Most theoretic models of multiparty electoral competition make the assumption that party leaders are motivated to maximize their vote share or seat share. In plurality-rule systems this is a sensible assumption. However, in proportional representation systems, this assumption is questionable since the ability to make public policy is not strictly increasing in vote shares or seat shares. We pre...

Are politicians motivated by policy outcomes or by the perks of office? The answer to this question is central to understanding the behavior of office holders and the policies they produce. Despite the question’s importance, however, the existing literature is not well suited to provide an answer. To shed light on the issue of political motivations I exploit a basic fact: to hold office, one mu...

Conventional wisdom suggests that the president’s standing with the public affects his success in Congress. Electoral self-interest is the primary reason to expect a relationship between presidential popularity and the behavior of members of Congress. Although numerous studies have analyzed the effects of presidential popularity, the lack of presidential approval data at the congressional const...

There is more to strategic voting than simply avoiding wasting one’s vote if one is liberated from the corset of studying voting behavior in plurality systems. Mixed electoral systems provide different voters with diverse incentives to cast a strategic vote.They not only determine the degree of strategic voting, but also the kind of strategies voters employ. Strategic voters employ either a was...

objective: aim of this experimental study is evaluating the effectiveness of two different approaches towards the treatment of major depressive disorder (mdd): positive-oriented psychotherapy and group cognitive-behavior therapy. methods: eighteen out-patients suffering from major depression were randomly divided into two groups to be treated according to either of these two approaches. both gr...

The behavior of voting for a party in an election has important social implications, yet, due to strong mentalistic influences in electoral research, it has rarely been studied from the behavior analytical perspective. In this article a behavioral analysis of voting is presented and a derived behavioral model is empirically tested on data from a Dutch election survey. It is concluded that such ...