In the citizen-candidate approach each citizen chooses whether or not to run as candidate. In this paper we find that the strategic entry-exit decision of the candidates eliminates one of the most undesirable properties of Plurality rule, namely to elect a poor candidate in three-candidate...

Plurality rule, when applied to a fixed agenda setting, is mostly criticized from being capable of choosing an alternative considered as worst by a strict majority. In this paper we consider an endogenous agenda setting with no more than three alternatives. In those equilibria where the...

A high court has to decide whether a law is constitutional, un- constitutional, or interpretable. The voting system is runoff. Runoff voting systems can be interpreted both, as social choice functions or as mechanisms. It is known that, for universal domains of preferences, runoff voting systems...

The top-two primary is the new primary system passed in several states of the US that creates a single ballot in which the top two vote getters pass to the general election. Primary elections induce a sequential game with three stages: the candidate-entry stage, the primary election stage, and...

Parliamentary elections to the Basque Autonomous Community have a stable multi-party system that regularly produces long-lived minority and coalition governments. More amazing still, this stable party system arises in the context of a complex social and political setting in which the society...

We present a framework to analyze the relative importance of issues for the electorate. We distinguish two concepts -- issue salience and issue divisiveness -- and present those in the context of the multidimensional spatial model. Issue salience, which is widely studied in empirical and...

The top-two primary recently approved in states like Washington, California, and Alaska eliminates the closed party primaries and creates instead a single ballot in which the first and second place winners pass to the general election. We compare the electoral consequences of the top-two primary...

This paper studies two widely used models of political competition – citizen-candidate and probabilistic voting – to investigate the impact that asymmetries in single-peaked preferences have on two-party electoral competition. In a two-candidate equilibrium of the citizen–candidate model,...

We explore to what extent we can propose fixed negotiation rules as well as simple mechanisms (or protocols) that guarantee that political parties can form stable coalition-governments. We analyze the case where three parties can hold office in the form of two-party coalitions. We define the...