The election system used to select Afghanistan’s Wolesi Jirga (lower house of parliament) has radically shaped the realms of democratic stability and political legitimacy since its introduction for the elections of 2005. Afghanistan uses the Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV) in 34 provincial-level, multi-member constituencies with a special affirmative action (quota) mechanism for women. The ...

  Every society has oriented itself towards a governing method concerning the socio-cultural conditions and with the inclusion of different historical-ideological periods and has accepted it as its governmental plan. Iranian society is not an exception to this general rule. Throughout different historical stages, such as the government of Safavid, the Constitution Movement, and despotic g...

The adoption of gender quotas in electoral lists, like the recent “parity law” in France, can be fully rationalized on the basis of the self interest of male incumbent politicians. This paper explains why the parity law was approved in its form and, at the same time, why it has not been very effective. The existence of a voters’ bias in favor of male candidates is sufficient to convince the inc...

The mean voter theorem suggests that all parties should rationally converge to the electoral center. Typically this leads to an outcome which is unattractive to the rich. This paper develops a general stochastic model of elections in which the electoral response is a¤ected by the valence (or quality) of the candidates. Contributions made by policy-motivated activists can in‡uence valence, leadi...

On the Influence of Extreme Parties in Electoral Competition with Policy-Motivated Candidates* We study and compare equilibrium platforms in models of one-dimensional electoral competition with two and four policy-motivated parties. We first analyse the plurality game, where the party that gets the most votes is elected and implements its proposed platform. Restrictions on the set of credible a...

I develop a model of campaign finance in primary elections in which campaigns, which supply hard information about candidates’ electability, must be financed by strategic donors. I provide a rationale for Super Tuesday electoral calendars in which a block of voters vote simultaneously early in the election followed by other voters voting sequentially. For a range of campaign costs, such a calen...

One of the inheritances of British colonialism in many parts of the world is an electoral system based on that used to elect members of the UK House of Commons, albeit with many slight variations on the basic model of single-member constituencies allocated to the candidates with a plurality of the votes cast. One such country with that inheritance was Bermuda, which intends to shift its system ...

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...

We propose and estimate a dynamic model of voting which incorporates the three main factors affecting voting choices of individual citizens: party identification, policy preferences and candidates’ valence. Using individual level data on voting decisions in two consecutive presidential elections we identify and estimate (1) the distribution of voters’ policy positions, and (2) candidates’ valen...