Electoral institutions can affect the voting behavior of legislators who are elected through those institutions. In this article, the authors apply social network theory to study patterns of legislative choices under different primary election systems, and this approach leads the authors to study how electoral institutions affect legislative behavior differently than most previous research—that...

This paper explores the features of political economy in the dynamics of representative politics in India. Politics is seen as enhancing economic benefits through acquiring and maintenance of power in the realm of democratic set up. The system of representation is riddled with competitive populism. Emerging leaders and parties are forced to accommodate their ideologies in coping with competitiv...

What kinds of electoral systems can help democracy survive in countries split by deep cleavages of race, religion, language, or ethnicity? As is well-known, politicians in such “divided societies” often have strong incentives to “play the ethnic card” at election time, using communal appeals to mobilize voters. “Outbidding”—increasingly extreme rhetoric and demands—can offer rewards greater tha...

The conventional wisdom in political science is that legislators’ electioneering practices are closely linked to the electoral systems in which they compete.1 Since electoral concerns are argued to shape legislators’ representation and policy decisions, understanding how electoral incentives differ across electoral systems is useful for explaining cross-national differences representation and p...

The claims-making behavior of ethnopolitical communities spans three primary forms—electoral party politics, social movement protest behavior, and violent rebellion. In this study we posit that the three forms constitute a scale of increasingly contentious activity; where politically feasible, communities that give rise to the most intense forms of political behavior will also tend to be engage...

There is a growing evidence that political corruption is often closely associated with the rent seeking activities of special interest groups. This paper examines the nature of the interaction between the lobbying activities of special interest groups and the incidence of political corruption and determines whether electoral competition can eliminate political corruption. We obtain some strikin...

How can the differing levels of voter participation in sub-national parliamentary elections be explained? To answer this question I start from the current literature on cross-national comparative research, and apply explanatory approaches from this literature to the analysis of electoral turnout in sub-national units. I focus on two competing influential assessments in the literature, instituti...

Using data on elections to the United States House of Representatives (1946-1998), this paper exploits a quasi-experiment generated by the electoral system in order to determine if political incumbency provides an electoral advantage – an implicit first-order prediction of most principalagent theories of politician and voter behavior. Candidates who just barely won an election (barely became th...

To what extent can electoral engineering mitigate deadly intra-state conflict? This paper investigates the impact of electoral engineering on nationalist party behavior in highlyfragmented states. As nationalist parties have been instrumental in escalating inter-group tensions to large-scale hostilities, frameworks for conflict resolution frequently incorporate institutional mechanisms as a mea...

The literature on vote-buying assumes a complete transaction of cash for votes. While there is ample evidence that candidates do target certain voters with cash handouts, it is unclear whether these actually result in higher turnout and voteshares for the distributing party. In this paper we argue that in settings with low level of monitoring by political parties, such as many African countries...