Non–traditional parties have had newfound success across European democracies contributing to increasing electoral volatility. Drawing from the literature on social movements, voting for an unconventional party can be a form of contentious politics. Support for non– mainstream parties is the institutional manifestation of the factors that contribute to social movements. Perceptions of political...

Since 1978, the vote reported for House incumbents in the American National Election Studies (NES) has been significantly higher than the actual incumbents' vote in the districts surveyed; in NES surveys before 1978, the reported vote was much closer to the actual vote. The prime suspect for the source of this bias is the new question format introduced in 1978 and used in all subsequent studies...

Explanations for differences in political preferences between men and women continue to be debated, generating more heat than light in attempts to locate their source and potential influence. The reason for this confusion rests on the lack of conceptual clarity concerning the difference between sex, typically referring to biological differences, and gender, assumed to result from socialization,...

Public choice ana lysis of voting predicts apathy and rational ignorance. Transactions cost analysis forms predictions on the basis of systematic responses to low-cost signals that serve to reduce decision-making costs. Public choice analysis is premised only on instrumental rationality; a transactions cost analysis includes analysis of intrinsic motivation, ie. analysis of 'consumption' benefi...

PO L L S P ROV I D E I N F O R M AT I O N A B O U T how well the parties are doing in a campaign. That information may affect voters’ perceptions of the various parties’ chances of winning in a Arst past the post (FPP) system such as Canada or the chances of being part of a coalition government in a proportional representation (PR) system. By affecting voters’ expectations about the outcome of ...

P ositive turnout rates in the United States and elsewhere are widely considered “an embarrassing limitation of the economic approach to politics” because, for any one voter, “the costs of casting a ballot in any large election are almost always greater than the potential benefits, which are dependent on the unlikely occurrence of casting the winning or tie vote in an election” ~Knack 1992, 133...

Most of the countries in the democratic world use proportional representation to allocate seats in parliaments. There are typically more than two serious parties in those countries. Consequently, the two-party competition models do not help us much to understand the political economy of those countries. When there are more than two parties, it is no longer rational for voters to vote for the pa...

To what extent do social networks shape a person’s vote choice? Using data on political networks gathered during a novel, multi-wave panel study conducted during the 2010 election cycle in the UK, we argue that although people may choose to discuss politics more often with those who hold similar political views, remaining disagreements in political discussion networks can still have a substanti...

Professor William H. Riker's essay on "Voting and the Summation of Preferences" (this REVIEW, Vol. 55, December 1961, pp. 900-11) is a most useful contribution. It needs to be supplemented by some comment on the applicability of this material in the field of nominating choice; also on the applicability of experimental approaches to ascertain the frequency with which the problems that concern Ri...

There is more to strategic voting than simply avoiding wasting one’s vote if one is liberated from the corset of studying voting behavior in plurality systems. Mixed electoral systems provide different voters with diverse incentives to cast a strategic vote.They not only determine the degree of strategic voting, but also the kind of strategies voters employ. Strategic voters employ either a was...