Numerous papers by Public Choice oriented scholars and others have sought to test the hypothesis inspired by Downs (1957) that, ceteris paribus, turnout should be higher when elections are close. Most look in cross-sectional terms at variations in turnout at the constituency level for elections...

Controversy persists over the link between turnout and the likelihood of success of Democratic candidates (e.g., DeNardo, 1980, 1986; Zimmer, 1985; Tucker and Vedlitz, 1986; Piven and Cloward, 1988; Texeira, 1992; Radcliff, 1994, 1995; Erikson, 1995). The authors argue that the participants in this debate have largely...

Using data on non-presidential-year elections for governor and U.S. Senators in eight southern states over the period 1922– 1990, we provide a rational-choice-inspired model of the factors that should be expected to affect the relative levels of turnout in primaries as compared to general...

Given the fundamental unidimensionality in the data on Supreme Court voting patterns 1951-93 we observe, we are able to determine the identity of "median" members of each court in a fashion that does not require subjective coding of the extent to which particular cases reflect left-right issues....

We develop and test predictions about the factors determining the competitiveness of elections to the U.S. Senate. To do so, we deliberately abstract away from candidate-specific conditions that have often been used to study political competitiveness in order to focus on basic structural...

One paradox of voting states that, in a general election, in which many citizens vote, the probability that a single voter can affect the outcome is so small that in general citizens have no rational reason for voting. However, if all citizens accept this reasoning, then none will vote, and so...

We provide a natural extension of the Borda count to the n-dimensional spatial context, an algorithm to find the spatial Borda winner based on the notion of an inverse Borda count, the result that the Borda winner and the Condorcet winner coincide in unidimensional space when all alternatives on...