Theoretical conception and empirical application to the European Union

How should party preferences of voters in a multiparty system be measured, compared and aggregated? The authors use city block metric of distances between the pairwise comparisons of the five German parties (1995 survey data for West and East Germany). Neither in West nor in East Germany, a...

Expectations about the outcome of elections play an important role in both rational choice and social psychological theories of voting. So far, however, there is not much research on the formation of expectations and their influence on voting behavior. In this paper, we use election studies from...

Policy networks are often used as a metaphor to describe new forms of governance beyond state control involving both public and private actors. This paper argues that the delineation of policy networks is a common task of all network approaches. The authors proceed, first by selecting specific...

This paper addresses two problems: how can we identify a verisimilar policy space and how can we detect Nash equilibria in this space for parties’ policy positions? We argue that the ideological party positions that voters perceive are fixed during the time span of one electoral campaign...

Our basic argument is that in multi-party systems we should not only analyze party preferences but also coalition preferences in order to explain voting behavior. We distinguish between coalition leaning and coalition preference and are interested in explaining under what conditions an explicit...

In this paper we are interested in explaining strategic ticket-splitting in the German mixed-electoral system across time. We propose that mainly two factors determine the level of strategic ticket-splitting across electoral districts and across time. The closer the district race is expected or...