Many scholars argue that the political regime in contemporary Russia exemplifies the global phenomenon of electoral authoritarianism. But, what are the major features of such a regime in the case of Russia? Why and how did it proceed through a life cycle of emergence, development, and decay? And how might it evolve in the foreseeable future? This article seeks answers to these questions. B the ...

is paper uses a formal electoral model as the basis for discussion of various political episodes in British and US history and to evaluate the logic of Madison’s argument about the republican scheme of government. is leads to the inference that political choice involves electoral judgment as well as preference. e stochastic electoral model is extended to incorporate the basis of judgment, namel...

The 2000 U.S. presidential election has once again rekindled interest in possible electoral reform including the possible elimination of the Electoral College. Most arguments against the Electoral College have either been based on ancedotal evidence from particular elections or on highly stylized formal models We take a very different approach here. We develop a set of statistical models based ...

What kinds of electoral systems can help democracy survive in countries split by deep cleavages of race, religion, language, or ethnicity? As is well-known, politicians in such “divided societies” often have strong incentives to “play the ethnic card” at election time, using communal appeals to mobilize voters. “Outbidding”—increasingly extreme rhetoric and demands—can offer rewards greater tha...

This paper describes a system for real-time analysis of public sentiment toward presidential candidates in the 2012 U.S. election as expressed on Twitter, a microblogging service. Twitter has become a central site where people express their opinions and views on political parties and candidates. Emerging events or news are often followed almost instantly by a burst in Twitter volume, providing ...

This article reports the findings of the multistage agenda-setting process of four Israeli elections. In the first stage, agenda building, it is demonstrated that there is a close association between real-world indicators and media agenda. In the second stage, agenda setting, it was found that the level of television coverage of issues influences the proportion of surveys’ respondents naming th...

The election system used to select Afghanistan’s Wolesi Jirga (lower house of parliament) has radically shaped the realms of democratic stability and political legitimacy since its introduction for the elections of 2005. Afghanistan uses the Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV) in 34 provincial-level, multi-member constituencies with a special affirmative action (quota) mechanism for women. The ...