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...

In 2009 the German Federal Constitutional Court introduced the principle of “public nature of elections” (Federal Constitutional Court of Germany, March 2009). This principle requires that when using electronic voting systems it must be possible for the citizen to verify the essential steps in the election process and in the ascertainment of the results reliably and without special expert knowl...

This study examines how state ownership of banks can have contributed to the ascending to power of Vladimir Putin during the presidential elections of March 2000. We analyze how firm loans granted by the dominating state-owned bank Sberbank can have influenced the outcome of these elections. We study the relation at the regional level and analyze the variation in Sberbank firm loans and the inc...

Using a new data set, we estimate the magnitude of the incumbency advantage in direct primary elections between 1910 to 2000. We ̄nd that the incumbency advantage, as estimated by the sophomore surge, was above 5 percentage points in primary elections even in the ̄rst decades of the twentieth century. The sophomore surge in primary elections grew to approximately 15 percentage points by the end...

This article investigates the impact of the election of community leaders in local communities (villages or suku) in Timor-Leste. After looking briefly at the impacts of suku elections on selected communities—particularly on community cohesion—and at some community responses to elections, the article discusses local capacities for managing the challenges to social order and cohesion that can fl...

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Numerous recent field and lab experiments have found that elections cause higher subsequent levels of collective action within groups. This article questions whether effects observed in these environments apply when traditional institutions are democratized. We test the external validity of the experimental findings by examining the effects of introducing elections in an indigenous institution ...

Union Organizing Decisions in a Deteriorating Environment: The Composition of Representation Elections and the Decline in Turnout It is well known that the organizing environment for labor unions in the U.S. has deteriorated dramatically over a long period of time, contributing to the sharp decline in the private sector union membership rate and resulting in many fewer representation elections ...

We study the complexity of winner determination in single-crossing elections under two classic fully proportional representation rules—Chamberlin–Courant’s rule and Monroe’s rule. Winner determination for these rules is known to be NP-hard for unrestricted preferences. We show that for single-crossing preferences this problem admits a polynomial-time algorithm for Chamberlin–Courant’s rule, but...

Judges face retention elections in over a third of U.S. state courts of last resort and numerous lower courts. According to conventional wisdom, these elections engender judicial independence and decrease democratic accountability. We argue that in the context of modern judicial campaigns, retention elections create pressure for judges to cater to public opinion on “hot-button” issues that are ...