Forecasting seat outcomes in legislative elections in countries with stable, two-party systems is su ciently challenging as to have proven elusive for much of democratic experience. Forecasting an election in a relatively new democracy with a uid multi-party system, therefore, would seem on its face to be a hopeless objective. In this paper I attempt to demonstrate that election forecasting in ...

Among U.S. federal elections, Senate elections are unique in that each state is a two-member district where representatives are elected sequentially to overlapping terms. Models of the sequential nature of Senate elections have been proposed suggesting that the outcome of the election for one of the state’s two U.S. Senate seats affects the contest for the other. More specifically, these models...

Single-peaked elections have been attracting much attention recently. It turned out that manyNPhard voting problems become polynomial-time solvable when restricted to single-peaked elections. A natural generalization of the single-peaked elections is the k-peaked elections, where at most k peaks are allowed in each vote in the election. In this paper, we mainly aim at establishing a complexity ...

The belief that elections reduce rent seeking by government officials is widely held, likewise the belief that rent seeking decreases as elections are less subject to corruption. In this paper we develop and test a model in which these beliefs are carefully examined. Our model indicates that, while elections may provide a disincentive for rent seeking, this disincentive (1) need not actually ma...

The Prêt à Voter end-to-end verifiable voting system makes use of receipts, retained by voters, to provide individual verifiability that their vote has been recorded as cast. The paper discusses issues around the production and acceptance of receipts, and presents an alternative approach to individual verifiability based on Authentication Codes. These codes are constructed, in the encrypted dom...

The importance of primary elections is considered within the context of U.S. Senate elections where senators serve overlapping terms and voters are assumed to balance their two senators against each other. Voters behave strategically in the primaries but convergence to the median position is not achieved except as a knife-edge result. More generally, constraints in the party space prevent the p...

T he view that multiparty elections in changing authoritarian regimes should be held sooner rather than later has been increasingly under attack. Critics argue that, under conditions of low institutional development, multiparty elections may lead to violence and civil war, rather than to the peaceful allocation of authority that everyone desires. Starting from the premise that elections are str...

Many research questions in political communication can be answered by representing text as a network of positive or negative relations between actors and issues such as conducted by semantic network analysis. This article presents a system for automatically determining the polarity (positivity/negativity) of these relations by using techniques from sentiment analysis. We used a machine learning...

In this paper we present TopFish, a multilevel computational method that integrates topic detection and political scaling and shows its applicability for a temporal aspect analysis of political campaigns (preprimary elections, primary elections, and general elections). It enables researchers to perform a range of multidimensional empirical analyses, ultimately allowing them to better understand...

This study examines how the economic e ects of elections in rural China depend on voter heterogeneity, as captured by religious fractionalization. We rst document religious composition and the introduction of village-level elections for a nearly nationally representative sample of over two hundred villages. Then, we examine the interaction e ect of heterogeneity and the introduction of election...