Building on models of electoral competition with reputational mechanisms, I show that term limits decrease the vote share of candidates from parties less able to reward or punish candidates. Candidates suffer by not being able to credibly commit to policies far from their own preferences. Assuming that the major parties can provide better discipline of their members than third parties, the impl...

In economics and political science, the theoretical literature on social choice routinely highlights worst-case scenarios and emphasizes the nonexistence of a universally best voting method. Behavioral social choice is grounded in psychology and tackles consensus methods descriptively and empirically. We analyzed four elections of the American Psychological Association using a state-of-the-art ...

The Single Transferable Vote (STV) is a system of preferential voting employed in multi-seat elections. Each vote cast by a voter is a (potentially partial) ranking over a set of candidates. No techniques currently exist for computing the margin of victory (MOV) in STV elections. The MOV is the smallest number of vote manipulations (changes, additions, and deletions) required to bring about a c...

Many researchers have evaluated various decision rules to determine how well they perform in selecting winners in elections. They have established criteria to measure how well these rules perform in selecting winners with the greatest mass appeal in general elections. We evaluate such decision rules on their performance in determining winners of awards for outstanding accomplishment. We examine...

In the 13 Malaysia’s General Elections held in 2013, it was observed that large numbers of urban constituencies saw strongly decisive young voters (between 21-39 age group) determine the outcome in their favour. Also, the Elections Commission had approximated that 70% of some 4.2 million unregistered voters at the time were citizens aged between 21 and 40 years old. If they are not already cons...

This paper describes the experiences and the challenges we are facing within the ProVotE project, a four years project sponsored by the Autonomous Province of Trento that has the goal of switching to e-voting for local elections. One of the activities we are carrying out within ProVotE is the systematic analysis of the weaknesses and strengths of the procedures regulating local elections in Ita...

The 2012 Assembly Elections in Punjab received attention for being the first elections in post-1966 reorganised Punjab to witness return to power of an incumbent party regime. The elections also saw the emergence of a new set of political leadership, most notably the rise of Sukhbir Badal, the SAD President who led the campaign and crafted the Akali victory. The rise and fall of Manpreet Badal,...

During the latest years, the behavior of users in Twitter has been explored for various purposes, one of the most famous being the prediction of election results. Most works so far make their predictions by focusing strictly on Twitter data and are applied on some data after the elections; hence, they are biased towards the actual results. In the current work we have focused on the 2014 Europea...

We study a dynamic game of incomplete information in which two political parties contest elections with endogenously formed reputations regarding the preferences that prevail within each party. Party preferences exhibit serial correlation and change with higher probability following defeat in elections. We show that when partisans care sufficiently about office, extreme policies are pursued wit...