The importance of primary elections is considered within the context of U.S. Senate elections where senators serve overlapping terms and voters are assumed to balance their two senators against each other. Voters behave strategically in the primaries but convergence to the median position is not achieved except as a knife-edge result. More generally, constraints in the party space prevent the p...

Although immigration of workers generates a positive externality on members of domestic pension systems, many countries are very reluctant to allow foreigners into their labor markets. In a political economic framework, we explain this voting outcome by considering a young unskilled median voter who faces – in addition to a reduction of contribution rates – negative effects from immigration as ...

We offer a graphical display of the swing votes between all actual and possible tight majorities United States Supreme Court from 1946 to 2016. observe ebb flow number 5–4 coalitions votes. also note various inconsistencies with median voter theorem incompatibilities locational models adjudication.

We characterize the class of strategy-proof social choice functions on the domain of symmetric single-peaked preferences. This class is strictly larger than the set of generalized median voter schemes (the class of strategy-proof and tops-only social choice functions on the domain of single-peaked preferences characterized by Moulin (1980)) since, under the domain of symmetric single-peaked pre...

The Finagle point (Wuffle et al., 1989), the yolk (McKelvey, 1986; Ferejohn et al., 1984) and the epsilon-core (Wooders, 1983; Salant and Goodstein, 1990; Tovey, 2010; Feld and Grofman, 1991) are three solution concepts that have been proposed to predict the outcome of majority voting in the Euclidean spatial model. Relationships among these three concepts are investigated in (Bra̋uninger, 2007)...

We develop a model of electoral competition in which two purely opportunistic candidates select their policy position and invest in the quality of their platform. Policy positions are observed and, during the electoral campaign, the press reveals some information about quality. We demonstrate that when information is imperfect and quality endogenous, the Black-Downs median voter theorem fails t...

One important consideration when studying direct democracy is the rules on agenda establishment. In their seminal series of articles, Romer and Rosenthal (1978, 1979) identified the ability of a budget maximizing monopolist referendum agenda-setter to extract a greater amount of expenditure than desired by the median voter. While in Romer and Rosenthal’s models, the agenda setter exercised cont...