Elections, Coalitions, and Legislative Outcomes

Legislative coalitions with incomplete information.

In most parliamentary democracies, proportional representation electoral rules mean that no single party controls a majority of seats in the legislature. This in turn means that the formation of majority legislative coalitions in such settings is of critical political importance. Conventional approaches to modeling the formation of such legislative coalitions typically make the "common knowledg...

Political Competition in Legislative Elections∗

We develop a theory of candidate nomination processes predicated upon the notion that members of the majority party in a legislature collaboratively influence policy. Because of this team aspect, a candidate’s party label matters for voters, in addition to his own policy positions: For example, in a liberal district, electing even a liberal Republican may be unattractive for voters because it i...

Polar Coalitions in a Legislative Bargaining Game

Abstract. This paper considers an alternating offer legislative bargaining game with heterogeneous ideological preferences modeled as ideal points on an interval. The main contribution is a framework for measuring two forces that typically give proposers incentive to form coalitions out of either the left or right halves of the ideological spectrum “polar coalitions”. For a benchmark model with...

Voting in legislative elections under plurality rule

Conventional models of single district plurality elections show that with three parties anything can happen extreme policies can win regardless of voter preferences. I show that when there are multiple district elections for a legislature we get back to a world where the median voter matters: an extreme policy will generally only come about if it is preferred by the median voter in a majority o...

Gubernatorial Coattail Effects in State Legislative Elections