Introduction Voters make decisions on whether to vote and who to vote for in places. Places are crucial because they not only provide the context for interaction and social identification but they are the containers in which parties operate and seek representation by socialising and mobilising voters to support them. Longstanding theories of party choice stress how such places provide the space...

Does the religious affiliation of candidates act as a voting cue? Prior research suggests that voters choose which candidate to support under low-information circumstances where the media chooses to report the “horse-race” of politics and candidates choose to maximize votes by keeping their political positions ambiguous (Downs 1957; Page1976). Therefore, voters use candidate characteristics as ...

Recent research finds that naive survey participants’ rapid evaluations of the facial competence of United States Congressional candidates predict aggregate vote margins. The predictive power of facial competence has generated considerable interest because it seems to indicate a causal relationship between face and vote choice. Because there is no a priori reason to expect that candidate facial...

We introduce a framework for combining vote data and text data within a single formal and statistical framework. Formally, we model vote choice and word choice in terms of a common set of underlying preference parameters. Statistically, we implement a method for recovering these preference and location parameters. The method estimates the number of underlying ideological dimensions, models zero...

Whether voters vote strategically, using their vote to best further their interests, or vote sincerely, voting for their rst choice among the alternatives, is a question of longstanding interest. We o er two innovations in searching for the answer to this question. First, we begin with a more consistent model of sincere voting in multiparty democratic systems than has been presented in the lite...

After the Estonian Parliamentary Elections held in 2011, an additional verification mechanism was integrated into the i-voting system in order to resist corrupted voting devices, including the so called Student’s Attack where a student practically showed that the voting system is indeed not verifiable by developing several versions of malware capable of blocking or even changing the vote. This ...

Researchers sometimes argue that statisticians have little to contribute when few realizations of the process being estimated are observed. We show that this argument is incorrect even in the extreme situation of estimating the probabilities of events so rare that they have never occurred. We show how statistical forecasting models allow us to use empirical data to improve inferences about the ...

Elsewhere (Groseclose and Milyo, 2010), we examine a game where each legislator has preferences over (i) the resulting policy and (ii) how he or she votes. The latter preferences are especially important when the legislator is not pivotal. We show that when the game follows the normal rules of legislatures—most important, that legislators can change their vote after seeing how their fellow legi...

We propose an e-voting protocol that seems to allow citizens to verify that their vote has been accurately taken into account while preserving its secrecy, without requiring the use of a complex process. The main idea is to give each voter a receipt on which her choice is mixed with the choices of other voters.