Two decades ago, autocratic regimes were the rule in West Africa. Today, multiparty elections are relatively routine in the region, illustrated by the large number of elections conducted in West African countries in recent years. These elections provide insights into some of the strengths and weaknesses of the electoral process. Successful transfers of power in countries such as Senegal, Guinea...

I develop a theory of dynamic responsiveness that suggests that parties that win elections choose candidates who are more extreme and parties that lose elections choose candidates who are more moderate. Moreover, the size of past victories matters. Close elections yield little change, but landslides yield larger changes in the candidates offered by both parties. I test this theory by analyzing ...

Debates over urban school reform have become voluminous and heated, and scholarly research has focused primarily on the impact of various reforms. Research should also trace the impact of conflicts over political reform on voting in school board elections. We examine three school board elections in St. Louis between 2003 and 2006. In each election, the mayor organized a supported a slate of ref...

Midterm congressional elections provide an interesting testing ground for theories of voting and elections in America. Free from the contamination of national personalities and stylized issues that epitomize presidential campaigns, midterm elections provide a cleaner issue environment for investigating the effects of systematic short-term forces on congressional elections. The seemingly inevita...

Elections, as the institution through which citizens choose their political agents, are at the core of representative democracy. It is therefore appropriate that they occupy a central position in the study of democratic politics. The formal analysis of elections traces back to the work of Hotelling (1929), Downs (1957), and Black (1958), who apply mathematical methods to understand the equilibr...

Among U.S. federal elections, Senate elections are unique in that each state is a two-member district where representatives are elected sequentially to overlapping terms. Models of the sequential nature of Senate elections have been proposed suggesting that the outcome of the election for one of the state’s two U.S. Senate seats affects the contest for the other. More specifically, these models...

Single-peaked elections have been attracting much attention recently. It turned out that manyNPhard voting problems become polynomial-time solvable when restricted to single-peaked elections. A natural generalization of the single-peaked elections is the k-peaked elections, where at most k peaks are allowed in each vote in the election. In this paper, we mainly aim at establishing a complexity ...

The belief that elections reduce rent seeking by government officials is widely held, likewise the belief that rent seeking decreases as elections are less subject to corruption. In this paper we develop and test a model in which these beliefs are carefully examined. Our model indicates that, while elections may provide a disincentive for rent seeking, this disincentive (1) need not actually ma...

T he view that multiparty elections in changing authoritarian regimes should be held sooner rather than later has been increasingly under attack. Critics argue that, under conditions of low institutional development, multiparty elections may lead to violence and civil war, rather than to the peaceful allocation of authority that everyone desires. Starting from the premise that elections are str...

In this paper we present TopFish, a multilevel computational method that integrates topic detection and political scaling and shows its applicability for a temporal aspect analysis of political campaigns (preprimary elections, primary elections, and general elections). It enables researchers to perform a range of multidimensional empirical analyses, ultimately allowing them to better understand...