The plurality majority converse under single peakedness

The plurality majority converse (PMC), the strongest possible instance of a plurality majority disagreement, is studied in the context of single peakedness. After sharpening some of the notions of unfolding theory we construct PMCs for the case where all voters' preference orders are single peaked on a common ordering of the political parties contesting in an election. A PMC then appears to result from a particular distribution of the voters' preference orders in which the political center has been dissolved towards the extremes. The possibility of a PMC in some of the elections in Weimar Germany is examined. Elections that avoid plurality majority disagreements by having voters choose one of a constrained set of preference orders over the contesting parties are discussed.     

Ideological versus Downsian political competition

We analyze a one-dimensional model of spatial political competition with two parties and uncertainty on the distribution of voters' types. We assume that parties are formed by regular members and professional politicians; members care about the policy enacted, while professional politicians, on the contrary, care only about winning the election. We consider two possibilities: that members choose the political platforms and that professional politicians are the ones who choose such platforms. The expected utility for party members is analyzed under these two cases. We find that when professional politicians have no informational advantage, it is on the interest of both parties to let professional politicians choose the platforms. Only in the case in which professional politicians have much better information than the members of the party about voters is it possible that party members obtain a greater expected utility choosing the platforms themselves rather than letting the professional politicians choose. Received: 31 May 1999/Accepted: 1 March 2001     

THE IMAGE AND THE VOTE MANIPULATING VOTERS' PREFERENCES

Concern is often expressed regarding the ability of campaignconsultants to shape candidates' images and, thereby, influenceelectoral outcomes. Despite this concern, little attempt hasbeen made to investigate whether candidates' images can be shapedin a way that affects the vote. Here, we examine the role ofnonverbal aspects of candidate presentation on image makingand voters' preferences. In a series of three related studiesconducted at the time of the 1984 national election, the impactof different photographs of the same candidate is assessed.The results suggest that a candidate's image can be shaped insuch a way as to manipulate voters' preferences.     

THE DEVELOPMENT AND DECLINE OF MEDIEVAL VOTING INSTITUTIONS: A COMPARISON OF ENGLAND AND FRANCE

This paper argues that in the middle ages voting institutions emerged as mechanisms that allowed rulers to cooperate with subjects on mutually profitable projects. In spite of their utility, many of these voting institutions eventually declined. We test the model on the English parliament and the French estates general. The historical evidence strongly supports our view that these institutions declined in France, but not in England, due to increases in the heterogeneity of voters' interests and the insecurity of French rulers, since these factors made cooperation between French rulers and their subjects more difficult.     

On the influence of extreme parties in electoral competition with policy-motivated candidates

We study and compare equilibrium platforms in models of unidimensional electoral competition with two and four policy motivated parties. We first analyze the plurality game, where the party getting the most votes is elected and implements its proposed platform. Restrictions on the set of credible announcements are needed to get existence of equilibria. Comparing equilibria with two and four parties, we obtain that moderate parties react to the introduction of extreme parties by proposing the same or more extreme equilibrium platforms. We then study the proportional system, where the policy implemented is a weighted sum of the proposals, with the voting shares as weights. Here, the existence of extreme parties leads moderate ones to choose more centrist platforms. We finally test the robustness of our results with respect to, first, the enlargement of the strategy space to entry decisions and, second, to asymmetric distributions of voters' blisspoints.

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Picking the Winners: Politician vs. Voter Predictions of Two Controversial Ballot Measures

Abstract Both politicians and voters were asked to predict outcomesof two Oregon ballot measures in 1982. As expected, politicians'predictions always were closer to the mark than voters' were.Further, voters showed stronger signs of wishful thinking (the"Looking-Glass effect") in their predictions than did politicians.Using published preelection polls apparently improved politicians'accuracy in 1982, as well as voters' accuracy in a separate1984 survey. No other sources of data improved predictive accuracy.Findings have implications for theories of representative governmentand are consistent with a new theory of public opinion.     

PRIME MINISTERS, PARTIES, AND THE PUBLIC: THE DYNAMICS OF GOVERNMENT POPULARITY IN GREAT BRITAIN

This article proposes and tests a model of British party supportbetween 1953 and 1987, including prime minister's popularity,economic fluctuations, and short-term noneconomic factors. Weargue that public evaluations of the prime minister (PM) havehad an increasingly important effect on relative party popularity("government lead"). We demonstrate that this enhanced linkbetween PM popularity and government lead began in the 1960s,well before the Thatcher era. We also attempt to demonstratethat noneconomic factors (wars, scandals, etc.) exert indirecteffects on government lead through voters' evaluations of theprime minister. The results of this test, however, are inconclusive.We discuss the implications of these findings for our understandingof British politics.     

COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENTS, CONSTITUENT PREFERENCES, AND CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS

We model the behavior of a vote-maximizing legislator in order to predict interest group campaign contributions to incumbent politicians. We show that committee assignments and voter preferences affect the price a legislator requires to produce policies for any interest group. An econometric analysis of actual interest group contributions shows that these groups make significantly larger contributions to legislators on committees with jurisdiction over especially relevant policy issues and to incumbents with non-hostile constituencies. These results support our theory; interest groups act as if committees matter in the determination of policy and voters' interests constrain interest group behavior.     

The Institutionalization of U.S. Political Parties: Patronage Newspapers

There is general agreement that mass political parties emerged during the Jacksonian era, but there is no consensus about their precise origins. Institutional theorists within political science contend that political parties trace their beginnings to elite who nurtured them within the civil service bureaucracy, whereas theorists in political science who rely on microlevel explanations consider that parties developed to solve problems of social choice and collective action. Historians, in contrast, indicate that newspaper patronage in Washington, DC, beginning with Jefferson, was critical for the emergence of federal political parties. This study systematically examines the empirical implications of that assumption and considers both the organizational and political processes that underlie establishment of newspapers in the Capital, contributing to the understanding that newspapers provided a model both for the civil service and for political parties.     

Competition for popular support: a valence model of elections in Turkey

Models of elections tend to predict that parties will maximize votes by converging to an electoral center. There is no empirical support for this prediction. In order to account for the phenomenon of political divergence, this paper offers a stochastic electoral model where party leaders or candidates are differentiated by differing valences??the electoral perception of the quality of the party leader. If valence is simply intrinsic, then it can be shown that there is a ??convergence coefficient??, defined in terms of the empirical parameters, that must be bounded above by the dimension of the space, in order for the electoral mean to be a Nash equilibrium. This model is applied to elections in Turkey in 1999 and 2002. The idea of valence is then extended to include the possibility that activist groups contribute resources to their favored parties in response to policy concessions from the parties. The equilibrium result is that parties, in order to maximize vote share, must balance a centripetal electoral force against a centrifugal activist effect. We estimate pure spatial models and models with sociodemographic valences, and use simulations to compare the equilibrium predictions with the estimated party positions.     

Estimating the effects of activists in two-party and multi-party systems: comparing the United States and Israel

This article presents an electoral model where activist groups contribute resources to their favored parties. These resources are then used by the party candidates to enhance the electoral perception of their quality or valence. We construct an empirical model of the United States presidential election of 2008 and employ the electoral perception of the character traits of the two candidates. We use a simulation technique to determine the local Nash equilibrium, under vote share maximization, of this model. The result shows that the unique vote-maximizing equilibrium is one where the two candidates adopt convergent positions, close to the electoral center. This result conflicts with the estimated positions of the candidates in opposed quadrants of the policy space. The difference between estimated positions and equilibrium positions allows us to estimate the influence of activist groups on the candidates. We compare this estimation with that of Israel for the election of 1996, and show that vote maximization leads low valence parties to position themselves far from the electoral origin. We argue that these low valence parties in Israel will be dependent on support of radical activist groups, resulting in a degree of political fragmentation.     

Secondary issues and party politics: an application to environmental policy

This article develops a political economy model to assess the interplay between party formation and an environmental policy dimension viewed as secondary to the redistributive dimension. We define being a secondary issue in terms of the intensity of preferences over this issue rather than in terms of the proportion of voters who care for the environment. Equilibrium policies are the outcome of an electoral competition game between endogenous parties. We obtain the following results: (i) The Pigouvian tax never emerges in an equilibrium; (ii) The equilibrium environmental tax is larger when there is a minority of green voters; (iii) Stable green parties exist only if there is a minority of green voters and income polarization is large enough relative to the saliency of the environmental issue. We also study the redistributive policies advocated by green parties.     

Bandwagon, underdog, and political competition: the uni-dimensional case

This article studies the effects of bandwagon and underdog on the political equilibrium of two-party competition models. We adapt for voter conformism the generalized Wittman?CRoemer model of political competition, which views political competition as the one between parties with factions of the opportunists and the militants that Nash-bargain one another, and consider three special cases of the general model: the Hotelling?CDowns model, the classical Wittman?CRoemer model, and what we call the ideological-party model. We find that the presence of voter conformism significantly affects the nature of political competition, and its effect on political equilibrium is quite different depending on the model one uses. In the Hotelling?CDowns model, political parties put forth an identical policy at the equilibrium, regardless of the type of voter conformism, and this is the only equilibrium. In both the ideological-party and classical Wittman?CRoemer models, parties propose differentiated policies at the equilibrium, and the extent of policy differentiation depends on the degree of voter conformism.     

ONE THAT MADE A DIFFERENCE: COGNITIVE CONSISTENCY, POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE, AND THE 1980 PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE

Despite high expectations, students of the 1960 and 1976 presidentialdebates were unable to find much evidence that these eventssignificantly affected voters' candidate preferences. As a result,scholars have turned increasingly to cognitive consistency theoriesto explain viewers' reactions (Or nonreactions) to debates.This article argues that one key mediating variable determiningwhether or not voters are influenced by debates is their levelof political knowledge. Looking at the largely ignored 1980Carter-Reagan debate, we find that voters with generally lowlevels of knowledge are particularly affected by the debate,and significant shifts in candidate preferences do occur amongthis group. The evidence suggests that the debate was an importantfactor in Ronald Reagan's bid to unseat his Democratic opponent.     

Electing a parliament

We present a model where a society elects candidates belonging to two parties to a national parliament. The electoral rule determines the seats distribution between the two parties. The policy outcome is a function of the number of seats the two parties win in the election. We analyze two electoral rules, multidistrict majority and single district proportional. We prove that under both systems there is a unique pure strategy perfect equilibrium outcome. We compare the outcomes under the two systems.     

The effect of social homogeneity on coincidence probabilities for pairwise proportional lottery and simple majority rules

The Condorcet efficiency of Pairwise Proportional Lottery Rules (PPLR) is considered under various assumptions concerning the likelihood that given voters' preference profiles are observed on three alternatives. Representations are developed for the expected Condorcet efficiency under impartial culture, impartial anonymous culture, and a generalization to Pólya-Eggenberger distributions. PPLR is shown to be equivalent to a random selection process in the limit of voters under impartial culture. However, relatively small increases in social homogeneity, as measured by Kendall's Coefficient of Concordance, cause significant increases in the Condorcet efficiency of PPLR.Professor Berg's work was partly supported by the Swedish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.     

Adjustment of issue positions based on network strategies in an election campaign: A two-mode network autoregression model with cross-nested random effects

During election campaigns, political parties deliver statements on salient issues in the news media, which are called issue positions. This article conceptualizes issue positions as a valued and longitudinal two-mode network of parties by issues. The network is valued because parties pronounce pro or con positions on issues in more or less extreme ways. It is longitudinal because the media report new statements of parties on issues each new day.     

A majorization comparison of apportionment methods in proportional representation

From the inception of the proportional representation movement it has been an issue whether larger parties are favored at the expense of smaller parties in one apportionment of seats as compared to another apportionment. A number of methods have been proposed and are used in countries with a proportional representation system. These apportionment methods exhibit a regularity of order, as discussed in the present paper, that captures the preferential treatment of larger versus smaller parties. This order, namely majorization, permits the comparison of seat allocations in two apportionments. For divisor methods, we show that one method is majorized by another method if and only if their signpost ratios are increasing. This criterion is satisfied for the divisor methods with power-mean rounding, and for the divisor methods with stationary rounding. Majorization places the five traditional apportionment methods in the order as they are known to favor larger parties over smaller parties: Adams, Dean, Hill, Webster, and Jefferson. Received: 5 August 2000/Accepted: 24 October 2001     

Toward a Model of Political Organization–Public Relationships: Antecedent and Cultivation Strategy Influence on Citizens' Relationships with Political Parties

This study examined the organization–public relationship between citizens and their political parties against the backdrop of the 2008 presidential general election. Employing a telephone survey of registered voters (n = 508), we investigated the interaction of politically relevant relationship antecedents, relationship cultivation strategies used by political parties, perceptions of the organization–public relationship between voters and their party, and outcomes of the relationship to test a model of political organization–public relationships (POPRs). Time, interpersonal trust, mediated communication, interpersonal communication, and dialogic communication emerged as significant predictors of POPR strength. The findings lay the groundwork for further investigation of POPRs.     

Rational voters in a partisanship model

This paper examines a voter model for the US which is interconnected with the partisan theory. In our model, voters are rational and forward-looking. They are perfectly informed about the preferences of political parties and about the state of the economy. The predictions of our voter model differ from the predictions of conventional voter models, according to which the incumbent benefits from low unemployment and low inflation, irrespective of its political colour. In a partisan setting, the democratic party benefits from high unemployment and the republican party benefits from high inflation. Regressions of presidential approval rates indicate that the predictions of both the partisan voter model and the conventional model are consistent with the data.