How informed is a Latino vote? Though recent scholarship has improved our understanding of Latino political participation, partisanship, and policy preferences, relatively little is known about how Hispanics make electoral decisions. In this effort, we evaluate the role policy issues, candidate affect, and symbolism play in the electoral choices of Latino voters. In particular, we are intereste...

We examine the impact of ambiguous and contested land rights on investment and productivity in agriculture in Akwapim, Ghana. We show that individuals who hold powerful positions in a local political hierarchy have more secure tenure rights, and that as a consequence they invest more in land fertility and have substantially higher output. The intensity of investments on di¤erent plots cultivate...

Elements of an economic theory of political institutions are introduced. A variety of electoral systems are reviewed. Cox’s threshold is shown to measure incentives for diversity and specialization of candidates’ positions, when the number of serious candidates is given. Duverger’s law and its generalizations are discussed, to predict the number of serious candidates. Duverger’s law is interpre...

Theory: We present a model of voter campaign learning which is based on Bayesian learning models. This model assumes voters are imperfectly informed and that they incorporate new information into their existing perceptions about candidate issue positions in a systematic manner. Hypothesis: Additional information made available to voters about candidate issue positions during the course of a pol...

positive political metatheory based on the naturalistic ontology concerning unity of method in science, implies reducing social and political issues to naturalistic one and study the emperical regularities in a similar methodology. therfore, behaviors political fields conciderd to be subjected to a causal order that implies explanation and prediction according to deductive structure of scientif...

Although extensive research analyzes the factors that motivate European parties to shift their policy positions, there is little cross-national research that analyzes how voters respond to parties’ policy shifts. We report pooled, time-series analyses of election survey data from several European polities, which suggest that voters do not systematically adjust their perceptions of parties’ posi...

Using data collected in a general population survey from a random sample of individuals in four communities in Pennsylvania, we tested the following two hypotheses: (1) that differences in sociodemographic characteristics exist among individuals with variant positions on environmental issues; and (2) that individuals with different positions on environmental issues exhibit dissimilar levels of ...

Social scientists have predicted that individuals who occupy socially privileged positions or who have conservative political orientations are most likely to endorse the idea that genes are the root cause of differences among individuals. Drawing on a nationally representative sample of the US population, this study examines belief in the importance of genes for understanding individual differe...

Should voter awareness policies and get-out-the-vote movements be promoted? We address this question using a model of political advertising that incorporates both the mobilization and the persuasion aspects of advertising. An uncertainvoter model of two-candidate political competition is proposed, where candidates have fixed symmetric ideological positions and unknown qualities and can use poli...