The author stresses that participation has an intrinsic value for the citizens. In addition, it is also important as a means of civic education, a process in which citizens learn civic values. A comparison of electoral participation in democratic polities shows great differences among them. The author argues that the level of voter turnout depends on a number of factors, such as the features of...

A classic question about democratic elections is how much they are able to influence politician behavior by forcing them anticipate future reelection attempts, especially in contexts where voters not paying close attention and well informed. We compile a new dataset containing roughly 780,000 bills, combined with more than 16 million roll-call voting records for 6,000 legislators serving U.S. s...

This article pursues two tasks. The first is to clarify the value and productivity of Williams’s Keywords: a vocabulary culture society (first edition 1976, second expanded 1983a) for project Cultural Studies. clarification helped, I argue, by reading it alongside Vološinov’s Marxism philosophy language (published in Russian 1929, translated into English 1973). related task speculative developm...

Pre-electoral surveys typically attempt, and sometimes fail, to predict voting behavior on the basis of explicit measures of agreement or disagreement with a candidate or political position. Here, we assessed whether a specific brain signature of disagreement with one's social values, the event-related potential component N400, could be predictive of voting behavior. We examined this possibilit...

objective: acceptance-based behavior therapy (abbt) is a new psychotherapy for generalized anxiety disorder (gad). the current study intended to compare severity of symptoms, worry and quality of life of gad female patients between abbt and control. methods: this study was a randomized clinical trial. the sample included 18 women with gad referred to psychiatrists in isfahan, iran. patients wer...

The extent to which an electoral outcome is responsive to a voter 's preferences over outcomes depends on the voter 's ability to express her preferences in the act of voting. For instance, if a voter knows everything there is to know about the consequences of her voting decision, then her vote will be a relatively accurate measure of her preferences. In contrast, if a voter is uncertain about ...

JON FRAENKEL At first sight, the Pacific Islands seem like a graveyard for institutional determinist theories regarding the impact of electoral systems on party polarisation. Maurice Duverger’s well-known ‘sociological law’ was that first-past-the-post electoral rules tend to deliver two-party systems. Proportional representation (PR) systems were more loosely associated with multi-party settin...

Studies of electoral law consequences typically treat electoral laws as exogenous factors affecting political party systems, even while acknowledging that political parties often tailor electoral institutions to suit their own distributional needs. This study represents a departure from that approach, directly examining one aspect of the endogeneity of electoral systems: the endogeneity of Duve...

Many aspects of political behavior have been illuminated by standard models in which political actors maximize self-interested preferences. The works of Downs (1957), Buchanan and Tullock (1962),Buchanan, Tollison and Tullock (1980) and Becker (1983), as well as those inspired by these seminal contributions, have contributed to our understanding of voter, party and policy preferences, interest ...