Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral systems are considered by some to be ‘‘the best of both worlds’’ because they combine single member district representation with proportional outcomes. Critics, however, maintain that such systems cause voter confusion leading some voters to cast misinformed votes. Survey data from Germany and New Zealand are used to investigate voter’s political knowle...

Between 1999 and 2009, since no single party was in a position to lead a majority in the Lok Sabha, preelectoral coalitions have become the only option for parties to exercise executive power at the Centre. Looking at the trajectory of two pre-electoral coalitions over ten years, namely the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance and the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, the paper attempts...

Hugo Chávez dominated the Venezuelan electoral landscape since his first presidential victory in 1998 until his death in 2013. Nobody doubts that he always received considerable voter support in the numerous elections held during his mandate. However, the integrity of the electoral system has come into question since the 2004 Presidential Recall Referendum. From then on, different sectors of so...

We consider a canonical two-period model of elections with adverse selection (hidden preferences) and moral hazard (hidden actions), in which neither voters nor politicians can commit to future choices. We prove existence of electoral equilibria, and we show that in response to electoral incentives, office holders mix between “taking it easy” and “going for broke” in the first period. Even in t...

Electoral agency models suggest that government effi ciency is better when voters penalize poor performance, and party competition is balanced. Uncertainty in the electoral mechanism dillutes the incentive to produce effi ciently. We test this proposition on panel data on local governments. The dataset includes a broad set of indicators on service output and quality, which facilitates the measu...

In this paper, we characterize equilibria in games of electoral competition between three or more office-seeking candidates. Recognizing that electoral equilibrium involves both candidates’ and voters’ strategies, we first prove existence of pure strategy electoral equilibria when candidates seek to maximize their vote share. Accordingly, the main difficulty with electoral equilibria is multipl...

The Thai coup of 19 September 2006 derived ideological legitimacy from the view that the Thaksin government’s electoral mandate was illegitimate because it had been ‘‘bought’’ from an unsophisticated and easily manipulated electorate. There is nothing new about this argument, nor its use in justifying military interference. Political commentators have asserted regularly that the Thai populace l...

We investigate the effects of fiscal transparency and political polarization on the prevalence of electoral cycles in fiscal balance. The recent political economy literature on electoral cycles identifies such cycles mainly in weak and recent democracies. In contrast, we show, conditioning on a new index of institutional fiscal transparency, that electoral cycles in fiscal balance are a feature...