Lau and Redlawsk (1997) proposed that the quality of voter decision making can be evaluated by measuring what they called correct voting—the extent to which people vote in accordance with their own values and priorities—but in so doing provided little guidance about what actually determines whether voters can make such high-quality decisions. This article develops a framework for analyzing the ...

The 2012 Assembly Elections in Punjab received attention for being the first elections in post-1966 reorganised Punjab to witness return to power of an incumbent party regime. The elections also saw the emergence of a new set of political leadership, most notably the rise of Sukhbir Badal, the SAD President who led the campaign and crafted the Akali victory. The rise and fall of Manpreet Badal,...

John Q. Public, a computational model of political cognition which incorporates both cognitive and affective mechanisms, is employed as a voter facing political campaign information. A series of hypothetical, computational experiments show that the model successfully reproduces a set of well-known empirical phenomena found in electoral research and research on political cognition. Specifically,...

In this research, a case study was conducted, analyzing the Twitter messages posted between July and November 2015 by six political leaders in Turkey. The Twitter messages posted by President Erdoğan, AKP’s leader Davutoğlu, CHP’s leader Kılıçdaroğlu, MHP’s leader Bahçeli and HDP’s co-chairs Demirtaş and Yüksekdağ were all examined. The analysis focused primarily on the messages that were relat...

Though there is wide agreement among political scientists that separation of political and socio-economic statuses is necessary for the functioning of democracy, wide disagreement exists over the extent to which political statuses in tlie United States differ from socio-economic ones. This article focuses on PACs (Political Action Committees) as a new means for status-fusion in the United State...

Much of the existing ethnic politics literature suggests that in settings where ethnicity is politically salient, electoral competition encourages rival parties to focus narrowly on mobilizing their respective core ethnic constituents, a strategy that exacerbates ethnic divisions and may heighten the risk of conflict. This article develops an alternative account of campaign strategy that propos...

Numerous scholars have documented a dramatic increase in incumbency advantage in US congressional elections and also state legislative elections over the past four decades.' For example, Gelman and King show that incumbents in the House of Representatives now receive about twelve extra percentage points solely as a result of holding congressional office during the campaign;' the comparable figu...

We experimentally compare electoral outcomes when donor contribution limits are varied. The effect of contribution limits is studied under three levels of transparency: one where donors’ preferences and donations are unobserved by the candidate and public; one where they are observed by the candidate but not the public; and one where they are observed by all. We find that a combination of stric...

Leaders have been observed to use distinct rhetorical strategies, but it is unclear to what extent such strategies are effective. To address this issue we analyzed the official election campaign speeches of successful and unsuccessful Prime Ministerial candidates in all 43 Australian Federal elections since independence from Britain in 1901 and measured candidates' use of personal ('I', 'me') a...

Do audits by executive agencies impact the behavior of those audited? Does revealing negative information about legislators affect electoral results and behavior? Institutions that encourage transparency, such as campaign finance disclosure, influence mass elite behavior. Campaign transparency provides to voters during legislative campaigns character candidates, this affects voter legislator Th...