The dispute over the conflicting merits of proportional representation (PR) and plurality (PL) electoral systems is mainly a debate over which element, representation or stability, should be emphasized. Advocates of PR do not accept policies as democratically valid if they are made on an inadequate representational base. On the other hand, advocates of PL argue that representation is meaningles...

An exploration of competing electoral systems-single-member district plurality systems (predominant in the U.S.) versus proportional representation systems (STV in particular)-and competing theories of participatory democracy: J.S. Mill's optimistic deliberative democracy model, and Richard Posner's more pessimistic elite democracy model. Mill assumes voters are politically educable, capable of...

This paper studies pre-electoral coalition formation and its effect on election outcomes. I estimate a structural model of electoral competition in which: (i) parties can form pre-electoral coalitions to coordinate their candidate nominations, and (ii) parties make strategic campaign spending decisions in support of their candidates. The estimation strategy exploits insights from the literature...

We model a two-candidate electoral competition in which there is uncertainty about a policy-relevant state of the world. The candidates receive private signals about the true state, which are imperfectly correlated. We study whether the candidates are able to credibly communicate their information to voters through their choice of policy platforms. Our results show that the fact that private in...

This essay reports on some experiments designed to study two candidate electoral competition when voters are 'retrospective' voters. The experiments consist of a sequence of elections in which subjects play the part of both voters and candidates. In each election the incumbent adopts a policy position in a one-dimensional policy space, and voters are paid (on the basis of single peaked utility ...

This paper delivers a precise recommendation for how presidential candidates should allocate their resources to maximize the probability of gaining a majority in the Electoral College. A two-candidate, probabilistic-voting model reveals that more resources should be devoted to states which are likely to be decisive in the electoral college and, at the same time, have very close state elections....

The proposed election system lies in ensuring that it is transparent and impartial. Those who rule must be true representative of people’s. Thus while the electoral system may vary from country to country, It has to take into account the peculiarities of every society while at the same time incorporating remedies to problems prevailing in the system. The Electoral process expressed serious conc...

Despite Brazil's electoral laws, which would appear to encourage incumbency, legislative turnover in Brazil consistently exceeds 50% with each election. In this article, I explain this phenomenon as a function of two factors: the nature of political ambition and the dynamics of electoral competition. Political ambition accounts for about half of the turnover because a sizeable portion of incumb...

In this paper, an Electoral Cooperative Particle Swarm Optimization (ECPSO) based on several subswarms is presented to solving the Permutation Flow Shop Scheduling Problem (PFSSP). In the proposed algorithm, several strategies are employed to avoid falling into local optimum, improve the diversity and achieve better solution. Firstly, a electoral swarm is generated by the voting of primitive su...

We analyze a model in which voters are uncertain about the policy preferences of candidates. Two forces a¤ect the probability of electoral success: proximity to the median voter and campaign contributions. First, we show how campaign contributions a¤ect elections. Then we show how the candidates may wish to announce a range of policy preferences, rather than a single point. This strategic ambig...