For decades economists and political scientists have sought to identify variables that influence the electoral success of public officials. Most of the existing literature Jbcuses on the determinants of ftderal elections. This study examines elections to the Virginia House of Delegates and finds that campaign expenditures, incumbency status, party affiliation, and district voting tendencies all...

Formal models of voting have emphasizd the mean voter theorem, that all parties should rationally adopt identical positions at the electoral mean. The lack of evidence for this assertion is a paradox or contradiction in need of resolution. This article attempts to resolve this paradox by considering an electoral model that includes “valence” or nonpolicy judgements by voters of party leaders. T...

In this paper we discuss how a mathematical approach can be used to solve a serious drawback in the current Italian electoral system for the election of representatives at the Chamber of Deputies and suggest a methodology which is close to the one traditionally adopted in the Italian electoral history, but able to guarantee a more transparent, logical and fairer solution to the problem of trans...

In proportional representation systems, apportionment methods are used to convert the number of votes of a party into the number of seats allocated to this party. An interesting characteristic of any such method are the seat biases, that is, the expected differences between the actual seat allocation and the ideal share of seats, separately for each party, when parties are ordered from largest ...

Precis: Three general elections were held for the Northern Ireland Parliament during the 1920s. The 1921 and 1925 elections were contested using proportional representation, whereas the 1929 elec­ tions used the "first-past-the-post system". This paper analyses how the change in the electoral system reversed the trend towards political plurality reflected in the 1925 election results, and facil...

Electoral agency models suggest that government effi ciency is better when voters penalize poor performance, and party competition is balanced. Uncertainty in the electoral mechanism dillutes the incentive to produce effi ciently. We test this proposition on panel data on local governments. The dataset includes a broad set of indicators on service output and quality, which facilitates the measu...

One concern about reform of the electoral system in the Netherlands is whether this would reduce the proportion of women members in the House of Representatives. What evidence is there for this expectation? This study considers these issues, with the first section summarizing the normative arguments why socially inclusive legislatures are thought to be desirable. The representation of women in ...

This article explores how the party-defined dimensionality of political competition relates to the number of parties competing in legislative elections. It demonstrates that a mathematical relationship between the number of electoral parties and the literature’s concept of dimensionality follows from the variables’ definitions; conversely, it argues that exploring the relationship between the n...

In 2009, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) brought an end to the long reign of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). However, despite high expectations, this politically transformative event has not unleashed significant policy change in Japan. We highlight five electoral factors that have acted as important constraints on policy change under DPJ rule. First, majoritarian electoral rules have l...