Mandates, Parties, and Voters: How Elections Shape the by James H Fowler

By James H Fowler

So much examine on two-party elections has thought of the end result as a unmarried, dichotomous occasion: both one or the opposite celebration wins. during this groundbreaking booklet, James Fowler and Oleg Smirnov examine no longer simply who wins, yet by means of how a lot, and so they marshal compelling proof that mandates-in the shape of margin of victory-matter. utilizing theoretical types, machine simulation, rigorously designed experiments, and empirical info, the authors convey that once an election the coverage positions of either events movement within the course most popular by way of the successful party-and they movement much more if the victory is big. moreover, Fowler and Smirnov not just exhibit that the divergence among the coverage positions of the events is maximum whilst the former election used to be shut, but in addition that coverage positions are additional inspired via electoral volatility and ideological polarization.

Show description

Read Online or Download Mandates, Parties, and Voters: How Elections Shape the Future (Social Logic of Politics) PDF

Similar elections books

Breaking the Deadlock: The 2000 Election, the Constitution, and the Courts

The 2000 Presidential election resulted in a collision of historical past, legislation, and the courts. It produced a impasse that dragged out the outcome for over a month, and consequences--real and imagined--that promise to tug on for years. within the first in-depth learn of the election and its litigious aftermath, pass judgement on Posner surveys the heritage and concept of yankee electoral legislations and perform, analyzes which Presidential candidate ''really'' gained the preferred vote in Florida, surveys the litigation that ensued, evaluates the courts, the attorneys, and the commentators, and ends with a blueprint for reforming our Presidential electoral practices.

Passages to the Presidency: From Campaigning to Governing

Examines the careers of 4 presidents and explores the ways that the political process is altering their position.

Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Competition

At the present time, electoral authoritarianism represents the commonest kind of political regime within the constructing international - and the only we all know least approximately. Filling within the lacuna, this new e-book offers state-of-the-art learn at the inner dynamics of electoral authoritarian regimes. each one concise, jargon-free bankruptcy addresses a particular empirical puzzle at the foundation of cautious cross-national comparability.

Armageddon: How Trump Can Beat Hillary

AT STAKE: the way forward for AMERICAThe 2016 election is really America's Armageddon—the final and decisive conflict to save lots of the USA, a struggle to defeat Hillary Clinton and the forces looking to flout our constitutional executive and change it with an omnipotent president subsidized up by way of an activist judiciary that solutions to not anyone.

Additional info for Mandates, Parties, and Voters: How Elections Shape the Future (Social Logic of Politics)

Sample text

Roemer (1997) provides a rigorous and not trivial proof that a unique equilibrium exists in the Wittman model. However, this model is usually too complicated to yield closed-form solutions for comparative statics analysis (Roemer 2001). The few models that can be solved in closed form rely on the assumption that the median voter's preference is exactly equidistant between the preferences of the two parties (symmetry). Without the symmetry assumption, however, the Wittman model cannot be solved in closed form.

74-75). Notice that the updated estimate of the location of the median voter is simply a weighted average of the prior belief and the new information obtained in the previous election. 4 The weights on these beliefs are the variances. If prior information is unreliable, then more weight is given to the new information yielded in the election. If electoral volatility is high, then more weight is given to the prior belief. This updating process assumes that the location of the median voter for the previous election, m, can be observed.

To understand how parties use mandates, we return to the literature on spatial political competition between two parties. Traditional models assume that parties care only about winning elections (Downs 1957; Davis, Hinich, H OW do • From Oleg Smirnov and James H. Fowler. 2007. Moving with the Mandate: Policy-Motivated Parties in Dynamic Political Competition. Journal of Theoretical Politics 19(1): 9-31. , ©2007; in production. Copyrighted Material 16 TWO and Ordeshook 1970). Wittman (1977) extends these models by assuming that parties also care about policy outcomes (see also Wittman 1983; Calvert 1985; Duggan and Fey 2005; Roemer 1997,2001).

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.64 of 5 – based on 10 votes