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...

In elections, political preferences are strongly linked to the expectations of the electoral winner—people usually expect their favorite candidate to win. This link could be driven by wishful thinking (a biasing influence of preferences), driven by a biasing influence of expectations on one’s wishes, or produced spuriously. To examine these competing possibilities in the 2008 U.S. presidential ...

What allocation strategy do hegemonic party regimes use in order to increase their level of electoral support? Although the literature has established that targeting resources to marginally supportive districts is the most effective distributive strategy for competitive democracies, it is not possible to make a clear prediction about the best strategy for hegemonic party regimes due to the lack...

This paper focuses on new democracies in Eastern Europe and addresses two questions about the translation of social cleavages into political oppositions. The first question concerns the translation of pre-existing cleavages. In brief, does the evolution of new party systems influence the politicization of social conflicts? The second question concerns the translation of new social cleavages, i....

The adoption of mandatory gender quotas in party lists has been a subject of discussion in many countries. Since any reform obviously requires the approval of a (sometimes qualified) majority of incumbent legislators’ votes, keeping an eye on incumbents’ interests and incentives in different systems seems a natural thing to do if we want to understand different prospects for reforms in differen...

Focused on the French case, this paper aims at investigating a geographical change of electoral support, which is part of wider transformations of the electoral base of the Socialist Party, in particular the trend of working class dealignment. While a specific sociology emerged in “ideopolises”, anchored in the post-industrial and knowledge-based economy, a shift of the traditional socialist el...

This paper looks critically at several of the principal arguments employed for and against the continued use of the Electoral College, as opposed to a system of direct popular vote. The Electoral College does not merely diverge from our common American practices of direct popular vote, but it does so in ways that arbitrarily benefit some states at the expense of others. While federalism clearly...

The estimation of vote splitting in mixed-member electoral systems is a common problem in electoral studies, where the goal of researchers is to estimate individual voter transitions between parties on two different ballots cast simultaneously. Because the ballots are cast separately and secretly, however, voter choice on the two ballots must be recreated from separately tabulated aggregate dat...