Turnout as the most frequent form of political participation is often supposed to be linked to a relevant degree of political information of citizens. Non-voting on the other hand, is often assumed to be a decision caused by indifference or uninformedness. These stereotypes notwithstanding, there may be good reasons for informed citizens not to cast a vote, just as uninformed citizens may have ...

This paper examines the impact of political uncertainty on financial crises using a panel of twenty-two emerging markets. By examining political election cycles, we find that eight out of nine of the financial crises happened during the periods of political election and transition. Using a combination of probit and switching regression analysis, we find that there is a significant relationship ...

This paper looks at the stability of policy outcomes under di erent electoral systems. The political game among parties and party supporters of di erent ideologies involves pre-election coalition formation as well as after-election parliamentary bargaining. Voters' preferences vary across districts and over time. We show that under proportional representation there exists a unique stable policy...

Debates over urban school reform have become voluminous and heated, and scholarly research has focused primarily on the impact of various reforms. Research should also trace the impact of conflicts over political reform on voting in school board elections. We examine three school board elections in St. Louis between 2003 and 2006. In each election, the mayor organized a supported a slate of ref...

We provide a unified analysis of the canonical rational voting model with privately known political preferences and costs of voting. Focusing on type-symmetric equilibrium, we show that for small electorates, members of the minority group vote with a strictly higher probability than do those in the majority, but the majority is strictly more likely to win the election. As the electorate size gr...

We examine the relative performance of voting technologies by studying presidential, gubernatorial, and senatorial election returns across hundreds of counties in the United States from 1988 to 2000. Relying on a fixed effects regression applied to an unbalanced panel of counties, we find that in presidential elections, traditional paper ballots produce the lowest rates of uncounted votes (i.e....

Electronic democracy (e-democracy) is a necessity in this era of computers and information technology. Electronic election (e-election) is one of the most important applications of e-democracy, because of the importance of the voters’ privacy and the possibility of frauds. Electronic voting (e-voting) is the most significant part of e-election, which refers to the use of computers or computeris...

BACKGROUND Throughout human history, a disproportionate degree of political power around the world has been held by men. Even in democracies where the opportunity to serve in top political positions is available to any individual elected by the majority of their constituents, most of the highest political offices are occupied by male leaders. What psychological factors underlie this political g...