How do new party systems evolve over time? This article argues that system evolution requires the solution of coordination problems voters face in early elections; this happens through a learning mechanism. Elections reveal information to voters, who update their beliefs about viability and distribution voters’ preferences adjust behaviour. The institutional setting, however, strongly condition...

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...

A typical assumption of electoral models of party competition is that parties adopt policy positions so as to maximize expected vote share. Here we use Euro-barometer survey data and European elite-study data from 1979 for the Netherlands and Germany to construct a stochastic model of voter response, based on multinomial probit estimation. For each of these countries, we estimate a pure spatial...

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...

We explore in this article an institutional foundation of agricultural protectionism in Japan, a country long recognized as resisting international pressures to open up its rice market. Using our qualitative analysis of postwar politics of agricultural protectionism and a simple formal model, we argue that farmers in Japan have stronger incentives to mobilize electoral support for the governing...

This paper explores how features of the electoral and party system affects the composition and efficiency of government spending--specifically government spending on education. In doing so we contribute to the literature the connection between institutions spending on two fronts. First, we move beyond the simple institutional dichotomies that characterize many existing studies (e.g. presidentia...

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...

Elements of an economic theory of political institutions are introduced. A variety of electoral systems are reviewed. Cox’s threshold is shown to measure incentives for diversity and specialization of candidates’ positions, when the number of serious candidates is given. Duverger’s law and its generalizations are discussed, to predict the number of serious candidates. Duverger’s law is interpre...

The idea of proportionality, which compares votes cast to seats won, is a common test of fair representation. But fair representation is a relation between electoral aims and electoral outcomes. The proportionality test falsely presupposes that each voter aims to support a political party. It therefore tells us nothing about fair representation. We need to construct a deeper criterion of fair r...