Bernard Grofman

Electoral laws and their political consequences

electoral laws and their political consequences agathon electoral laws and their political consequences agathon series on representation bernard grofman on amazon com free shipping on qualifying offers the aim of this book is to provide an overview of recent research on electoral laws and their political consequences by scholars who have helped shape the field after several decades of virtual neglect except for douglas rae s seminal work, holdings electoral laws and their political consequences electoral laws and their political consequences edited by bernard grofman and arend lijphart jf 1001 e388 1986 electoral participation a comparative analysis edited by richard rose, electoral laws and their political consequences electoral laws and their political consequences grofman bernard and arend lijphart eds electoral laws and their political consequences new york agathon press 1986 feel free to contribute with a summary under comments, electoral laws and their political consequences google books electoral laws and their political consequences electoral laws and their political consequences bernard grofman arend lijphart limited preview 2003 bibliographic information title electoral laws and their political consequences volume 1 of representation series representation vol 1, electoral laws and their political consequences bernard the university of chicago press books division chicago distribution center, electoral laws and their political consequences google books his edited and co edited books include choosing an electoral system praeger 1984 electoral laws and their political consequences agathon press 1986 and parliamentary versus presidential government oxford university press 1992 he has also published numerous articles in leading journals on comparative politics and democratic theory, electoral laws and their political consequences electoral laws and their political consequences author unknown subject electoral laws and their political consequences keywords unknown electoral laws and their political consequences created date 8 2

Thirteen theorems in search of the truth

We review recent work on the accuracy of group judgmental processes as a function of (a) the competences (judgmental accuracies) of individual group members, (b) the group decision procedure, and (c) group size. This work on individual competence and group accuracy represents an important contribution to democratic theory and a useful complement to the usual emphasis in the social choice literature on individual preference and preference aggregation mechanisms. The work reported on is rooted in a tradition which goes back to scholars such as Condorcet, Poisson, and Bayes.

Modeling Negative Campaigning

Negative campaigning is an important aspect of campaign competition but plays little or no role in existing models of campaigns. Within the context of plurality elections for a single office we model the incentives that affect the use of negative campaigning. Under simplifying but still quite general assumptions we show a number of results, including the following key conclusions: (1) for two-candidate competition the front-runner will engage in more positive and less negative campaigning than the opponent; (2) in a three-candidate contest with one candidate clearly trailing by a large margin and playing mainly a spoiler role, that candidate will only engage in positive campaigning; and (3) in any three-candidate contest, no candidate engages in negative campaigning against the weaker of his two opponents, so that to the extent there is negative campaigning, it will be directed against the front-runner or it will come from the front-runner. These results have direct empirical applications to multicandidate primaries and nonpartisan contests and can provide insight into recent general elections as well.

Optimizing group judgmental accuracy in the presence of interdependencies

AbstractConsider a group of people confronted with a dichotomous choice (for example, a yes or no decision). Assume that we can characterize each person by a probability, pi, of making the ‘better’ of the two choices open to the group, such that we define ‘better’ in terms of some linear ordering of the alternatives. If individual choices are independent, and if the a priori likelihood that either of the two choices is correct is one half, we show that the group decision procedure that maximizes the likelihood that the group will make the better of the two choices open to it is a weighted voting rule that assigns weights, wi, such that

The Neglected Role of the Status Quo in Models of Issue Voting

w_i \propto \log \frac{{p_i }} {{1 - p_i }}.

Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965-1990.

We then examine the implications for optimal group choice of interdependencies among individual choices.

The Strange Case of Relative Gratification and Potential for Political Violence: The V-Curve Hypothesis

The view that congressional committees tend to be biased subsets of their parent chambers provides the foundations for a substantial body of theoretical literature on distributive politics and legislative structure. More recent revisionist work suggests that committees composed of preference outliers are in fact rare. We reject the categorical account of preference outliers a priori and elaborate conditions under which committees should be unrepresentative of their parent chambers. We argue that the most widely available and frequently used data—floor roll call votes—are inappropriate to the task of assessing outlier predictions in any form. Finally, we conduct a differentiated set of hypothesis tests within one policy jurisdiction to illustrate the characteristics of evidence and analysis necessary to evaluate alternative theoretical accounts of legislative organization. The appearance of policy-relevant biases in congressional work groups, we conclude, is not so much rare as it is conditional, and we suggest several conditions on which future models of legislative organization should build.

An Introduction to Crisp Set QCA, with a Comparison to Binary Logistic Regression

We offer a spatial model of voter choice based on the directionality and magnitude of expected shifts from the status quo. In this model citizens do not look merely at the positions (platforms) of the parties/candidates, but also at how successful potential officeholders are likely to be in implementing changes from the present status quo in the direction they intend. We argue that our model is more faithful in spirit to Downss (1957) work than the standard operationalization and, more importantly, that it enables us to account for long-run dynamics of electoral politics in which, because of shifts in the location of the status quo, voter choices may change even though party locations and voter ideal points remain unchanged. Moreover, it leads to ideas for improving the operationalization of issue-voting models.