Electoral integrity matters: how electoral process conditions the relationship between political losing and political trust

Political equilibria with electoral uncertainty

After an election, when party positions and strengths are known, there may be a centrally located large party at the core position. Theory suggests that such a core party is able to form a minority government and control policy. In the absence of a core party, theory suggests that the outcome be a lottery associated with coalition risk. Stochastic models of elections typically indicate that all...

Philippine Political Parties, Electoral System and Political Reform

Political Advertising and the Electoral College∗

We present a structural model of political advertising in equilibrium. Candidates’ choose advertising based on its marginal impact on the probability of winning the election, the returns from winning and the cost of advertising. The voter model takes the form of an aggregate discrete choice model in which advertising affects a voter’s incentive to vote for either candidate or not to vote at all...

Electoral Accountability in Context: How Political Institutions Condition Performance Voting

 The idea that voters use elections to hold governments to account for their performance lies at the heart of democratic theory, and countless studies have shown that economic performance can predict support for incumbents. Importantly, however, recent literature has shown that the link between economic performance and vote electoral outcomes is conditioned by countries " institutional setup ,...

Political Consequences of Pacific Island Electoral Laws1

JON FRAENKEL At first sight, the Pacific Islands seem like a graveyard for institutional determinist theories regarding the impact of electoral systems on party polarisation. Maurice Duverger’s well-known ‘sociological law’ was that first-past-the-post electoral rules tend to deliver two-party systems. Proportional representation (PR) systems were more loosely associated with multi-party settin...