election and electing publics authorities, statemen, parliament representative and local council,s members by people is un undeniable prerequisites of democracy. a state claiming democracy but lacking institutions as electoral systems and referendum could not be found. nevertheless electoral procedures are not identical everywhere. in some countries the nominee has to obtain the landslide (simp...

Between 1999 and 2009, since no single party was in a position to lead a majority in the Lok Sabha, preelectoral coalitions have become the only option for parties to exercise executive power at the Centre. Looking at the trajectory of two pre-electoral coalitions over ten years, namely the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance and the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, the paper attempts...

Early research led scholars to believe that institutional accountability in Congress is lacking because public evaluations of its collective performance do not affect the reelection of its members. However, a changed partisan environment along with new empirical evidence raises unanswered questions about the effect of congressional performance on incumbents’ electoral outcomes over time. Analys...

Electoral systems determine the role party affiliations play in political representation. According to conventional expectations, politicians’ party affiliations should influence political representation when they are elected by proportional representation. In contrast, majoritarian systems force politicians to converge to the median position of their constituents, and party affiliation should ...

in this paper, the french electoral system in different layers of power and its impact on voter’s political life and behavior is explored. the french chose the two-step plurality system in the national assembly elections. this electoral style has caused the multi-party and bipolar system to be institutionalized in the land of flowers. although this electoral system is harmful to minor parties e...

e demonstrate the surprising benefits of legislative redistricting (including partisan gerrymandering) for American representative democracy. In so doing, our analysis resolves two long-standing controversies in American politics. First, whereas some w scholars believe that redistricting reduces electoral responsiveness by protecting incumbents, others, that the relationship is spurious, we dem...

Cross-national analyses are presented that suggest that changes in the variance of voters’ policy preferences—in 12 Western European democracies from 1976 to 1998—are associated with corresponding changes in the variance of policy choices on offer in these party systems. This finding is labeled the Voter Distribution Effects Result. There is also evidence to support a second major finding, the ...

It has been a standard result of the stochastic, or probabilistic, spatial model of voting that vote maximizing candidates, or parties, will converge to the electoral mean (the origin). This conclusion has appeared to be contradicted by empirical studies. Here, a more general stochastic model, incorporating ‘exogeneous’ valence, is constructed. Contrary to the standard result, it is shown in Th...

This paper studies electoral competition in a model of redistributive politics with deterministic voting and heterogeneous voter loyalties to political parties. We construct a natural measure of “party strength” based on the sizes and intensities of attachment of a party’s loyal voter segments and demonstrate how party behavior varies with the two parties’ strengths. In equilibrium, parties agg...