This paper studies the effects of power-concentrating institutions on the quality of political selection, i.e., the voters’ capacity to identify and empower well-suited politicians. In our model, candidates are heterogeneous in two unobservable quality aspects: ability and public-spiritedness. As voters can only base their ballots on the candidates’ binding policy proposals, low-quality candida...

Electoral systems in which voters can cast preference votes for individual candidates within a party list are increasingly popular. To the best of our knowledge, there is no research on whether and how scale used to evaluate affect electoral behavior results. In this paper, we analyze data from an original voting experiment leveraging real-life political preferences embedded nationally represen...

Electoral participation is one of the important pillars of any country's development. Therefore, the study was conducted with the aim of the effect of social justice on electoral participation. For this purpose, Inglehart and Milbrath theories were used as a theoretical framework. The research method was survey and data were collected using a questionnaire. The statistical population included y...

Abstract Many studies show that the order of candidates’ names on ballot has an effect voting. Less informed and indifferent voters may simplify voting process by using position candidates as a cue. By studying six parliamentary elections in Finland, this study first demonstrates relationship between preference votes follows reversed J-shaped curve. Candidates listed early win most votes, while...

We introduce a new collection of data that consolidates information on European Parliament elections into one comprehensive source. It provides formal electoral rules as well national-level and district-level election results for parties individual politicians (including full candidate lists). The use existing key variables makes it easy to link the across different units observation (country, ...

We study a simple model of public opinion formation that posits that interaction between neighbouring agents leads to bandwagons in the dynamics of individual opinion choices, as well as in that of the aggregate process. We then analyze the implication that these findings have in terms of space-time allocation of fundings in an electoral campaign, where two candidates run in a winner-take-all e...

Electoral control refers to attempts by an election’s organizer (“the chair”) to influence the outcome by adding/deleting/partitioning voters or candidates. The groundbreaking work of Bartholdi, Tovey, and Trick [BTT92] on (constructive) control proposes computational complexity as a means of resisting control attempts: Look for election systems where the chair’s task in seeking control is itse...

Electoral equilibria depend upon candidates’ motivations. Maximization of expected vote share may not lead to the same behavior as maximization of the probability of winning the election. Accordingly, it is desirable to understand when electoral equilibria are insensitive to the choice of candidate motivations. This paper examines sufficient conditions for local equilibrium equivalence between ...

In this paper I develop a model of political platform choice and subsequent policy implementation decisions by political candidates who are primarily motivated by career concerns. Although political platforms are non binding, politicians have some incentive to keep campaign promises in order to uphold their reputation. I analyze the electoral outcome and the determinants which influence the dec...

A large number of candidates have become a regular feature of Indian elections. Given the regulatory concerns the problem has evoked, the paper reviews the process of candidate entry in select developed countries. The review reveals the presence of diverse approaches, ruling out the necessity for extreme options like debarring fringe candidates – a course suggested by several Indian expert grou...