Does complete public financing of campaigns enhance electoral competition? Arizona and Maine implemented similar clean elections programs for state-level races in 2000, providing an opportunity to examine the consequences of public financing. Employing two measures of competitiveness, I find that clean elections programs in both states significantly increased competition in districts where chal...

Does campaign duration affect election outcomes? To date, this question has largely evaded political scientists, but it is reasonable to expect systematic links between campaign length and candidate performance in elections. We hypothesize that longer campaigns would help challengers' electoral fortunes, thereby curbing incumbency advantage and potentially boosting competitiveness in elections....

Nowadays it is commonplace to argue that candidates’ personal characteristics play a large part in determining how individuals vote. In the domain of political marketing this assumption is often given for granted, and no clear conceptual understanding of how image crafting techniques affect voters has emerged. This article is an attempt to link political marketing’s concern for impression manag...

An important topic, in electoral studies, is the choice of the electoral system, which will be applied in parliamentary elections, because parliamentary seats distributed to political parties differ when a different system is applied. In this paper we focus on the five latest electoral systems applied in Greek Parliamentary Elections. Each one of them is described and analysed, in detail. Diffe...

Using panel data for 104 countries between 1975 and 1998, this article tries to explain interruptions of IMF programmes around election dates in the recipient countries. On average, programmes seem to be more likely to break down before elections. This increase in interruption probabilities is, however, less severe in more democratic countries. In true democracies interruption frequencies are e...

The paper presents a series of experiments in which participants were invited to vote in four one round elections and four two round elections, with the same set of five candidates, among which three were viable and two were not. The experiments were designed to test the arguments put forward by Duverger and Cox about the propensity to vote sincerely or strategically in one round and two round ...

We study the problem of coalitional manipulation in elections using the unweighted Borda rule. We provide empirical evidence of the manipulability of Borda elections in the form of two new greedy manipulation algorithms based on intuitions from the bin-packing and multiprocessor scheduling domains. Although we have not been able to show that these algorithms beat existing methods in the worst-c...

Legally binding elections require retention of specified election data such as balloting material. This applies to paper-based as well as electronic elections. However, in Germany legal requirements on retention in e-voting have not been issued so far. Based on the German legal framework for governmental as well as non-governmental paper-based elections, we give recommendations on long-term ret...

Sumanta Banerjee ([email protected]) is best known for his book In the Wake of Naxalbari: A History of the Naxalite Movement in India (1980). The Maoists want a provision in the electoral rules to arm the voter with the right to reject a candidate, but if the voters are granted such a provision, will they allow them to participate in the elections, or still insist on boycotting them? It is hi...

It is well-known that the electorate in midterm elections is more ideologically extreme than the electorate in presidential elections; yet, surprisingly, we find that United States senators that are elected in midterm elections are consistently more ideologically moderate than those first elected in presidential elections. Furthermore, senators who are ousted or retire from office around presid...