia. Empirically studying the relationship between democracy and conflict is challenging, not only because of conceptual...

This paper adopts a "revealed preference" approach to the question of what can be inferred about bias in a political system. We model an infinite horizon, dynamic economy and its political system from the point of view of an "outside observer." The observer sees a finite sequence of policy data,...

It can be advantageous for an office motivated party A to spend effort to make it public that a group of voters will lose from party A's policy proposal. Such effort is called inverse campaigning. The inverse campaigning equilibria are described for the case where the two parties can...