Electoral Choice & Practice and the Democratic Process in Mozambique

Democratic Process and Electoral Politics in Andhra Pradesh, India

read the draft and gave their comments. The queries from Ms Rachel Bishop, editor for ODI, were extremely helpful in identifying certain gaps and refining the style of the text. v Glossary Andhra Kesari Literally, 'Lion of Andhra'; name given to the legendary Tanguturi Prakasam, leader of a Congress Party faction and founder of the Praja Party Amma Mother Anicuts Irrigation systems Anna Elder b...

Democratic Principle and Electoral College Reform

Presidentialism, Electoral Identifiability, and Budget Balances in Democratic Systems

This paper examines the impact of the form of government—–presidential or parliamentary—–on fiscal outcomes in democratic systems. Based on data for democracies in 98 countries between 1970 and 2002, it shows that the gross domestic product ratio of the central government budget balance is higher in presidential than in parliamentary democracies. It also shows that this impact is not due to the...

Disasters and Incumbent Electoral Fortunes: No Implications for Democratic Competence∗

A recent empirical literature shows that incumbent electoral fortunes suffer following negative events incumbents cannot control. These results have been taken to show that voters are insufficiently rational to competently hold elected officials accountable. Without disputing the empirical findings, we dispute these interpretations. Our argument has two steps. First, we present a formal model t...

Social choice and electoral competition in the general spatial model

This paper extends the theory of the core, the uncovered set, and the related undominated set to a general set of alternatives and an arbitrary measure space of voters. We investigate the properties of social preferences generated by simple games, we extend results on generic emptiness of the core, we prove the general nonemptiness of the uncovered and undominated sets, and we prove the upper h...