In an RDD study of the incumbency effect, observations somewhat away from the threshold separating winners and losers in an election are necessarily employed. We consider how incorporating the vote volatility of elections into a preferred index of electoral competitiveness or closeness, in...

There are 833 thousand polling stations in all of the 543 parliamentary constituencies spread over 35 states of India. On the day elections are being held in any one of these polling stations, a minimum of 4 Central Police Force(CPF) personnel must be deployed there, to maintain law and order...

We study a Condorcet jury model where voters are driven both by passion (expressive motives) and by reason (instrumental motives). We show that arbitrarily small amounts of passion significantly affect equilibrium behavior and the optimal size of voting bodies. Increasing the size of voting...

Parties value unity, yet, members of parliament face competing demands, giving them incentives to deviate from the party line. For members of the European Parliament (MEPs), these competing demands are national party and European party group pressures. Here, we look at how MEPs respond to those...