The fair way to decide an election between two candidates a and b is majority rule; if more than half the electorate prefer a to b, then a is elected; otherwise b is elected. Arrow’s theorem asserts that no fair election procedure exists for choosing from among three or more candidates. This note gives an exposition of Arrow’s theorem. It also describes the relation of election procedures betwe...

Why do some elections spark violence whilst others do not? That is a question that has gained increased interest from scholars during the last few years. However, because of the field’s relative novelty, and despite the vast literature on democratization and civil war, it is still a question that is not fully comprehended. In this thesis, a theory claiming that clientelism should increase the r...

We establish existence and continuity properties of equilibria in a model of dynamic elections with a discrete (countable) state space and general policies and preferences. We provide conditions under which there is a representative voter in each state, and we give characterization results in terms of the equilibria of an associated “representative voting game.” When the conditions for these re...

This paper uses a large panel data set to examine the relation between elections and fiscal policy. We find evidence of political budget cycles in both developed and developing countries: government spending increases before elections while revenues fall, leading to a larger deficit in election years. We demonstrate that political budget cycles are much larger in developing countries than in de...

We study the complexity of voting control problems in multi-peaked elections. In particular, we focus on the constructive/destructive control by adding/deleting votes under Condorcet, Maximin and Copeland voting systems. We show that the NP-hardness of these problems (except for the destructive control by adding/deleting votes under Condorcet, which is polynomial-time solvable in the general ca...

Does complete public financing of campaigns enhance electoral competition? Arizona and Maine implemented similar clean elections programs for state-level races in 2000, providing an opportunity to examine the consequences of public financing. Employing two measures of competitiveness, I find that clean elections programs in both states significantly increased competition in districts where chal...

Does campaign duration affect election outcomes? To date, this question has largely evaded political scientists, but it is reasonable to expect systematic links between campaign length and candidate performance in elections. We hypothesize that longer campaigns would help challengers' electoral fortunes, thereby curbing incumbency advantage and potentially boosting competitiveness in elections....

Nowadays it is commonplace to argue that candidates’ personal characteristics play a large part in determining how individuals vote. In the domain of political marketing this assumption is often given for granted, and no clear conceptual understanding of how image crafting techniques affect voters has emerged. This article is an attempt to link political marketing’s concern for impression manag...

An important topic, in electoral studies, is the choice of the electoral system, which will be applied in parliamentary elections, because parliamentary seats distributed to political parties differ when a different system is applied. In this paper we focus on the five latest electoral systems applied in Greek Parliamentary Elections. Each one of them is described and analysed, in detail. Diffe...

Using panel data for 104 countries between 1975 and 1998, this article tries to explain interruptions of IMF programmes around election dates in the recipient countries. On average, programmes seem to be more likely to break down before elections. This increase in interruption probabilities is, however, less severe in more democratic countries. In true democracies interruption frequencies are e...