Building on the literature that investigates citizen and voter trust in government, we analyze the topic of voter confidence in the American electoral process. Our data comes from two national telephone surveys where voters were asked the confidence they have that their vote for president in the 2004 election was recorded as intended. We present preliminary evidence that suggests confidence in ...

This paper describes the competitive strategies of political parties – aiming at maximising electoral support – in the early years of democratic elections. By spreading through geographical space in search of votes, candidates and parties challenged adversaries in their traditional strongholds, a process which led to the reduction of the number of safe seats and uncontested constituencies. Evid...

This paper uses the Banzhaf power measure to calculate the a priori voting power of individual voters under the existing Electoral College system for electing the President of the United States, as well as under variants of this system in which electoral votes are either apportioned among the states in a different manner or cast by the states in a different manner. While the present winner-take...

Generating realistic artificial preference distributions is an important part of any simulation analysis of electoral systems. While this has been discussed in some detail in the context of a single electoral district, many electoral systems of interest are based on multiple districts. Neither treating preferences between districts as independent nor ignoring the district structure yields satis...

Elections in the wake of dramatic transitions from authoritarian regimes to democracy may confront voters with choices that are unattractive or bewildering, or both. This paper examines the conditions that produce tractable sets of party options for voters, presents cross-national data on the choice sets and competitiveness in elections after dramatic transitions, and examines how the electoral...

The paper econometrically investigates the determinants of advertising intensity in the manufacturing industry of São Paulo, Brazil in 1996 taking as reference an extensive survey carried out by Fundação SEADE. The preliminary investigation indicated a substantial degree of endogeneity in structure and performance variables. The instrumental variables estimation also considered instruments refe...

Various nations across the globe have always used media as a tool to safeguard their strategic interests by promoting their ideologies, cultural or democratic values; policies and priorities, political ambitions and at the same time used media in propaganda and counter propaganda operations both in times of peace and war. Such an exercise has mostly been accomplished through official media unde...

This paper explores the importance of context in election studies. A distinction is made between global and compositional effects, and those resulting from measurement error. While compositional effects are essentially spatial, global effects may also result from temporal variation. The mechanisms through which such effects come about are outlined and then some different designs for exploring a...

We are used to considering engineering ethics largely a critical enterprise. By pointing out ethical issues and by raising concerns about a technology, ethicists usually criticise rather than promote the technology in question. Of course, from a utilitarianist perspective, an ethicist might come to the conclusion that a certain technology is better than another one or than doing without. Howeve...