The phenomenon of split ticket voting is intriguing, and has partially been explicated in the scientific literature. Studies have offered several inconclusive reasons why a voter may decide to split his/her vote, and to support rival candidates, and opposing political parties. The candidate’s visibility, on the one hand, and partisan identification, on the other hand, have been the most cited e...

Drawing from the theory of policy voting, this study examines the impact of opinions about gay rights on voting for presidential candidates. Qualitative analysis of the major party platforms and candidate campaign rhetoric from the six presidential elections held between 1988 and 2008 indicates that Democratic and Republican presidential candidates began openly expressing opposing positions on ...

This paper explores the conditions under which voters in emerging democracies support non-viable candidates. We argue that cognitive biases and the geographic clustering of minor-party supporters in ethno-political enclaves lead to misperceptions about the electoral prospects of minor-party candidates, weakening strategic defections both among co-ethnic and non-co-ethnic supporters. We explore ...

In this paper we use a research design that exploits unique features of Japanese elections to estimate and decompose the incumbency advantage in Japan’s Lower House elections. Like some existing related studies we also use repeated observations on the same candidates to account for unobserved factors that remain constant across observations. We find evidence that much of incumbent LDP represent...

Many have observed that political candidates running for election are often purposefully expressing themselves in vague and ambiguous terms. In this paper we provide a simple formal model of this phenomenon. We model the electoral competition between two candidates as a two-stage game. In the first stage of the game two candidates simultaneously choose their ideologies, and in the second stage ...

The United States, uniquely among all countries, elects its head of state using a two-tiered system called the Electoral College. If we view the states that make up the Electoral College as voters and make some simplifying assumptions, it is possible to use the theory of voting and voting power to measure the power of the individual states in a presidential election. Modeling the Electoral Coll...

We study the relation between the electorate’s information about candidates’ policy platforms during an election, and the subsequent provision of inefficient local public goods by the elected government. More information does not always lead to better outcomes. We show that the equilibrium outcome is efficient if voters are partially uninformed; whereas, if the electorate is very well informed,...

Under closed-list proportional representation, a party's electoral list determines the order in which legislative seats are allocated to candidates. When candidates differ their ability, parties face trade-off between competence and incentives. Ranking decreasing of ensures that elected politicians most competent. Yet, party lists create incentives for may push not rank order. We examine this g...