The pioneering model of electoral competition was developed by Harold Hotelling and Anthony Downs. The model developed by Hotelling and Downs and many subsequent models in the literature about electoral competition have assumed that candidates embody policies and, if a voter is not indifferent between the policies embodied by two candidates, then the voter’s choices are fully determined by his ...

Although observers of Brazilian politics commonly hold that voters reward incumbents for “bringing home the bacon,” I provide reasons to question the direct link between pork and electoral success as well as statistical evidence demonstrating the lack of such a link. This generates a puzzle: if pork barreling is ineffective, why do Brazilian deputies spend so much time seeking pork? The answer ...

The phenomenon of split ticket voting is intriguing, and has partially been explicated in the scientific literature. Studies have offered several inconclusive reasons why a voter may decide to split his/her vote, and to support rival candidates, and opposing political parties. The candidate’s visibility, on the one hand, and partisan identification, on the other hand, have been the most cited e...

Non–traditional parties have had newfound success across European democracies contributing to increasing electoral volatility. Drawing from the literature on social movements, voting for an unconventional party can be a form of contentious politics. Support for non– mainstream parties is the institutional manifestation of the factors that contribute to social movements. Perceptions of political...

Susanne Lohmann for data used in an earlier version of the empirical analysis and participants in the Harvard Seminar in Positive Political Economy for useful comments. None of them is implicated in what follows. Abstract The degree to which voters respond to the macro-economy when deciding their vote is known to depend on institutional factors, including whether the government in power is a co...

Article history: Received 26 June 2008 Received in revised form 20 January 2009 Accepted 23 January 2009 Available online 4 February 2009 This paper provides a systematic analysis of fiscal decentralization on the quality of government by studying jointly its effects on electoral discipline and selection, in a settingwhere, realistically, voters only have limited information aboutfiscal policy ...

The Portuguese presidential election of 2006 represented a major upset for the incumbent Socialist Party (PS). In the March 2005 legislative elections, the PS had obtained 46.4 percent of the valid votes allowing it to form, for the first time in the history of this center-left party, a single-party cabinet supported by an absolute majority in parliament. However, less than one year later, the ...

Phenomena which involves collective choice of many agents who are interacting with each other and choosing one of several alternatives, based on the limited information available to them, frequently show switching between two distinct phases characterized by a bimodal and an unimodal distribution respectively. Examples include financial markets, movie popularity and electoral behavior. Here we ...

Within the framework of pure redistribution (dividing one unit of a homogeneous good among identical individuals), the paper analyses the redistribution that arises from Downsian, two-party, electoral competition. It appears that the strategic behavior of vote-maximizing parties leads them to propose divisions which are not far from the egalitarian one. Journal of Economic Literature Classifica...