Previous research has shown that divided government correlates with more constrained government, but less is understood about the empirical conditions that lead to divided government. This paper treats divided government as the dependent variable in an empirical macro political economy model...

Todorov et al (2005) demonstrated that people could make competence judgments about faces with only 100 millisecond exposures that were predictive of electoral victories. Others have since shown that Swiss children can predict the outcome of French elections when they pick which face they would...

I study a one-dimensional Hotelling-Downs model of electoral competition in which unelectable fringe candidates with extreme policy platforms are an integral part of the political process. When the preferences of voters change over time, and there are restrictions on political parties changing...

This article examines the implications of various voter interaction hypotheses within the collective bias model on the fair weights in heterogeneous voting systems. In such systems, political decision-making is carried out by member state representatives that are assigned individual weights in...

This paper presents a detailed analysis of voters' responses to municipality and regional-level unemployment and economic growth, using panel data on 284 municipalities and 9 regions, covering Swedish general elections from 1982 to 2002. The preferred specification suggests that a reduction in...

This paper makes use of variation in the timing of local elections to shed light on one of the core questions in democratic politics: what would happen if everyone voted? Does a low voter turnout rate imply that a small subset of special interest voters controls politics and policy? Or, are...

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 previous empirical research, scholars have found evidence suggesting that the character-based valence attributes of party elites, such as competence and integrity, can have notable effects on their levels of electoral support (Mondak 1995; McCurley and Mondak 1995; Clark 2009). A related, but rather...

Ghana’s 2008 elections have been hailed by national and international observers as a model for Africa. This perception has prevailed despite persistent concerns about 'ethnic block voting' and electoral fraud. Electoral malpractice and vote rigging along ethnic lines in Ghana's virtual...

A voting paradox arises when the outcome of a case is the opposite of the resolution of the individual issues within the case. For instance, eight Justices believe a statute is constitutional under the Due Process Clause, and five Justices believe the same statute is constitutional under the...