Moving beyond a unitary actor assumption that models members of a self-evidently collective entity such as a political party “as if” they all shared a single brain, this paper explores the cohesion and discipline of party legislators in multi-party systems operating under the constitutional rules of parliamentary government. We do this in the context of Italian politics, for which a consistent ...

135 Despite the importance of this issue, not much systematic research appears to have been devoted to assessing the relative susceptibility of national and local governments to interestgroup capture. Here we describe a model of two-party electoral competition with “probabilistic” voting behavior and lobbying by specialinterest groups based on David Baron (1994) and Gene Grossman and Elhanan He...

Polarization has been always identified as a problem for Latin American democracies. Yet its determinants remain largely undertheorized and without systematic evidence. This paper tackles this shortcoming with a new explanation where polarization is conceptualized as a mobilizational tool used by parties to deliver unequivocal signals to voters about their location in the policy space. The expl...

In a country where only two political parties — the Democrats and Republicans — have dominated electoral politics since the Civil War, any electoral headway by a third party or candidate is a noteworthy event. Setting aside Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party effort, Perot’s 18.9% of the popular vote in 1992 was the largest third party popular vote since the Civil War. By running again in 1996 a...

Dominant theories of electoral behavior emphasize that voters myopically evaluate policy performance and that this shortsightedness may obstruct the welfare-improving effect of democratic accountability. However, we know little about how long governments receive electoral credit for beneficial policies. We exploit the massive policy response to a major natural disaster, the 2002 Elbe flooding i...

Pre-electoral coalitions (PECs) are one of the most often used methods to coordinate entry into the electoral market. Party elites, however, do not know how voters will respond to the coalition formation at the polls. In this article, the authors report on an experimental study among 1,255 Belgian students. In order to study voter responses to the formation of PECs, respondents were presented w...

American electoral volatility is in a free fall. Overtime variation in the partisan balance of presidential elections across states has matched an all-time low in American history and is a fraction of its 1970’s peak. The current decline in volatility parallels declines during the Gilded Age and Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. Trends in electoral volatility vary regionally, and the South’s pat...

Elections and electoral rules matter. Imagine the outcome of the 2000 U.S. presidential election if Nader supporters had voted strategically for Gore rather than voting for their preferred candidate. Imagine the U.S. government’s response to Hurricane Katrina if the voter turnout of poor Americans matched that of their affluent counterparts. It matters whether people vote or not and it matters ...

This paper presents a case study of Ghana’s gradual democratiza through 2004. This gradual democratization three main factors: the role of the international community, civil society, and electoral reform. Data as well. The 1992 Constitut as relevant books were consulted, in addition to Chairman of the EC and Convention Party (PNC) found that Ghana’s gradual democratization was electoral reforms...

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the sociological impact of social factors on the electoral behavior of citizens of Mazandaran province by comparing the two age groups of youth and adults. In this regard, a descriptive-analytical cross-sectional study was conducted using a researcher-made questionnaire. Statistical population of this study is men and women over 18 years old th...