Turnout as the most frequent form of political participation is often supposed to be linked to a relevant degree of political information of citizens. Non-voting on the other hand, is often assumed to be a decision caused by indifference or uninformedness. These stereotypes notwithstanding, there may be good reasons for informed citizens not to cast a vote, just as uninformed citizens may have ...

The electoral system adopted by Hungary in 1989 represents a monument to the potential for institutional design through bargaining to produce complex yet stable institutions. The key compromise reached during this bargaining process was the decision to use the mixed member system, electing a roughly even measure of representatives from both majoritarian single-member districts (SMDs) and from m...

Recent literature suggests that electoral budget cycles are a phenomenon of new rather than established democracies. What part of the democratization process explains the amelioration of the political budget cycle? We argue the answer lies (in part) in the development of a strong party system. We extend the classic Rogoff-Siebert model to show that political budget cycles are possible in a legi...

This paper presents an aspect of research work that was carried out to resolve the many challenges in Nigeria electoral process. All efforts by Nigerian voters to ensure that their votes are counted and used to declare results in all the general elections conducted failed. The officials saddled with the responsibilities to conduct and declare election results in Nigeria, connived with dubious P...

We study the impact of organized crime on electoral competition. In a theoretical model where parties compete for mafia support, we show that (i) the strongest party is willing to pay the highest price to secure mafia services; (ii) the volume of electoral trade with the mafia increases with political competition and with the efficiency of the mafia organization. Guided by these theoretical pre...

Institutions shape political outcomes, yet institutions themselves are endogenously shaped outcomes of political choices. Electoral systems are a unique class of distributive institutions that fundamentally shape political competition and political outcomes in democratic polities. Our paper examines the origins and subsequent changes to the Polish electoral system from the semi-free election in...

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...

Drawing on survey data from Taiwan and South Korea, this essay examines the electoral sources and democratic implications of vote shifting in these two young East Asian democracies. First, I complement the conventional Asian identity voting literature by demonstrating that vote shifting is a form of rational voting involving critical evaluations of government performance and careful weighing of...