Biproportional apportionment methods provide two-way proportionality in electoral systems where the electoral region is subdivided into electoral districts. The problem is to assign integral values to the elements of a matrix that are proportional to a given input matrix, and such that a set of rowand column-sum requirements are fulfilled. In a divisor-based method for biproportional apportionm...

American electoral volatility is in a free fall. Overtime variation in the partisan balance of presidential elections across states has matched an all-time low in American history and is a fraction of its 1970’s peak. The current decline in volatility parallels declines during the Gilded Age and Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. Trends in electoral volatility vary regionally, and the South’s pat...

In elections, political preferences are strongly linked to the expectations of the electoral winner—people usually expect their favorite candidate to win. This link could be driven by wishful thinking (a biasing influence of preferences), driven by a biasing influence of expectations on one’s wishes, or produced spuriously. To examine these competing possibilities in the 2008 U.S. presidential ...

Focused on the French case, this paper aims at investigating a geographical change of electoral support, which is part of wider transformations of the electoral base of the Socialist Party, in particular the trend of working class dealignment. While a specific sociology emerged in “ideopolises”, anchored in the post-industrial and knowledge-based economy, a shift of the traditional socialist el...

One way to measure the a priori voting power of the states in the U.S. Electoral College is to view it as a weighted voting system and calculate power indices of the states. However this does not take into account the fact that in a given presidential election some states are almost certain to vote for a particular candidates, nor does it allow for states to split their electoral votes between ...

Many of the small island democracies of the South Pacific are natural laboratories for constitutional and electoral experimentation, but have tended to be ignored by comparative political science research. This article examines one apparently unknown case of electoral innovation from the region: the use of Borda count voting procedures for elections in the Pacific Island states of Nauru and Kir...

This paper looks critically at several of the principal arguments employed for and against the continued use of the Electoral College, as opposed to a system of direct popular vote. The Electoral College does not merely diverge from our common American practices of direct popular vote, but it does so in ways that arbitrarily benefit some states at the expense of others. While federalism clearly...

There is a growing evidence that political corruption is often closely associated with the rent seeking activities of special interest groups. This paper examines the nature of the interaction between the lobbying activities of special interest groups and the incidence of political corruption and determines whether electoral competition can eliminate political corruption. We obtain some strikin...

In this paper we study the impact of news media and public surveys on the electoral campaigns for political competitions. We present an agent-based model that addresses the effective influence of surveys in orienting the opinions of voters before elections. The dynamics of electoral consensus is studied as a function of time by investigating different possible scenarios and the effect of period...

Despite growing interest from practitioners, politicians and the media, the political representation of Muslim ethnic minority women in the West has received scant scholarly attention. I address this gap with new data on the representation of Muslim ethnic minority women and men in 20 national legislatures from 2000 to 2010. Results reveal that Muslim ethnic minority women are increasingly elec...