This volume brings together eight original essays designed to provide an overview of developments in spatial voting theory in the past ten years. The topics covered are: spatial competition with possible entry by new candidates; the "heresthetical" manipulation of vote outcomes; candidates with policy preferences; experimental testing of spatial models; probabilistic voting; voting on alternatives with predictive power; elections with more than two candidates under different election systems; and agenda-setting behavior in voting. Leading scholars in these areas summarize the major results of their own and other's work, providing self-contained discussions that will apprise readers of important recent advances.

"The central feature of democracy is that the will of the people determines the policies enacted by the government. In representative democracies such as the United States, citizens influence the government primarily through voting in elections. The success of democratic governance, therefore, rests in large part on the ability of citizens to select leaders who will act in accordance with their policy preferences. In the end, a government lives up to this democratic ideal (or doesn't) through the enactment of specific policies. How, then, do citizens' votes relate to their preferences over government policy outputs? What intervening factors either assist or interfere with voters' selection of candidates who espouse views closest to their own? Understanding the relationship between citizens' policy views and their voting behavior is central to the evaluation of elections and of democratic governance more generally. This book studies the opinions of ordinary citizens on specific policies and the relationships between these policy views and people's vote choices in presidential elections. Specifically, I focus on testing the empirical implications of spatial theories of voting, which, in their simplest form, assume that each citizen's policy views can be represented by a location on some liberal-conservative policy spectrum, with candidates in a given election each taking a position on this same dimension. Each voter then casts his or her ballot for the candidate whose position is closest to the voter's own ideological location"-- Provided by publisher.

Most theories of elections assume that voters and political actors are fully rational. This title provides a behavioral theory of elections based on the notion that all actors - politicians as well as voters - are only boundedly rational.

This book presents a simple geometric model of voting as a tool to analyze parliamentary roll call data. Each legislator is represented by one point and each roll call is represented by two points that correspond to the policy consequences of voting Yea or Nay. On every roll call each legislator votes for the closer outcome point, at least probabilistically. These points form a spatial map that summarizes the roll calls. In this sense a spatial map is much like a road map because it visually depicts the political world of a legislature. The closeness of two legislators on the map shows how similar their voting records are, and the distribution of legislators shows what the dimensions are. These maps can be used to study a wide variety of topics including how political parties evolve over time, the existence of sophisticated voting and how an executive influences legislative outcomes.

Both theoretical and empirical aspects of single- and multi-winner voting procedures are presented in this collection of papers. Starting from a discussion of the underlying principles of democratic representation, the volume includes a description of a great variety of voting procedures. It lists and illustrates their susceptibility to the main voting paradoxes, assesses (under various models of voters' preferences) the probability of paradoxical outcomes, and discusses the relevance of the theoretical results to the choice of voting system.

How much influence do citizens have to control the government? What guides voters at election time? Why do governments survive? How do institutions modify the power of the people over politicians? The book combines academic analytical rigor with comparative analysis to identify how much information voters must have to select a politician for office, or for holding a government accountable; whether parties in power can help voters to control their governments; how different institutional arrangements influence voters' control; why politicians choose particular electoral systems; and what economic and social conditions may undermine not only governments, but democracy. Arguments are backed by vast macro and micro empirical evidence. There are cross-country comparisons and survey analyses of many countries. In every case there has been an attempt to integrate analytical arguments and empirical research. The goal is to shed new light on perplexing questions of positive democratic theory.

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.

A pioneering effort to integrate ideology with formal political theory

The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics are the essential guide to the study of American political life in the 21st Century. With engaging contributions from the major figures in the field The Oxford Handbook of American Elections and Political Behavior provides the key point of reference for anyone working in American Politics today

As the last decade has shown, ideological polarization in Congress has reached historic levels. Yet, spatial theory has become increasingly important for how scholars understand Congress and legislative elections. In spatial models, candidates select positions along an ideological spectrum, and voters choose candidates based on those locations. However, the central tendency of these models is for the candidates to converge to the location of the median voter, so polarization has become increasingly problematic for spatial theory, even as scholars have come to rely increasingly on these models. In Incremental Polarization, Justin Buchler provides a unified spatial model of legislative elections, parties, and roll call voting to explain the development of polarization in Congress. His model moves beyond elections and factors in legislators' roll call voting, where a different but related spatial process operates. By linking these models, Incremental Polarization fills a critical gap in our understanding of the strategic, electoral, and procedural roots of polarization-and the role that parties play in the process.