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...

The existing empirical literature in comparative politics holds that social cleavages affect the number of candidates or parties when electoral institutions are “permissive.” However, this literature lacks a theoretical account of the strategic candidate entry and exit decisions that ultimately determine electoral coalitions under different institutions in plural societies. This paper incorpora...

Early research led scholars to believe that institutional accountability in Congress is lacking because public evaluations of its collective performance do not affect the reelection of its members. However, a changed partisan environment along with new empirical evidence raises unanswered questions about the effect of congressional performance on incumbents’ electoral outcomes over time. Analys...

Falling into a Niche: Institutional Equilibrium between Plurality and Proportional Representation for Large Political Parties" Scholars of electoral systems (e.g., Duverger, 1954; Rae 1967) argue that a combination of electoral system and district magnitude provide the strategic incentives for political party competition. All electoral systems reward large parties with a disproportional seat bo...

How does the electoral geography of legislative districts affect pork barreling? This article presents a formal model extending Mayhew’s classic credit-claiming theory to account for the electoral geography of bicameralism. Under bicameralism, upper chamber (Senate) and lower chamber (Assembly) legislators who share overlapping constituencies must collaborate to bring home pork projects. Collab...

Rational partisan theory’s exclusive focus on electoral uncertainty ignores the importance of policy uncertainty for the economy. I develop a theory of policy risk to account for this uncertainty. Using an innovative measure of electoral probabilities based on Iowa Electronic Markets futures data for the United States from 1988 to 2000, I test both theories. As predicted by rational partisan th...

Federal constitutions are viewed as incomplete contracts that must be renegotiated among self-interested, reelection-seeking politicians. Even when collectively sub-optimal, they are difficult to renegotiate if each state government faces electoral incentives to ignore externalities and federation-wide collective goods. Vertically integrated political parties help resolve this problem by creati...

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...

Theoretical spatial models of electoral voting tend to predict either convergence to an electoral mean (when voting is probabilistic) or chaos (when voting is deterministic). Here, we construct an empirical model of voting for the Israeli Knesset in 1992 (based on a large electoral sample and on analysis of party declarations). The probabilistic voting model so estimated fits the known election...