In French national elections, the presence of a national economic vote is clear. However, the character of the economic vote is less clear at the regional level. Assuming regional elections are second order, voters may wish to signal the national incumbent, by rewarding or punishing it for...

Two commonly-used criteria for evaluating voting rules are how infrequently the rules provide opportunities for strategic voting and how infrequently they encounter voting paradoxes. The lack of ranking data from enough actual elections to determine these frequencies with reasonable accuracy...

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...

Bureaucratic compliance is often crucial for political survival, yet eliciting that compliance in weakly institutionalized environments requires that political principals convince agents that their hold on power is secure. We provide a formal model to show that electoral manipulation can help to...

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...

As American governors acquire enhanced regulatory and decision-making powers for economic development, the prevalence of statewide business scorecards and other factors are prompting voters to make these politicians and their agents responsible for the financial well-being of their states....