Mixed compensatory systems (some call them “mixed-member proportional systems”), are praised for combining "the best of both worlds.” Yet, we know fairly little about their outcomes in practice. We still lack a genuine model that explains how many compensation seats are needed for the outcome to be proportional. Without this knowledge we will neither be able to estimate how many parties we expe...

Decades of research on voting in American elections have consistently identified political parties as a predominant determinant of vote choice. Parties play a valuable role in helping voters overcome a lack of substantive information by providing them with low-information cues and shortcuts. However, in many elections, party cues are either absent (as in ballot measure elections and non-partisa...

What explains the perpetuation of political dynasties in democracies? A handful of recent investigations using data from the United States and other candidatecentered electoral environments have pointed to a causal effect of incumbency on dynasty formation. However, dynasties exist in party-centered environments as well—and, importantly, the causal mechanisms underlying their formation may diff...

This article examines variation in partisanship levels across the United States between 1880 and 1940 and suggests that the introduction of three electoral laws in this time period—party registration, primaries and secret ballots—can explain the geographic variation in partisanship levels across the United States during this era. Specifically, the article argues that the introduction of party r...

The Public Choice literature has identified conditions in which voters in multi-candidate contests would have an incentive to vote strategically rather than vote for the most preferred candidate or candidates. In the US, where party registration and party primaries play a critical role in the electoral process—especially in states with closed primaries—the existence of multiple layers of electi...

The 2005 UK general election resulted for the third successive time in the Labour party winning a much larger share of seats in the House of Commons than of the votes cast. Furthermore, with an equal share of the votes the Conservative party would have won 111 seats fewer than Labour. Commentators have used this outcome to criticise aspects of the country’s electoral system. This paper reports ...

This paper explores the conditions under which voters in emerging democracies support non-viable candidates. We argue that cognitive biases and the geographic clustering of minor-party supporters in ethno-political enclaves lead to misperceptions about the electoral prospects of minor-party candidates, weakening strategic defections both among co-ethnic and non-co-ethnic supporters. We explore ...

Gerrymandering—the manipulation of electoral boundaries to maximize constituency wins—is often seen as a pathology of democratic systems. A commonly cited cure is to require that electoral constituencies have a ‘compact’ shape. But how much of a constraint does compactness in fact place on would-be gerrymanderers? We operationalize compactness as a convexity constraint and apply a theorem of Ka...