This volume provides an important update to our current understanding of politics and the internet in a variety of new contexts, both geographically and institutionally. The subject of e-democracy has morphed over the years from speculative and optimistic accounts of a future heightened direct citizen involvement in political decision-making and an increasingly withered state apparatus, to more prosaic investigations of party and governmental website content and micro level analyses of voters' online activities. Rather than levelling the communications and participation playing field, most studies concluded that existing patterns of bias and power distribution were being repeated online, with the one exception of a genuine change in the potential for protest and e-activism. Across all of these accounts, the question remains whether the internet is a levelling communication tool that elevates the profile of marginalised players in the political system, or whether it is a medium that simply reinforces existing power and participatory biases. While employing case studies from various global perspectives, this book investigates the role of digital media and competitive advantage, campaigns and the effect of social media, online communication as way of fomenting nonviolent revolutions and the undeniable and important role of the internet on democracy around the world.

Maurice Duverger is arguably the most distinguished French political scientist of the last century, but his major impact has, strangely enough, been largely in the English-speaking world. His book, Political Parties, first translated into English in 1954, has been very influential in both the party politics literature (which continues to make use of his typology of party organization) and in the electoral systems literature. His chief contributions there deal with what have come to be called in his honor Duverger s Law and Duverger s Hypothesis. The first argues that countries with plurality-based electoral methods will tend to become two-party systems; the second argues that countries using proportional representation (PR) methods will tend to become multi-party systems. Duverger also identifies specific mechanisms that will produce these effects, conventionally referred to as mechanical effects, and psychological effects . However, while Duverger s Hypothesis concerning the link between PR and multipartism is now widely accepted; the empirical evidence that plurality voting results in two-party systems is remarkably weak with the U.S. the most notable exception.

The chapters in this volume consider national-level evidence for the operation of Duverger s law in the world s largest, longest-lived and most successful democracies of Britain, Canada, India and the United States. One set of papers involves looking at the overall evidence for Duverger s Law in these countries; the other set deals with evidence for the mechanical and incentive effects predicted by Duverger. The result is an incisive analysis of electoral and party dynamics."

With the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the right of minorities to register and vote was largely secured. It was soon discovered, however, that minority voting did not guarantee the election of minorities or minority-preferred candidates. Indeed, efforts by states and localities in the second half of the 1960s were aimed at denying any substantial minority representation to go along with the ability to cast ballots. Eventually congressional amendments to the Act along with the Supreme Court opinion in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986) have led to efforts to eliminate electoral laws that have the effect of diluting the minority vote, whether or not they were enacted with discriminatory intent. Controversy still surrounds the matter of minority representation, however, because of the ambiguity of certain aspects of the law and because of problems in applying it to the largely single-member district context of the 1990s. This book is the most up-to-date treatment of voting rights law and the numerous controversies surrounding minority representation. The authors have extensive, firsthand experience in both the legal battles and the scholarly examination of these issues. Based on this wealth of experience, they describe the development of the law after 1965, discuss in detail the prevailing Supreme Court interpretation of the Voting Rights Act, and examine discrepancies in federal court interpretations of subsequent actions. They also introduce the reader to technical procedures for establishing standards of representation and measuring discrimination. In the final two chapters, they consider the application of voting rights law to districting in the 1990s along with the implicationsof recent developments for the future of representation in America.

In developing Legislative Term Limits, the editor has included material that has explicit and testable models about the expected consequences of term limits that reflect Public Choice perspectives. This book contains the best efforts of economists and political scientists to predict the consequences of legislative term limits.

This book tells the story of how the way in which we conduct elections has changed after the Florida recount litigation of 2000. Some of the nation's leading experts look at various aspects of election administration, including issues of ballot format, changes in registration procedures, the growth in the availability of absentee ballot rules and other forms of convenience voting, and changes in the technology used to record our votes. They also look at how the Bush v. Gore decision has been used by courts that monitor the election process and at the consequences of changes in practice for levels of invalid ballots, magnitude of racial disparities in voting, voter turnout, and access to the ballot by those living outside the United States. The editors, in their introduction, also consider the normative question of exactly what we want a voting system to do. An epilogue by two leading election law specialists looks at how election administration and election contest issues played out in the 2012 presidential election."

Behavioral Social Choice looks at the probabilistic foundations of collective decision-making rules. The authors challenge much of the existing theoretical wisdom about social choice processes, and seek to restore faith in the possibility of democratic decision-making. In particular, they argue that worries about the supposed prevalence of majority rule cycles that would preclude groups from reaching a final decision about what alternative they prefer have been greatly overstated. In practice, majority rule can be expected to work well in most real-world settings. Furthermore, if there is a problem, they show that the problem is more likely to be one of sample estimates missing the majority winner in a close contest (e.g., Bush-Gore) than a problem about cycling. The authors also provide new mathematical tools to estimate the prevalence of cycles as a function of sample size and insights into how alternative model specifications can change our estimates of social orderings.

In the modern era, representation is the hallmark of democracy, and electoral rules structure how representation works and how effectively governments perform. Moreover, of the key structural variables in constitutional design, it is the choice of electoral system that is usually the most open to change. There are three distinctive approaches to electoral system research. One, associated largely with economics, involves the study of electoral system effects through the deductive method, using mathematical tools to derive theorems about the properties of voting methods and behaviors. A second, associated largely with political science, has a primarily empirical focus, and looks in depth at how electoral rules impact on political outcomes, through large cross-sectional or case studies. A third, and more recent tradition, inspired largely by work in experimental economics, involves experimentation, either in the form of controlled laboratory experiments or in the form of in situ field studies. This volume employs the third approach to report on experiments that look at alternatives to the present two round (majority runoff) system used for the election of French presidents. This system is of considerable importance not just because of its use in France but also because of its wide adoption in presidential elections in new democracies, such as Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Russia and Ukraine. The editors have assembled the top experimental economists and political scientists specializing in French politics to provide in-depth analysis of the double ballot electoral system, and, more broadly, of the effect of electoral rules on the number of candidates, voter strategies, and ideological choice. Ultimately, the editors and contributors argue that experimental methods have great potential to inform our understanding of institutional mechanisms in the context of voting behavior.

This book provides an overview of the nascent field of "information pooling and group judgmental accuracy." The contributors to this volume include mathematical psychologists, economists, social psychologists, political scientists, and statisticians. The book is organised around five review essays: one on information pooling from the perspective of models of individual judgment (Batchelder), one on information pooling and group judgment (Grofman and Owen), one on group judgment in applied settings (Hastie), and one on organisational design (Radner). Along with the review essays discussant comments are also provided which elaborate on points not covered in the essays. While the focus of these papers is largely theoretical and abstract, the subject of information pooling and optimal group judgment is clearly one of great practical importance and is directly relevant to issues of policy choice and organisational structure.

In the early 1990s, major electoral reforms took place in both Italy and Japan; each replaced a form of "proportional representation" (in which voters cast a ballot for a party list) with a "mixed member" system (in which voters cast ballots for individual candidates and party lists). The reforms were enacted by political elites in the context of divisions within the dominant party, changing patterns of party support, and party splits, in efforts to retain power while responding to charges of corruption, clientelism, and lack of accountability. The experiences of both countries provide a laboratory in which to investigate the effects and implications of the reforms, and, more broadly to analyze voter behavior in the context of institutional change. The introduction provides an overview of post-WWII politics and electoral reform in Italy and Japan. In each of the next four chapters, specialists in Italian and Japanese electoral politics are teamed up to review data both before and after the reforms. Within this comparative framework, the authors explore such topics as changes in party competition, candidate selection mechanisms, and intra-party politics. The concluding chapter considers the longer-term consequences-both anticipated and unanticipated-of the reforms; despite superficially similar conditions, the effects in the two countries were dramatically different: in Japan, the new system has taken hold, with minor modifications, while in Italy, there was a reversion to a proportional representation system. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, to understand why similar reforms had such different effects in the two countries we must examine how electoral systems are embedded in broader institutional and social arrangements, and at the complex interplay of political geography, political history, and the rational calculations of political actors.

This book tells the story of how the way in which we conduct elections has changed after the Florida recount litigation of 2000. Some of the nation's leading experts look at various aspects of election administration, including issues of ballot format, changes in registration procedures, the growth in the availability of absentee ballot rules and other forms of convenience voting, and changes in the technology used to record our votes. They also look at how the Bush v. Gore decision has been used by courts that monitor the election process and at the consequences of changes in practice for levels of invalid ballots, magnitude of racial disparities in voting, voter turnout, and access to the ballot by those living outside the United States. The editors, in their introduction, also consider the normative question of exactly what we want a voting system to do. An epilogue by two leading election law specialists looks at how election administration and election contest issues played out in the 2012 presidential election."

This volume provides an important update to our current understanding of politics and the internet in a variety of new contexts, both geographically and institutionally. The subject of e-democracy has morphed over the years from speculative and optimistic accounts of a future heightened direct citizen involvement in political decision-making and an increasingly withered state apparatus, to more prosaic investigations of party and governmental website content and micro level analyses of voters’ online activities. Rather than levelling the communications and participation playing field, most studies concluded that existing patterns of bias and power distribution were being repeated online, with the one exception of a genuine change in the potential for protest and e-activism. Across all of these accounts, the question remains whether the internet is a levelling communication tool that elevates the profile of marginalised players in the political system, or whether it is a medium that simply reinforces existing power and participatory biases. While employing case studies from various global perspectives, this book investigates the role of digital media and competitive advantage, campaigns and the effect of social media, online communication as way of fomenting nonviolent revolutions and the undeniable and important role of the internet on democracy around the world.

Extreme polarization in American politics—and especially in the U.S. Congress—is perhaps the most confounding political phenomenon of our time. This book binds together polarization in Congress and polarization in the electorate within an ever-expanding feedback loop. This loop is powered by the discipline exerted by the respective political parties on their Congressional members and district candidates and endorsed by the voters in each Congressional district who must choose between the alternatives offered. These alternatives are just as extreme in competitive as in lop-sided districts. Tight national party discipline produces party delegations in Congress that are widely separated from one another but each ideologically narrowly distributed. As district constituencies become more polarized and are egged on by activists, parties are further motivated to move past a threshold and appeal to their respective bases rather than to voters in the ideological center. America has indeed acquired parties with clear platforms—once thought to be a desirable goal—but these parties are now feuding camps. What resolution might there be? Just as the progressive movement slowly replaced the Gilded Age, might a new reform effort replace the current squabble? Or could an asymmetry develop in the partisan constraints that would lead to ascendancy of the center, or might a new and over-riding issue generate a cross-cutting dimension, opening the door to a new politics? Only the future will tell.

In the early 1990s, major electoral reforms took place in both Italy and Japan; each replaced a form of "proportional representation" (in which voters cast a ballot for a party list) with a "mixed member" system (in which voters cast ballots for individual candidates and party lists). The reforms were enacted by political elites in the context of divisions within the dominant party, changing patterns of party support, and party splits, in efforts to retain power while responding to charges of corruption, clientelism, and lack of accountability. The experiences of both countries provide a laboratory in which to investigate the effects and implications of the reforms, and, more broadly to analyze voter behavior in the context of institutional change. The introduction provides an overview of post-WWII politics and electoral reform in Italy and Japan. In each of the next four chapters, specialists in Italian and Japanese electoral politics are teamed up to review data both before and after the reforms. Within this comparative framework, the authors explore such topics as changes in party competition, candidate selection mechanisms, and intra-party politics. The concluding chapter considers the longer-term consequences-both anticipated and unanticipated-of the reforms; despite superficially similar conditions, the effects in the two countries were dramatically different: in Japan, the new system has taken hold, with minor modifications, while in Italy, there was a reversion to a proportional representation system. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, to understand why similar reforms had such different effects in the two countries we must examine how electoral systems are embedded in broader institutional and social arrangements, and at the complex interplay of political geography, political history, and the rational calculations of political actors.

In the modern era, representation is the hallmark of democracy, and electoral rules structure how representation works and how effectively governments perform. Moreover, of the key structural variables in constitutional design, it is the choice of electoral system that is usually the most open to change. There are three distinctive approaches to electoral system research. One, associated largely with economics, involves the study of electoral system effects through the deductive method, using mathematical tools to derive theorems about the properties of voting methods and behaviors. A second, associated largely with political science, has a primarily empirical focus, and looks in depth at how electoral rules impact on political outcomes, through large cross-sectional or case studies. A third, and more recent tradition, inspired largely by work in experimental economics, involves experimentation, either in the form of controlled laboratory experiments or in the form of in situ field studies. This volume employs the third approach to report on experiments that look at alternatives to the present two round (majority runoff) system used for the election of French presidents. This system is of considerable importance not just because of its use in France but also because of its wide adoption in presidential elections in new democracies, such as Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Russia and Ukraine. The editors have assembled the top experimental economists and political scientists specializing in French politics to provide in-depth analysis of the double ballot electoral system, and, more broadly, of the effect of electoral rules on the number of candidates, voter strategies, and ideological choice. Ultimately, the editors and contributors argue that experimental methods have great potential to inform our understanding of institutional mechanisms in the context of voting behavior.

In developing Legislative Term Limits, the editor has included material that has explicit and testable models about the expected consequences of term limits that reflect Public Choice perspectives. This book contains the best efforts of economists and political scientists to predict the consequences of legislative term limits.

Maurice Duverger is arguably the most distinguished French political scientist of the last century, but his major impact has, strangely enough, been largely in the English-speaking world. His book, Political Parties, first translated into English in 1954, has been very influential in both the party politics literature (which continues to make use of his typology of party organization) and in the electoral systems literature. His chief contributions there deal with what have come to be called in his honor Duverger's Law and Duverger's Hypothesis. The first argues that countries with plurality-based electoral methods will tend to become two-party systems; the second argues that countries using proportional representation (PR) methods will tend to become multi-party systems. Duverger also identifies specific mechanisms that will produce these effects, conventionally referred to as "mechanical effects," and "psychological effects." However, while Duverger's Hypothesis concerning the link between PR and multipartism is now widely accepted; the empirical evidence that plurality voting results in two-party systems is remarkably weak-with the U.S. the most notable exception.

The chapters in this volume consider national-level evidence for the operation of Duverger's law in the world's largest, longest-lived and most successful democracies of Britain, Canada, India and the United States. One set of papers involves looking at the overall evidence for Duverger's Law in these countries; the other set deals with evidence for the mechanical and incentive effects predicted by Duverger. The result is an incisive analysis of electoral and party dynamics.

Behavioral Social Choice looks at the probabilistic foundations of collective decision-making rules. The authors challenge much of the existing theoretical wisdom about social choice processes, and seek to restore faith in the possibility of democratic decision-making. In particular, they argue that worries about the supposed prevalence of majority rule cycles that would preclude groups from reaching a final decision about what alternative they prefer have been greatly overstated. In practice, majority rule can be expected to work well in most real-world settings. Furthermore, if there is a problem, they show that the problem is more likely to be one of sample estimates missing the majority winner in a close contest (e.g., Bush-Gore) than a problem about cycling. The authors also provide new mathematical tools to estimate the prevalence of cycles as a function of sample size and insights into how alternative model specifications can change our estimates of social orderings.

This book integrates spatial and behavioral perspectives - in a word, those of the Rochester and Michigan schools - into a unified theory of voter choice and party strategy. The theory encompasses both policy and non-policy factors, effects of turnout, voter discounting of party promises, expectations of coalition governments, and party motivations based on policy as well as office. Optimal (Nash equilibrium) strategies are determined for alternative models for presidential elections in the US and France, and for parliamentary elections in Britain and Norway. These polities cover a wide range of electoral rules, number of major parties, and governmental structures. The analyses suggest that the more competitive parties generally take policy positions that come close to maximizing their electoral support, and that these vote-maximizing positions correlate strongly with the mean policy positions of their supporters.

Professors Merrill and Grofman develop a unified model that incorporates voter motivations and assesses its empirical predictions--for both voter choice and candidate strategy--in the United States, Norway, and France. The analyses show that a combination of proximity, direction, discounting, and party ID are compatible with the mildly but not extremely divergent policies that are characteristic of many two-party and multiparty electorates. All of these motivations are necessary to understand the linkage between candidate issue positions and voter preferences.

Extreme polarization in American politics—and especially in the U.S. Congress—is perhaps the most confounding political phenomenon of our time. This book binds together polarization in Congress and polarization in the electorate within an ever-expanding feedback loop. This loop is powered by the discipline exerted by the respective political parties on their Congressional members and district candidates and endorsed by the voters in each Congressional district who must choose between the alternatives offered. These alternatives are just as extreme in competitive as in lop-sided districts. Tight national party discipline produces party delegations in Congress that are widely separated from one another but each ideologically narrowly distributed. As district constituencies become more polarized and are egged on by activists, parties are further motivated to move past a threshold and appeal to their respective bases rather than to voters in the ideological center. America has indeed acquired parties with clear platforms—once thought to be a desirable goal—but these parties are now feuding camps. What resolution might there be? Just as the progressive movement slowly replaced the Gilded Age, might a new reform effort replace the current squabble? Or could an asymmetry develop in the partisan constraints that would lead to ascendancy of the center, or might a new and over-riding issue generate a cross-cutting dimension, opening the door to a new politics? Only the future will tell.

American democracy differs greatly from other democracies around the world. But is the American way more or less efficacious than comparable democracies in Asia, Latin America, or Europe? What if the United States had a prime minister instead of (or in addition to) a president, or if it had three or more parties in Congress instead of two? Would there be more partisan animosity and legislative gridlock or less? These are the kinds of questions that thinking about U.S. government in comparative perspective helps us to analyze. This valuable contribution to political studies takes a unique approach to a much-studied subject, looking at the U.S. government from a comparative point of view. Four distinguished scholars in the field examine the Constitution, the two-party system, the division of power between state and federal governments, and other major features of the American political system in terms of how they differ from other democracies, and they explore what those differences ultimately mean for democratic performance. By merging two important fields of study, American government and comparative political systems, this essential text offers a new and refreshingly insightful view of American exceptionalism.

This book integrates spatial and behavioral perspectives - in a word, those of the Rochester and Michigan schools - into a unified theory of voter choice and party strategy. The theory encompasses both policy and non-policy factors, effects of turnout, voter discounting of party promises, expectations of coalition governments, and party motivations based on policy as well as office. Optimal (Nash equilibrium) strategies are determined for alternative models for presidential elections in the US and France, and for parliamentary elections in Britain and Norway. These polities cover a wide range of electoral rules, number of major parties, and governmental structures. The analyses suggest that the more competitive parties generally take policy positions that come close to maximizing their electoral support, and that these vote-maximizing positions correlate strongly with the mean policy positions of their supporters.

Professors Merrill and Grofman develop a unified model that incorporates voter motivations and assesses its empirical predictions--for both voter choice and candidate strategy--in the United States, Norway, and France. The analyses show that a combination of proximity, direction, discounting, and party ID are compatible with the mildly but not extremely divergent policies that are characteristic of many two-party and multiparty electorates. All of these motivations are necessary to understand the linkage between candidate issue positions and voter preferences.

This book provides an up-to-date analysis of American voting rights law and the numerous controversies surrounding minority representation. Written by authors with first-hand experience in the case law, the book details the evolution of the law and precedent from 1965 onwards. The authors explain the logic underlying the major decisions, introduce the reader to the procedures for establishing standards of representation and measuring discrimination, and discuss the major points of recent contention. In conclusion, they address the implications of recent developments in voting rights law for the future of representation in America.

Elections are the means by which democratic nations determine their leaders, and communication in the context of elections has the potential to shape people's beliefs, attitudes, and actions. Thus, electoral persuasion is one of the most important political processes in any nation that regularly holds elections. Moreover, electoral persuasion encompasses not only what happens in an election but also what happens before and after, involving candidates, parties, interest groups, the media, and the voters themselves. This volume surveys the vast political science literature on this subject, emphasizing contemporary research and topics and encouraging cross-fertilization among research strands. A global roster of authors provides a broad examination of electoral persuasion, with international perspectives complementing deep coverage of U.S. politics. Major areas of coverage include: general models of political persuasion; persuasion by parties, candidates, and outside groups; media influence; interpersonal influence; electoral persuasion across contexts; and empirical methodologies for understanding electoral persuasion.