Empirical research reports conflicting conclusions about whether primary election voters strategically account for candidates’ general election prospects when casting their votes. We model the strategic calculations of office-seeking candidates facing two-stage elections beginning with a...

Several recent spatial modeling studies incorporate valence issues—e.g., voters’ evaluations of the candidates’ competence, integrity, and charisma—that may give one of the candidates an electoral advantage that is independent of his policy positions. However to date all such models...

Advocates of consensual political institutions, i.e. institutions that promote compromise and powersharing among political parties, claim that these institutions promote moderation in government policy outputs. To date, however, there exists little research – either theoretical or empirical...

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...

Saari and Van Newenhizen (1987) misinterpret their findings about the indeterminacy of voting systems: far from being a vice, indeterminacy is a virtue in allowing voters to be more responsive to, and robbing them of the incentive to misrepresent, their preferences. The responsiveness of...

This essay evaluates six single-winner, multicandidate electoral systems with respect to their tendency to choose Condorcet candidates. To this end I calibrate a logistic multiple regression model from Monte Carlo simulations, based on a multivariate normal spatial model, in which I vary the...

We have seen that under the assumptions of this study the problem of maximizing a voter's total utility for a number of one-stage decision rules for multi-candidate elections may be specified as linear (or quadratic) programs. Potentially optimal strategies emerge as extreme points of the...