Abstract Electoral rules can affect who wins and loses elections. Most cities select office holders through plurality rule, but an alternative, ranked-choice voting (RCV), has become increasingly popular. RCV requires voters to rank candidates, instead of simply selecting their most preferred candidate. Observers debate whether will cure a variety electoral ills or undermine representation. We ...

Mixed-member electoral systems require voters simultaneously to cast ballots in single-member districts (SMD) and multimember, proportional representation (PR) constituencies. It may be that not all parties offer candidates in both electoral contexts, however. In this event would-be voters for some parties may find themselves “frustrated” by the restricted choice menu on offer in the SMD, being...

It was the first election of the new century. The race had been tight and close. The incumbent party might not be able to hold the presidency, despite relative prosperity in the nation. For weeks and weeks, the nation waited without knowing who would be President. No candidate had a clear majority of the electoral votes. The Electoral College might have been designed to insure a smooth election...

Models of elections tend to predict that parties will maximize votes by converging to an electoral center. There is no empirical support for this prediction. In order to account for the phenomenon of political divergence, this paper offers a stochastic electoral model where party leaders or candidates are differentiated by differing valences—the electoral perception of the quality of the party ...

Electoral coordination refers to the use by political parties of a concerted strategy that makes most effective use of electoral rules to maximize their interests in legislative elections. Coordination requires both strategic thinking and political discipline, however, and in relatively new democracies these conditions may not exist. In this study I examine electoral coordination in the Hungari...

1. THE PROBLEM. Something is rotten in the electoral state of the United States. Mathematics is involved. Advances in computer technology—hardware and software— have permitted a great leap “forward” in the fine art of political gerrymandering—“the practice of dividing a geographical area into electoral districts, often of highly irregular shape, to give one political party an unfair advantage b...

Despite a pervasive presence in politics, lying has not traditionally played a role in formal models of elections. In this paper we develop a model that allows candidates in the campaign stage to misrepresent their policy intentions if elected to office, and in which the willingness to lie varies across candidates. We find that candidates more willing to lie are favored, but that this advantage...

We derive a unified statistical method with which one can produce substantially improved definitions and estimates of almost any feature of two-party electoral systems that can be defined based on district vote shares. Our single method enables one to calculate more efficient estimates, with more trustworthy assessments of their uncertainty, than each of the separate multifarious existing measu...

Politicians adopt a variety of linguistic strategies in their speeches to connect with their audience. To name one, appraisal, as a system of interpersonal meaning, is concerned with evaluation where resources are used for negotiating social relationships. Despite their significance in shaping texts, there have hardly been any extensive inventories of appraisal tools contrasting electoral speec...

We report on a statistical analysis of the engagement in the electoral processes of all Brazilian cities by considering the number of party memberships and the number of candidates for mayor and councillor. By investigating the relationships between the number of party members and the population of voters, we have found that the functional forms of these relationships are well described by subl...