University student voters’ resistance to money politics

Counterfactual Communication in Politics: Features and Effects on Voters

During debates and interviews, political leaders often have to defend themselves from adversaries and journalists questioning their performance. To fight against these threats, politicians resort to various defensive strategies, either direct or indirect, to draw attention away from their responsibilities or shed a more positive light upon their work. Counterfactual defences (i.e., comparing pa...

The Personalization of Party Politics: The Voters' Perspective

Modern political democracy is usually understood as party democracy. That designation conveys the insight that parties constitute the nexus of most that can be reasonably required for a political system to be regarded as democratic. Against that background it is a challenge to democracy that, according to some analyses, a sort of personalization of politics is currently taking place. That perso...

Partisan Politics and Aggregation Failure with Ignorant Voters†

We analyze how voter ignorance effects competing candidates’ policy choices and election outcomes. We show that voter ignorance of policy positions has no effect in large elections provided voters know the preference distribution in the electorate. We then explore a model where voters are ignorant of policy positions and of the preference distribution. In that case limit equilibria (as the numb...

Student Resistance to Thought-Experiments

Stressful politics: voters' cortisol responses to the outcome of the 2008 United States Presidential election.

Social subordination can be biologically stressful; when mammals lose dominance contests they have acute increases in the stress hormone cortisol. However, human studies of the effect of dominance contest outcomes on cortisol changes have had inconsistent results. Moreover, human studies have been limited to face-to-face competitions and have heretofore never examined cortisol responses to shif...