This paper challenges the dominant paradigm of turnout studies by proposing that turnout variations occur because elections differ, not because countries differ; and certainly not because people differ. Indeed, we take the radical position that what matters if we want to understand overtime and cross-national turnout variations is differences in the ways in which citizens are affected by the el...

marked the first time that even remotely open and democratic elections had taken place in Russia since the birth of the Soviet Union in 1917. The 1989 elections can be viewed as the progenitor of the current political situation in Russia for it was those first elections that launched the long and rocky devolution of the centralized, one-party Soviet state into the multiparty Russian system that...

Polls for majoritarian voting systems usually show estimates of the percentage of votes for each candidate. However, proportional vote systems do not necessarily guarantee the candidate with the most percentage of votes will be elected. Thus, traditional methods used in majoritarian elections cannot be applied on proportional elections. In this context, the purpose of this paper was to perform ...

The decisions voters make-and whether those decisions are rational-have profound implications on the functionality of a democratic society. In this study, we delineated two criteria in evaluating voter rationality and weigh evidence of voter rationality versus irrationality. Furthermore, we compared models in two different elections in Taiwan to explore the reasons behind the irrational choices...

This paper will examine the influence of radio political campaign messages on the electorates’ voting behavior in Kano – Nigeria, with a focus on the 2015 general elections. It seeks to ascertain the extent that the electorates in Kano – Nigeria were exposed to radio political campaign messages, as well as the extent to which such messages influenced their voting decisions. Equally, the study c...

We investigate whether the plurality rule aggregates information efficiently in large elections with multiple alternatives, in which voters have common interests. Voters’ preferences depend on an unknown state of nature, and they receive imprecise private signals about the state of nature prior to the election. Similar to two-alternative elections (e.g., Myerson (1998)), there always exists an ...

We visualize aggregate outputs of popular multiwinner voting rules—SNTV, STV, Bloc, k-Borda, Monroe, Chamberlin– Courant, and PAV—for elections generated according to the two-dimensional Euclidean model. We consider three applications of multiwinner voting, namely, parliamentary elections, portfolio/movie selection, and shortlisting, and use our results to understand which of our rules seem to ...

A fundamental tenent of representative democracy is that votes should be counted in a fair and unbiased manner. Contrary to this premise I …nd that in U.S. House elections this is not the case. I employ a novel approach to detect electoral manipulation by looking at extremely close elections where the outcome between any two candidates should be random. I …nd that in extremely close elections t...