Objective. Appalachia – historically a culturally and politically unique region of the United States – has been effectively ignored by contemporary political scientists. Using a unique measure of Appalachian residence, this paper analyzes racial attitudes, religion, and Appalachian opposition to the 2008 presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. Methods. I use regression analysis to assess the ex...

The literature on economic voting notes that voter’s subjective evaluations of the overall state of the economy are correlated with vote choice, whereas personal economic experiences are not. Little is known about how voters acquire information about the general state of the economy, and how this information is then used to determine vote choice. To better understand this process, we asked a se...

We develop a simple model in which voters care about both economic and “cultural” policy (noneconomic issues such as abortion). Democrats and Republicans are ideologically differentiated and choose economic policy positions to maximize their respective probability of winning. Voters who are culturally and economically conservative or liberal strongly prefer one of the parties, while the boundar...

The pioneering model of electoral competition was developed by Harold Hotelling and Anthony Downs. The model developed by Hotelling and Downs and many subsequent models in the literature about electoral competition have assumed that candidates embody policies and, if a voter is not indifferent between the policies embodied by two candidates, then the voter’s choices are fully determined by his ...

We present a structural model of political advertising in equilibrium. Candidates choose advertising across media markets in order to maximize the probability of winning the national election. The voter model takes the form of an aggregate random coefficients discrete choice model in which advertising affects a voter’s incentive to vote for either candidate or not to vote at all. We estimate th...

Electronic voting technology is often proposed as translating voter intent to vote totals better than alternative systems such as paper ballots. We suggest that EVMs can also alter vote choice, and in particular the way in which voters register anti-system sentiment. This paper examines the effects of the introduction of electronic voting machines in India, the world’s largest democracy, using ...

When autonomous agents attempt to coordinate action, it is often necessary that they reach some kind of consensus. Reaching consensus has traditionally been dealt with in the Distributed Artiicial Intelligence literature via negotiation. Another alternative is to have agents use a voting mechanism; each agent expresses its preferences, and a group choice mechanism is used to select the result. ...