We examine the effect of the number of candidates and the impact of ideology on the efficiency of the electoral process. We show that the tendency to focus on policies that provide particularistic benefits increases with the number of candidates to the expense of policies that benefit the population at large. Thus, the efficiency of policies provided in an electoral equilibrium worsens when the...

This study estimates spatial representations of recent elections in Canada, France, The Netherlands and Israel. Its purpose is to test whether there exist systematic differences in the extent of spatial dispersion among parties and candidates in the majoritarian and proportional electoral systems. Canada and France are majoritarian systems, while The Netherlands and Israel are highly proportion...

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...

We delineate three mechanisms that could explain women's under-representation in electoral lists and political power: voter demand, candidate supply, and internal party dynamics. We use Spain's Equality Law, which mandates a 40 percent female quota on electoral lists, to test these alternative theories. The law was enacted by the Social-Democratic Party after the surprise parliamentary electora...

In 1925 a new electoral system was introduced in Chile. This reform changed the electoral formula from a cumulative voting system to a proportional one (d ́Hondt) and established new rules about district magnitude and form of voting. It has been argued that this reform was motivated by the emergence of new parties or the expansion of the electorate. This article offers an alternative explanation...

ABSTRACT While the increase of women in elected office has received much scholarly attention, less attention been paid to dynamics resisting gender quotas countries that fail adopt such measures despite regional and international pressure. We develop a context-sensitive typology affirmative action includes funding incentives explore determinants electoral candidates’ positioning context Zambia....

In strategic candidacy games, both voters and candidates have preferences over the set of candidates, and candidates may strategically withdraw from the election in order to manipulate the outcome according to their preferences. In this work, we extend the standard model of strategic candidacy games by observing that candidates may find it costly to run an electoral campaign and may therefore p...

Direct influence over communication media is a potent resource during electoral campaigns, and politicians have an incentive to gain control of the airwaves to advance their careers. In this article, we use data on community radio license applications in Brazil to identify both the causal effect of incumbency on politicians’ ability to control the media and the causal effect of media control on...

This paper describes a system for real-time analysis of public sentiment toward presidential candidates in the 2012 U.S. election as expressed on Twitter, a microblogging service. Twitter has become a central site where people express their opinions and views on political parties and candidates. Emerging events or news are often followed almost instantly by a burst in Twitter volume, providing ...

A modification of the ''winner-take-all'' rule for awarding state electoral votes in US presidential elections is proposed. The modified rule has the potential of turning a state that is currently ''safe'' for either major party candidate into a ''battleground'' one, forcing presidential candidates to compete in the state and encouraging state voters (interested in the election result) to vote ...