Lichtman (2005) reports that the Keys model has been able to pick the winner of every presidential election since 1860, retrospectively through 1980 and prospectively from 1984-2004. Given this record, it seems sensible to examine this index method. We tested how well the Keys model predicted the winner of the popular vote, and also how closely it forecasted the actual percentage of the two-par...

Little evidence links the strategic decisions of campaigns to individual-level voting behavior. Yet for campaigns to matter in the way that experts argue, exposure to campaigns must also matter so there should be observable differences in the structure of vote choice between battleground and non-battleground states. Combining presidential campaign data with the Senate Election Study, we show th...

Many developing democracies struggle with vote-buying and other forms of clientelism in electoral politics. Clientelism has been associated with reduced accountability and trust, increased corruption, and inefficient public administration (Stokes 2005; Desposato 2007; Keefer 2007; Kitschelt et al. 2010; Hicken and Simmons 2008; Hicken 2011; Stokes et al. 2013). In response, many government agen...

Implementing an electronic voting system for the first time can be difficult, since requirements are sometimes hard to specify and keep changing, resources are scarce in an academic setting, the gap between theory and practice is wider than anticipated, adhering to a formal development lifecycle is inconvenient and delivery on time is very hard. This paper describes all of the work done by the ...

In recent elections, voters supported initiatives to limit the number of terms that their representatives may serve, yet at the same time, overwhelmingly re-elected their incumbents. We provide a theoretical explanation for this and other puzzles associated with voting on term limitations. The pattern of voting on term limits can be explained by the desire to redistribute power from one party t...

This paper demonstrates the feasibility and usefulness of survey research asking respondents to report voting probabilities in hypothetical election scenarios. Posing scenarios enriches the data available for studies of voting decisions, as a researcher can pose many more and varied scenarios than the elections that persons actually face. Multiple scenarios were presented to over 4,000 particip...

The article suggests a formal model of a two-tier voting procedure, which unlike traditional voting systems does not presuppose that every vote counts the same. In deciding a particular issue voters are called in the first round to assign categories of their fellow-citizens with differential voting power (or weights) according to the special position or concern individuals are perceived as havi...