After he had only tightly lost the election in July 2006, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his Coalición claimed fraud and asserted that unfair conditions during the campaign had diminished his chances to win the presidency. The paper investigates this latter allegation centering on a perceived campaign of hate, unequal access to campaign resources and malicious treatment by the mass media. It f...

Does campaign duration affect election outcomes? To date, this question has largely evaded political scientists, but it is reasonable to expect systematic links between campaign length and candidate performance in elections. We hypothesize that longer campaigns would help challengers' electoral fortunes, thereby curbing incumbency advantage and potentially boosting competitiveness in elections....

This paper examines the role of the Adult Education Association of Zambia (AEAZ) in the Zambian national elections. Outlined in this paper are workshop topics, challenges encountered, and outcomes of the education campaign by the AEAZ in its crusade to inform voters of their rights and obligations. The six interrelated topics presented at various civic awareness campaigns were leadership ...

Competitive political parties and election campaigns are central to the health of democracies. Parties and campaigns require significant resources to be effective. India has developed complex election expenditure, political party funding, and reporting and disclosure laws. We suggest that these laws may have perverse impacts on the electoral system: they tend to drive campaign expenditure under...

Many lament that weak accountability and poor governance impede economic development in Africa. Politicians rely on ethnic allegiances that deliver the vote irrespective of performance, dampening electoral incentives. Giving voters information about candidate competence counters ethnic loyalty and strengthens accountability. I extend a canonical electoral model to show how information provision...

Although observers of Brazilian politics commonly hold that voters reward incumbents for “bringing home the bacon,” I provide reasons to question the direct link between pork and electoral success as well as statistical evidence demonstrating the lack of such a link. This generates a puzzle: if pork barreling is ineffective, why do Brazilian deputies spend so much time seeking pork? The answer ...

Although perceived by candidates and parties as important in affecting political outcomes, the link between spending and success in multicandidate, multiparty election campaigns remains unproven. Not only are there relatively few studies of campaign spending effects in multiparty systems, there are none examining the effect under the Single Transferable Vote (STV) electoral system. Our study ex...

Framing effects and bounded rationality imply that election campaigns may be an important determinant of election outcomes. This paper uses a two-party setting and simple game theoretic models to analyse the strategic interaction between the parties’ campaign decisions. Alternations of power emerge naturally, even if both electoral preferences and party positions

Framing effects and bounded rationality imply that election campaigns may be an important determinant of election outcomes. This paper uses a two-party setting and simple game theoretic models to analyse the strategic interaction between the parties’ campaign decisions. Alternations of power emerge naturally, even if both electoral preferences and party positions