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...

Leading theories of transitions from single-party dominant systems begin with economic crisis, the party’s loss of patronage resources, and elite-level defections. The multiparty elections that are then held exert no independent effect, but instead register neutrally the party’s decline and the democratization of politics. This paper, however, shifts attention from the dominant party to citizen...

The key theoretical idea in this paper is that activist groups contribute resources to their favored parties in response to policy concessions from the parties. These resources are then used by a party to enhance the leader’s valence — the electoral perception of the quality of the party leader. The equilibrium result is that parties, in order to maximize vote share, will balance a centripetal ...

This paper develops an approach to studying how bias in favor of one party due to the pattern of electoral districting a¤ects policy choice. We tie a commonly used measure of electoral bias to the theory of party competition and show how this a¤ects party strategy in theory. The usefulness of the approach is illustrated using data on local government in England. The results suggest that reducin...

While party splits are a relatively frequent phenomenon in many new and established democracies, the systematic empirical research on electoral competition after schisms is limited. The analysis of more than 200 splits across 25 European countries in the post-war period addresses this gap in the literature. The study shows that the vote share of rump and splinter parties in the first election a...

Using data from an e-voting experiment conducted in the 2005 Congressional Election in Argentina, we estimate the effect of different e-voting technologies on the likelihood that citizens cast their vote for different parties for the National Congress and the Legislature of Buenos Aires. Our results indicate that voters are extremely receptive to the information cues provided by the different v...

We study electoral campaign management scenarios in which an external party can buy votes, i.e., pay the voters to promote its preferred candidate in their preference rankings. The external party’s goal is to make its preferred candidate a winner while paying as little as possible. We describe a 2-approximation algorithm for this problem for a large class of electoral systems known as scoring r...

Since its first publication in 1951, Duverger’s Political Parties has influenced an entire branch of political science devoted to the study of the political consequences of electoral laws. This essay examines the two propositions known as Duverger’s law and Duverger’s hypothesis, both concerned with how electoral institutions shape party systems. First explaining the propositions and their cont...

Since 1993, Japan has experienced party breakups, mergers and the formation of new parties that are rare in industrial democracies. As a result, the one-party dominance by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), with perennial opposition parties, has evolved into a LDP-centered governing coalition faced with the Democratic Party (DP) contending with it for office. While an electoral system change t...