This paper describes the competitive strategies of political parties – aiming at maximising electoral support – in the early years of democratic elections. By spreading through geographical space in search of votes, candidates and parties challenged adversaries in their traditional strongholds, a process which led to the reduction of the number of safe seats and uncontested constituencies. Evid...

This paper uses the Banzhaf power measure to calculate the a priori voting power of individual voters under the existing Electoral College system for electing the President of the United States, as well as under variants of this system in which electoral votes are either apportioned among the states in a different manner or cast by the states in a different manner. While the present winner-take...

Generating realistic artificial preference distributions is an important part of any simulation analysis of electoral systems. While this has been discussed in some detail in the context of a single electoral district, many electoral systems of interest are based on multiple districts. Neither treating preferences between districts as independent nor ignoring the district structure yields satis...

Elections in the wake of dramatic transitions from authoritarian regimes to democracy may confront voters with choices that are unattractive or bewildering, or both. This paper examines the conditions that produce tractable sets of party options for voters, presents cross-national data on the choice sets and competitiveness in elections after dramatic transitions, and examines how the electoral...

Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? There is considerable debate about the validity of data extracted from social media for studying offline behavior. To address this issue, we show that there is a statistically significant association between tweets that mention a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives and his or her subsequent electoral performance. We demonstrat...

This paper explores the importance of context in election studies. A distinction is made between global and compositional effects, and those resulting from measurement error. While compositional effects are essentially spatial, global effects may also result from temporal variation. The mechanisms through which such effects come about are outlined and then some different designs for exploring a...

The collapse of the traditional social ties, the advance of the mass media and the advent of political marketing have altered the structure and the direction of electoral campaigns. Present-day media-mediated electoral campaigns are hotly debated. On one side are those who claim that campaigns simplify political reality, manipulate voters, encourage voting apathy and in the long run contribute ...

In this paper we argue that institutional changes to the seniority system have electoral consequences to incumbents. Building on the theory of Conditional Party Government, we argue that the consolidation of power in the hands of party leadership reduces the electoral value of seniority. This reduction occurs because power that was previously in the hands of committee chairs, whose roles are ob...

This paper examines electoral accountability after the 2009-10 UK expenses scandal. Existing research shows that Members of Parliament (MPs) implicated in the scandal fared only marginally worse in the election than non-implicated colleagues. This lack of electoral accountability for misconduct could have arisen either because voters did not know about their representative's wrongdoing or becau...

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...