This paper presents a theory which rationalizes voting in terms of the marginal utility a citizen derives from contributing a small amount of effort in the political process when the cost of voting is small. Citizens abstain when the marginal cost of voting exceeds the marginal perceived...

In this paper, we construct a general probabilistic spatial theory of elections and examine sufficient conditions for equilibrium in two-candidate contests with expected vote-maximizing candidates. Given strict concavity of the candidate objective function, a unique equilibrium exists and the...

This essay constructs a very general model of an election campaign contributor's decision problem. This model permits one to assess the effects of three variables on the campaign contribution decision in two-candidate elections. These variables are: first, the level of the statutory contribution...

With the model of the electoral process described in Section 1, and a social welfare function defined by symmetrically weighting and summing individual utility functions, two factors, in addition to the density of preferences and the form of the weighting function, affect the performance of the...