In this paper we use holistic grading to measure the level of populism found in political parties’ discourse during electoral campaigns. The technique is applied to electoral manifestos from 144 parties in 27 countries from Western Europe and the Americas. For about half the sample, we also code speeches by the candidates or party leaders, which indicate the validity of measuring populism on el...

Elections represent a coordination problem for voters and candidates for office. Electoral coordination is also the causal mechanism behind any explanation of the relationship between electoral systems and the number of parties. I present a dynamic model of electoral coordination with candidate exit. The model extends two important results from the literature to a dynamic setting. The extension...

politicians adopt a variety of linguistic strategies in their speeches to connect with their audience. to name one, appraisal, as a system of interpersonal meaning, is concerned with evaluation where resources are used for negotiating social relationships. despite their significance in shaping texts, there have hardly been any extensive inventories of appraisal tools contrasting electoral speec...

This paper presents a theory of political competition with campaign contributions and informative political advertising. Policy-motivated parties compete by selecting candidates and interest groups provide contributions to enhance the electoral prospects of like-minded candidates. Contributions are used to finance advertising campaigns that provide voters with information about candidates’ ideo...

This paper shows how political parties differentiate to reduce electoral competition. Two parties choose platforms in a unidimensional policy space, and then in a continuum of constituencies with different median voters candidates from the two parties compete in Hotelling-Downs competition. Departing from party platform is costly enough that candidates do not take the median voter’s preferred p...

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the sociological impact of social factors on the electoral behavior of citizens of Mazandaran province by comparing the two age groups of youth and adults. In this regard, a descriptive-analytical cross-sectional study was conducted using a researcher-made questionnaire. Statistical population of this study is men and women over 18 years old th...

The secret ballot was designed to eliminate the incentive for candidates to purchase votes through direct vote buying. When voters have private information on their candidate preferences, incumbent candidates will generally be less efficient in purchasing votes than their challengers. Incumbent candidates may therefore benefit from the elimination of direct vote purchasing. Viewed in this vein,...

Proportional representation by means of a single transferable vote (PR-STV) is the electoral system employed in Irish elections. In this system, voters rank some or all of the candidates in order of preference. A latent space model is proposed for these election data where both candidates and voters are located in the same D-dimensional space. The locations are determined by the ranked preferen...

The adoption of mandatory gender quotas in party lists has been a subject of discussion in many countries. Since any reform obviously requires the approval of a (sometimes qualified) majority of incumbent legislators’ votes, keeping an eye on incumbents’ interests and incentives in different systems seems a natural thing to do if we want to understand different prospects for reforms in differen...