Among those advocating the use of particular electoralmechanisms to reduce the prospects for conflict and strengthendemocracy in societies that are deeply divided in ethnic orreligious terms, there are two main approaches, one associatedwith Arend Lijphart, one with Donald Horowitz....

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....

Regenwetter and Grofman [17] offer a probabilistic generalization of Sen's [25, 27] classic value restriction condition when individual preferences are linear orders. They provide necessary and sufficient conditions for transitive majority preferences on linear orders. They call these conditions...

In this paper we introduce harmonic analysis (Fourier series) as a tool for characterizing the existence of Nash equilibria in two-dimensional spatial majority rule voting games with large electorates. We apply our methods both to traditional proximity models and to directional models. In the...

The Laakso-Taagepera index (Laakso and Taagepera, 1979) has become the most commonly used measure to specify the ‘effective’number of political parties in a party system where parties vary substantially in their vote and/or seat shares. It is well known that the Laakso-Taagepera...

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...

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...

The distinguished authors in this volume address the fundamental causes for such heterogeneous international experiences, placing particular emphasis on the role of institutions. They demonstrate how the study of economic development is increasingly linked to the development of institutions,...