I assume that voters mark ballots exclusively to express their true preferences among parties, leaving aside any considerations about an election’s possible outcome. The paper then analyzes the resulting voting behavior. In particular, it studies how effective different voting systems such as...

I assume that voters mark ballots exclusively to express their true preferences among parties, leaving aside any considerations about an election’s possible outcome. The paper then analyzes the resulting voting behavior. In particular, it studies how effective different voting systems such as...

There are two distinct views on how candidate (or party) issue strategies influence mass evaluations. One is the view underlying the classic spatial model that the proximity between the voter's own issue positions and the positions taken by the candidates drives the evaluation. The other view is...

The directional theory of issue voting - a new theory proposed by Rabinowitz and Macdonald - has, in a series of analyses, been shown to outperform the old Downsian proximity theory. This result has a very practical consequence: according to the directional theory, a centrist party cannot expect...

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...