We argue that standard models that solve the paradox of voting do a bad job explaining the frequency of very close elections. We instead model head-to-head elections as a competition between incentive schemes to turn out voters. We show that elections are either heavily contested, and decided by...

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...

Natural experiments are increasingly prominent in the social sciences. However, natural experiments often have more in common with traditional observational studies than with randomized experiments. We illustrate our argument by examining the case of using redistricting to estimate the personal...

Does the partisanship of poll workers affect electoral outcomes? Many countries use partisan and adversarial vote-counting systems where poll workers are party representatives and mutual control is expected to provide fairness. Yet in countries with dominant party regimes, parties often have de...

We explore sequential voting in symmetric two-option environments. We show that the (informative) symmetric equilibria of the simultaneous voting game are also equilibria in any sequential voting structure. In unanimity games, (essentially) the whole set of equilibria is the same in all...

The majority runoff system is widely used around the world. Yet, our understanding of its properties and of voters' behavior is limited. In this paper, we fully characterize the set of strictly perfect voting equilibria in large three-candidate majority runoff elections. Considering all possible...

Increasing concern over corporate governance has led to calls for more shareholder in uence over corporate decisions, but allowing shareholders to vote on more issues, such as executive compensation, may not affect the quality of governance. We should expect instead that, under current rules,...

Last decade’s unprecedented whirlwind of redistricting lawsuits and reforms have fallen behind us as redistricters shift their focus to tomorrow’s elections. This decade’s redistricting plans will be scrutinized more than ever, and the public’s perception of these new plans is vital to...

In multi-party systems, parties often form alliances before elections. What brings competing parties to coalesce into new entities? I present a model of electoral competition in which parties can form pre-electoral alliances and decide how binding these should be. Parties face a dynamic...

Electoral reform creates new strategic coordination incentives for voters, but these effects are difficult to isolate. We identify how the reform of the Norwegian electoral system in 1919, when single-member districts (SMDs) were replaced with multi- member proportional representation (PR),...