This paper introduces eight country-level datasets with >50,000 observations that can be used to analyze novel comparative questions concerning party personnel strategies—how parties recruit candidates and allocate members across party, legislative, cabinet positions. We make these public inspire research, especially from an electoral systems perspective; shape constituency representation influ...

Using Cox’s ’SF-ratio’ (the ratio of the vote won by the ’second loser’ to that of the ’first loser’), we examine strategic voting in mixed-member electoral systems in ten countries and a total of 35 elections. The SF-ratio is a useful indicator of strategic defection from less competitive to more competitive electoral options that is comparable across very diverse country cases. Under conditio...

Few voting systems in the world possess a feature set as rich as the Hungarian electoral law, which incorporates three distinct sets of districts, a mixed-member system, a two-round system (2RS) (using two different criteria for run-off qualification), two potentially separate legal thresholds, two different sets of rules for proportional representation (PR), plus a few additional twists relate...

This article examines theoretical and historical issues raised by Donald Stokes’s classic 1960s articles on “Party Loyalty and the Likelihood of Deviating Elections,” “On the Existence of Forces Restoring Party Competition,” and “Parties and the Nationalization of Electoral Forces.” I use presidential election returns from 1868 to 1996 and a simple regression model to measure partisan, national...

Formal models of voting have emphasized the mean voter theorem, namely, that all parties should rationally adopt identical positions at the electoral mean. The lack of evidence for this assertion is a paradox which this article attempts to resolve by considering an electoral model that includes ‘valence’ or non-policy judgements by voters of party leaders. In a polity such as Israel, based on p...

Previous empirical research has developed stochastic electoral models for Israel, Turkey, and other polities. The work suggests that convergence to an electoral center often predicted by electoral models is a nongeneric phenomenon. In an attempt to explain nonconvergence, a formal model based on intrinsic valence is presented. This theory showed that there are necessary and sufficient condition...

The Strategy of Dominant Party Politics: Electoral Institutions and Election Outcomes in Africa Politics in many African countries today is defined by simultaneous differences and similarities. What we mean by difference is that the rules under which elections are conducted are different across countries. Some countries, Botswana and Zimbabwe, conduct elections under first-past-the-post plurali...

We study a model of party formation in which the informativeness of party labels and inter-party ideological heterogeneity are endogenously and jointly determined in response to electoral incentives. Parties use screening to increase the cost of affiliation for politicians whose ideal points diverge from the party platform. Because affiliation decisions are endogenous, increased screening decre...

The Portuguese presidential election of 2006 represented a major upset for the incumbent Socialist Party (PS). In the March 2005 legislative elections, the PS had obtained 46.4 percent of the valid votes allowing it to form, for the first time in the history of this center-left party, a single-party cabinet supported by an absolute majority in parliament. However, less than one year later, the ...

We develop an equilibrium model to analyze the role of the media in electoral competition. When policy payoffs are state-dependent, party policies do not converge to the median voter’s ideal policy if the media report only party policies. News analysis about the state, though possibly biased, can discipline off-equilibrium deviations and make the parties adopt more centrist policies. Since vote...