JON FRAENKEL At first sight, the Pacific Islands seem like a graveyard for institutional determinist theories regarding the impact of electoral systems on party polarisation. Maurice Duverger’s well-known ‘sociological law’ was that first-past-the-post electoral rules tend to deliver two-party systems. Proportional representation (PR) systems were more loosely associated with multi-party settin...

How can the differing levels of voter participation in sub-national parliamentary elections be explained? To answer this question I start from the current literature on cross-national comparative research, and apply explanatory approaches from this literature to the analysis of electoral turnout in sub-national units. I focus on two competing influential assessments in the literature, instituti...

This paper explores the features of political economy in the dynamics of representative politics in India. Politics is seen as enhancing economic benefits through acquiring and maintenance of power in the realm of democratic set up. The system of representation is riddled with competitive populism. Emerging leaders and parties are forced to accommodate their ideologies in coping with competitiv...

We present a model of electoral control with behavioral voters. The model captures two main regularities of voting behavior found in empirical studies: voters are forgetful and are in uenced by extraneous events beyond the control of public o cials (e.g. rain fall). Speci cally, we assume the voters' propensities to reelect the incumbent is governed by a stochastic reinforcement process instead...

This paper presents an aspect of research work that was carried out to resolve the many challenges in Nigeria electoral process. All efforts by Nigerian voters to ensure that their votes are counted and used to declare results in all the general elections conducted failed. The officials saddled with the responsibilities to conduct and declare election results in Nigeria, connived with dubious P...

Electronic voting provides accuracy and efficiency to the electoral processes. World democracies would benefit from a secure e-voting system not only to improve voter participation and trust but also to prevent electoral fraud. However, current e-voting systems are complex and have security weaknesses. In this paper, we describe a secure e-voting system for national and local elections. This sy...