Printing Prêt à Voter ballots on demand is desirable both for convenience and security. It allows a polling station to serve numerous different ballots, and it avoids many problems associated with the custody of the printouts. This paper describes a new proposal for printing Prêt à Voter ballots on demand. The emphasis is on computational efficiency suitable for real elections, and on very gene...

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) render a valuable platform for tackling one of democracy’s central challenges: low voter turnout. Studies indicate that lack of information and cost-benefit considerations cause voters to abstain from voting. VAAs are online voting assistance tools which match own political preferences with those of candidates and parties in elections. By assisting voters in th...

Fowler, Baker, and Dawes (2008) recently showed in two independent studies of twins that voter turnout has very high heritability. Here we investigate two specific genes that may contribute to variation in voting behavior. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we show that individuals with a polymorphism of the MAOA gene are significantly more likely to have vote...

The nonexistence of equilibria in models of electoral competition involving multiple issues is one of the more puzzling results in political economics. In this paper, we relax the standard assumption that parties act as expected utility maximizers. We show that equilibria often exist when parties with limited knowledge about the electorate are modeled as uncertainty-averse. What is more, these ...

The nonexistence of equilibria in platform setting games with mutliple issues is one of the more puzzling results in political economics. In this paper we relax the stardard assumption that parties either have perfect information about the electorate or that they behave as expected utility maximizers. We show that equilibria often exist when parties are instead uncertainty averse. What is more,...

When members of a voting body exhibit single peaked preferences, pair-wise majority voting equilibria (Condorcet winners) always exist. Moreover, they coincide with the median(s) of the voters’most preferred alternatives. This important result, known as the median voter result, has been crucial in the development of public economics and political economy. Yet, there are many examples in the lit...

a r t i c l e i n f o How does changing from an assembly to a town-council form of government affect the way in which cities are run? Previous empirical research on this question has not found much of an impact of assemblies on aggregate outcomes such as local public expenditures or taxation. Nevertheless, the specific role of organized insiders may be important to understand how cities and tow...

Using a panel of U.S. school districts spanning 1970 – 2000, we examine the relationship between income inequality and fiscal support for public education. In contrast with recent theoretical and empirical work suggesting a negative relationship between inequality and public spending, we find results consistent with a median voter model, in which inequality that reduces the median voter’s tax s...