Gender is playing an important role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, especially with Hillary Clinton becoming the first female presidential nominee and Donald Trump being frequently accused of sexism. In this paper, we introduce computer vision to the study of gender politics and present an image-driven method that can measure the effects of gender in an accurate and timely manner. We fi...

How does local unemployment influence presidential elections? Some argue that, for voters, the state of the local economy is an afterthought to that of the national economy. Those who argue that local unemployment matters fall into two camps. Recent research finds that local unemployment is a partisan issue that benefits Democratic candidates because voters believe they are the party best equip...

This study draws from agenda-setting and issue priming theories to develop hypotheses about how state-level ballot propositions may affect presidential elections. We propose that ballot measures prime voters to evaluate candidates in terms of policy questions placed on their state ballot. We test if concerns about gay marriage in 2004 had greater salience for voters in states where proposals to...

Party discipline is known to be di¤erent in Parliamentary and in Presidential democracies. Yet, the theoretical literature is silent about why parties adopt such di¤erent structures. We propose a setup where parties are brands. They strategically choose both their ideological position and their internal discipline. The latter introduces a trade-o¤ between the informativeness of the party label ...