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Publications (462)
Extreme polarization in American politics—and especially in the US Congress—is perhaps the most confounding political phenomenon of our time. This book connects polarization in Congress and polarization in the electorate within an ever-intensifying feedback loop. The loop is powered by the discipline exerted by the respective political parties on t...
Extreme polarization in American politics—and especially in the US Congress—is perhaps the most confounding political phenomenon of our time. This book connects polarization in Congress and polarization in the electorate within an ever-intensifying feedback loop. The loop is powered by the discipline exerted by the respective political parties on t...
Extreme polarization in American politics—and especially in the US Congress—is perhaps the most confounding political phenomenon of our time. This book connects polarization in Congress and polarization in the electorate within an ever-intensifying feedback loop. The loop is powered by the discipline exerted by the respective political parties on t...
Extreme polarization in American politics—and especially in the US Congress—is perhaps the most confounding political phenomenon of our time. This book connects polarization in Congress and polarization in the electorate within an ever-intensifying feedback loop. The loop is powered by the discipline exerted by the respective political parties on t...
Extreme polarization in American politics—and especially in the US Congress—is perhaps the most confounding political phenomenon of our time. This book connects polarization in Congress and polarization in the electorate within an ever-intensifying feedback loop. The loop is powered by the discipline exerted by the respective political parties on t...
Extreme polarization in American politics—and especially in the US Congress—is perhaps the most confounding political phenomenon of our time. This book connects polarization in Congress and polarization in the electorate within an ever-intensifying feedback loop. The loop is powered by the discipline exerted by the respective political parties on t...
Extreme polarization in American politics—and especially in the US Congress—is perhaps the most confounding political phenomenon of our time. This book connects polarization in Congress and polarization in the electorate within an ever-intensifying feedback loop. The loop is powered by the discipline exerted by the respective political parties on t...
Extreme polarization in American politics—and especially in the US Congress—is perhaps the most confounding political phenomenon of our time. This book connects polarization in Congress and polarization in the electorate within an ever-intensifying feedback loop. The loop is powered by the discipline exerted by the respective political parties on t...
Extreme polarization in American politics—and especially in the US Congress—is perhaps the most confounding political phenomenon of our time. This book connects polarization in Congress and polarization in the electorate within an ever-intensifying feedback loop. The loop is powered by the discipline exerted by the respective political parties on t...
Extreme polarization in American politics—and especially in the US Congress—is perhaps the most confounding political phenomenon of our time. This book connects polarization in Congress and polarization in the electorate within an ever-intensifying feedback loop. The loop is powered by the discipline exerted by the respective political parties on t...
Extreme polarization in American politics—and especially in the US Congress—is perhaps the most confounding political phenomenon of our time. This book connects polarization in Congress and polarization in the electorate within an ever-intensifying feedback loop. The loop is powered by the discipline exerted by the respective political parties on t...
Extreme polarization in American politics—and especially in the US Congress—is perhaps the most confounding political phenomenon of our time. This book connects polarization in Congress and polarization in the electorate within an ever-intensifying feedback loop. The loop is powered by the discipline exerted by the respective political parties on t...
Extreme polarization in American politics—and especially in the US Congress—is perhaps the most confounding political phenomenon of our time. This book connects polarization in Congress and polarization in the electorate within an ever-intensifying feedback loop. The loop is powered by the discipline exerted by the respective political parties on t...
Extreme polarization in American politics—and especially in the US Congress—is perhaps the most confounding political phenomenon of our time. This book connects polarization in Congress and polarization in the electorate within an ever-intensifying feedback loop. The loop is powered by the discipline exerted by the respective political parties on t...
Extreme polarization in American politics—and especially in the US Congress—is perhaps the most confounding political phenomenon of our time. This book connects polarization in Congress and polarization in the electorate within an ever-intensifying feedback loop. The loop is powered by the discipline exerted by the respective political parties on t...
We show how to extend the Laakso-Taagepera measure of the effective number of parties so as to incorporate both party and ethnicity in a way that allows both ethnic-specific, party-specific, and composite measures that we refer to as extended L-T indices. While the aim of this article is methodological, we also illustrate our approach with U.S. two...
Using a folded seats‐votes curve, we examine partisan bias in the 2020 presidential election and compare it to partisan bias in the five other presidential elections in the twenty‐first century. 2020 and 2016 are extreme outliers with respect to the absolute magnitude of partisan bias in the Electoral College. In 2016, 2020, and 2000 bias runs in a...
Democracy often fails to meet its ideals, and these failures may be made worse by electoral institutions. Unwanted outcomes include elite polarization, unresponsive representatives, and the ability of a faction of voters to gain power at the expense of the majority. Various reforms have been proposed to address these problems, but their effectivene...
This article builds on work by Devine and Kopko (2021) and Lacy and Burden (1999) who estimated a probit model of candidate choice from nationally representative survey data to determine the second choice of third-party voters. Using this model on 2020 election data, we show that the Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgenson probably cost Donald Trump vic...
It is well understood thateven small differences in population can have a disproportionate impact on representation in the U.S. House of Representatives after a decennial census because of the peculiarities of rounding rules that require integer allocations. While the COVID-19 pandemic can be held responsible for accelerating the trend toward the i...
Democracy often fails to meet its ideals, and these failures may be made worse by electoral institutions. Unwanted outcomes include polarized institutions, unresponsive representatives, and the ability of a faction of voters to gain power at the expense of the majority. Various reforms have been proposed to address these problems, but their effecti...
Objective
We compare and contrast methods for measuring malapportionment from different disciplines: law, political science, and economics.
Methods
With data from the U.S. House, Senate, and Electoral College (EC) over the period 1790–2010, we compare disproportionality measures and compare both across time and between institutions.
Results
We de...
This article uses data collected from Google Scholar to identify characteristics of scholars who have chosen to create a Google Scholar profile. Among tenured and tenure-track faculty with full-time appointments in PhD-granting political science departments, we find that only 43.7% have created a profile. However, among R1 faculty, young and early-...
We compare and contrast methods for measuring malapportionment from different disciplines: law, political science, and economics. For example, in political science, the comparative politics approach to measuring malapportionment has been in terms of an adaptation of standard measures of seats-votes discrepancy, such as the Loosemore-Hanby Index of...
Electoral laws are often regarded as the key factors structuring party competition. Yet, despite having very similar electoral systems, reflecting a shared colonial legacy, the United States (U.S.) and Canada have had very different party systems. For the past 100 years, the U.S. is perhaps the most consistently two-party system among the world’s m...
In League of Women Voters v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (2018) the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down as a “severe and durable” partisan gerrymander the congressional map drawn by Republicans in 2011 and used in elections from 2012-2016. It did so entirely on state law grounds after a three-judge federal court had rejected issuing a prelimina...
Though African-American and Latino electoral success in state legislative and congressional elections continues to occur almost entirely in majority-minority districts, minorities now have new opportunities in districts that are only 40–50% minority. This success can primarily be explained in terms of a curvilinear model that generates a “sweet spo...
We examine the consequences to policy-seeking, center-left and center-right parties under proportional representation following entry by extremist parties either at one or both ends of a unidimensional political spectrum. Assuming a symmetric, unimodal voter distribution, we show that the entry of a single extremist party on either the left or righ...
Using updated data from 2002 and 2017 on the political science discipline, we show how the cohort and gender composition of US PhD-granting departments has changed dramatically over time. Integrating 2002 and 2017 data, we examine overall patterns and gender differences in job mobility, tenure and promotion, and university prestige level among non-...
Objectives
We offer a typology of possible reforms to the Electoral College (EC) in terms of changes to its two most important structural features: seat allocations that are not directly proportional to population and winner‐take‐all outcomes at the state level. This typology allows us to classify four major variants of “reform” to the present EC i...
The two volume Oxford Handbook of Public Choice provides a comprehensive overview of the Public Choice literature. Volume 1 covers rational choice models of elections, interest groups, rent seeking, and public choice contributions to normative political economy. It begins with introductory chapters on rational choice politics, the founding of publi...
This article updates the Masuoka, Grofman, and Feld 2002 dataset that identified the then-3,719 faculty in political science PhD-granting departments in the United States. That dataset contained information about each faculty member, including date and PhD-granting department, lifetime citation counts, fields of interest, and school of employment....
In League of Women Voters et al. v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania et al. (2018), henceforth abbreviated LWV, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down that state's congressional plan as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. It did so entirely on state law grounds after a three-judge federal court had rejected issuing a preliminary injunction ag...
We introduce primaries—both closed and open—into a Downsian model of two-party electoral competition allowing the two candidates in each party’s primary to differ in valence as well as in policy platform. The good news is that the introduction of either type of primary acts as a stabilizing force since equilibriums exist quite generally, serves as...
We introduce and study the class of egalitarian variants of committee scoring rules, where instead of summing up the scores that voters assign to committees---as is done in the utilitarian variants---the score of a committee is taken to be the lowest score assigned to it by any voter. We focus on five rules, which are egalitarian analogues of SNTV,...
Electoral authoritarian regimes usually preserve the dominance of the ruling party through electoral fraud, violence and intimidation. This paper focuses on the subtler forms of manipulation that undermine the electoral integrity and democratic outcomes. Specifically, we examine how an unusual electoral rule, involving multimember districts elected...
Beginning with a definition of gerrymandering, and after a brief review of the evolution of the case law on partisan gerrymandering, I propose five necessary elements of a test for when partisan gerrymandering rises to the level of unconstitutionality: (a) a clear and severe injury involving a disparate impact on a political party that serves as th...
The fact that two senators are elected from each state offers the potential for natural paired comparisons. In particular, examining historical and geographic patterns in terms of changes in the number of divided US Senate delegations (i.e., states whose two senators are of different parties) is a useful route to testing competing models of America...
We test theories about the effects of public input into redistricting, with evidence taken from remarks made in person at public hearings. One model, the cynical model, features legislators acting in their own interest and carries an expectation that public input is more or less a sham that line drawers will ignore, holding hearings only to give th...
Brams and Kilgour (Public Choice 170:99–113, 2017) begin their recent essay on the Electoral College (EC) by pointing out the obvious, but nonetheless regularly neglected fact that noncompetitive states may have a decisive impact on EC outcomes and shape the electoral strategies of the candidates in the competitive states, especially if there is as...
This article examines homophily - the tendencies for people with similar characteristics to interact with one another - and how social structure gives rise to network autocorrelation more than expected, while at the same time providing a balance against dynamics inducing pure segregation. The article begins with a discussion of two distinct process...
We provide a general analytic approach for calculating the Threshold of Exclusion (TE) for the single-seat and the multi-seat versions of all scoring rules, an infinitely large class of voting systems (Fishburn, 1973; Young, 1975; Saari, 1994, 1995). We offer specific results for two rules used for parliamentary elections at the national level: Bor...
Decided by the executive, redistrictings in France have been claimed to have substantial partisan bias in favor of the right. We examine the evidence for this claim in terms of France's left bloc versus right bloc politics, combining information from both the first and the second round of France's two round electoral system. We also examine data at...
We combine consideration of Duverger’s Law (Political parties: Their organization and activity in the modern state. London: Methuen, 1954) with Demsetz’s (J Law Econ 11:55–65, 1968) theory of natural monopoly to provide a novel perspective on the meaning and measurement of electoral competitiveness in a single member district, plurality rule electo...
I consider Gordon Tullock as a scholar who influenced the work of many others both through his own scholarship and in his role as journal editor, and as someone who regularly encouraged younger scholars.
This article considers the potential to use knowledge of expected electoral system effects to engage in electoral engineering. The review focuses on contributions made in the past dozen or so years and is limited to five specific questions: How do electoral systems affect (a) the proportionality of seats–votes relationships, (b) party proliferation...
Krehbiel’s (Pivotal politics, 1998) seminal work on pivotal politics in the US Congress emphasizes the importance of supermajoritarian rules and veto players in determining what bills can pass. We illustrate empirically that the volatility of the pivot points has increased markedly since the mid 1970s, and we link changes in pivot volatility to the...
Apportionment refers to the determination of the number of representatives to be allocated to preexisting political or geographic units, while districting refers to how lines are drawn on a map within those units to demarcate the geographic boundaries of individual constituencies. Malapportionment refers to differences in the ratio of the number of...
Objectives
To generate, via application of Bayes Theorem, accurate estimates about the size of Hispanic populations in California cities from very limited data on the surnames of those living in the cities.
Methods
We make use here of the ratio of those with the name “GARCIA” to those with the name “ANDERSON” in those cities, one of which is far m...
Race-conscious redistricting remains crucial to the election of an overwhelming share of African-American and Latino officials. We present descriptive evidence, easily interpretable by non-specialists, from recent elections at the state and federal levels to support our claims. The Voting Rights Act remains a valuable tool to protect the ability of...
We specify the level of polarization in a two-party legislature as an explicit function of three factors: (1) the ideological heterogeneity of district median voters, (2) the distance between candidates of different parties in the same or ideologically comparable districts, and (3) partisan bias in choosing between candidates equidistant from the m...
This book tells the story of how the way in which we conduct elections has changed after the Florida recount litigation of 2000. Some of the nation's leading experts look at various aspects of election administration, including issues of ballot format, changes in registration procedures, the growth in the availability of absentee ballot rules and o...
We know that most House seats remain within the same party over the course of a redistricting decade. For example, over 75% did so in the last decade. This gives rise to the question: “Why do some seats change hands and others not?” We seek to go beneath the standard answers (such as extent of electoral vulnerability as indicated by the previous vi...
Drawing on a comparison of the origins and effects of the electoral reforms in Italy and Japan in the early 1990s that led to the implementation of a mixed election system in both countries, we look at the extent to which changes in electoral systems are mere paper tigers in terms of having important impacts on party systems and ways of doing polit...
Drawing on insights about the geometric structure of majority rule spatial voting games with Euclidean preferences derived from the Shapley–Owen value (Shapley and Owen, Int J Game Theory 18:339–356, 1989), we seek to explain why the outcomes of experimental committee majority rule spatial voting games are overwhelmingly located within the uncovere...
This article examines strategic elements of voter behaviour in parliamentary elections where the voting method is a scoring rule other than plurality: the Borda Count, which is used for the election of ethnic minorities in Slovenia, and the Dowdall rule, which is used in the Pacific island state of Nauru in multi-seat districts. After first examini...
For a given distribution of voter ideal points, candidates may compete, not only by changing their policy platforms, but also by seeking to persuade voters to place more weight on one of the given dimensions. We do not examine persuasion mechanisms, per se, but, rather, investigate how change of the salience weights can lead to alternation of major...
This volume provides an important update to our current understanding of politics and the internet in a variety of new contexts, both geographically and institutionally. The subject of e-democracy has morphed over the years from speculative and optimistic accounts of a future heightened direct citizen involvement in political decision-making and an...
While there are many formal models that generate predictions about polarization, only a handful address the question of how, with no change in electoral rules, levels of polarization can dramatically vary over time, as they have in the US House during 150 years of two-party competition. We propose a model that emphasizes national party constraints...
The Banks set (1(4):295–306, 1985) is one of the more important concepts in voting theory since it tells us about the sophisticated outcomes of standard amendment voting procedures commonly in use throughout the English speaking world (and elsewhere as well). While the properties of the Banks set for finite voting games have been extensively studie...
We illustrate the power of “logical models” (Taagepera, 200730.
Taagepera, Rein (2007) Predicting Party Sizes: The Logic of Simple Electoral Systems (NewYork: Oxford University Press).[CrossRef]View all references) by offering a three-parameter model of the relationship between the effective number of parties and electoral turnout that makes use of...
Understanding the nature of political competition is a central issue in political economy. This paper offers an explanation for observed variation in the competitiveness of U.S. Senate elections since direct elections to the Senate became fully effective in 1922. We deliberately abstract away from candidate-specific factors to look at more general...
Decisions about voting rules can be regarded as one of the four most important choices structuring sociopolitical relationships, each of which has implications for ethnic representation, the central concern of this essay. Unlike the other three major choices-choosing between a unitary versus a federal system,1 choosing a parliamentary as opposed to...
Using the first dimension of DW nominate scores for the U.S. House and Senate over the period 1956-2004, we analyze how the degree of ideological polarization between the parties varies as a function of district ideology, defined in terms of Democratic presidential support in the district. We find, as expected, that the more Democratic-leaning the...
This paper is concerned with the effectiveness of Westminster parliamentary institutions in ensuring the stability of a nation’s public finances. Our starting point and major hypothesis is that the governance structure embodied in Canada’s parliamentary system has contributed importantly to the maintenance of fiscal stability. The fact that the Gov...