Electoral coalitions are becoming increasingly popular among opposition parties in Africa because they offer many advantages with respect to reducing party fragmentation and increasing incumbent turnovers. At the same time, however, they are often comprised of parties that are defined predominantly by their leaders’ personalities and exhibit little differentiation in terms of their policy orien...

Institutions shape political outcomes, yet institutions themselves are endogenously shaped outcomes of political choices. Electoral systems are a unique class of distributive institutions that fundamentally shape political competition and political outcomes in democratic polities. Our paper examines the origins and subsequent changes to the Polish electoral system from the semi-free election in...

Formal models of elections have emphasized the convergence of party leaders towards the centre of the electoral distribution. This paper attempts to resolve the apparent disparity between the formal result and the perception of political divergence by considering a model incorporating valence. Valence can be interpreted as the non-policy basis of political judgement made by the electorate conce...

We study the impact of organized crime on electoral competition. In a theoretical model where parties compete for mafia support, we show that (i) the strongest party is willing to pay the highest price to secure mafia services; (ii) the volume of electoral trade with the mafia increases with political competition and with the efficiency of the mafia organization. Guided by these theoretical pre...

Protocorporatist West European countries in which economic interests were collectively organized adopted PR in the first quarter of the twentieth century, whereas liberal countries in which economic interests were not collectively organized did not. Political parties, as Marcus Kreuzer points out, choose electoral systems. So how do economic interests translate into party political incentives t...

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...

This paper analyzes the role of political parties in electoral competition. A generalization of the Alesina (1988) model of electoral competition is proposed and estimated using data from the U.S. House of Representatives. The main extension is the reconsideration of the role of bargaining in the context of political parties. Results from the axiomatic bargaining literature are used to establis...

In their 2014 article in the British Journal of Political Science, Eleanor Neff Powell and Joshua A. Tucker examine the determinants of party system volatility in post-communist Europe. Their central conclusion is that replacement volatility – volatility caused by new party entry and old party exit – is driven by long-term economic performance. This article shows that this conclusion is based e...

We look ae the problem of devising an optimal gerrymander from the standpoint of the political party in control of the redistricting process in a singlemember district system involving two-party competition. In an electoral universe with uncertainty, we show that the optimal partisan gerrymander is different from the classic recipe for partisan gerrymandering if parties are concerned with the l...

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...