In this paper we prove theoretically and demonstrate empirically that all existing measures of incumbency advantage in the congressional elections literature are biased or inconsistent. We then provide an unbiased estimator based on a very simple linear regression model. We apply this new method to congressional elections since 1900, providing the first evidence of a positive incumbency advantage in the first half of the century.

e propose a comprehensive statistical model for analyzing multiparty, district-level elections. This model, which provides a tool for comparative politics research analogous to that which regression analysis provides in the American two-party context, can be used to explain or predict how geographic distributions of electoral results depend upon economic conditions, neighborhood ethnic compositions, campaign spending, and other features of the election campaign or aggregate areas. We also provide new graphical representations for data exploration, model evaluation, and substantive interpretation. We illustrate the use of this model by attempting to resolve a controversy over the size of and trend in the electoral advantage of incumbency in Britain. Contraiy to previous analyses, all based on measures now known to be biased, we demonstrate that the advantage is small but meaningfkl, varies substantially across the parties, and is not growing. Finally, we show how to estimate the party from which each party's advantage is predominantly drawn. w e propose the first internally consistent statistical model for analyzing multiparty, districtlevel aggregate election data. Our model can

Although integrating multiple levels of data into an analysis can often yield better inferences about the phenomenon under study, traditional methodologies used to combine multiple levels of data are problematic. In this paper, we discuss several methodologies under the rubric of multilevel analysis. Multilevel methods, we argue, provide researchers, particularly researchers using comparative data, substantial leverage in overcoming the typical problems associated with either ignoring multiple levels of data, or problems associated with combining lower-level and higher-level data (including overcoming implicit assumptions of fixed and constant effects). The paper discusses several variants of the multilevel model and provides an application of individual-level support for European integration using comparative political data from Western Europe.

This paper examines the relationship between the legislature and the public administration in postwar Italy (understood as the period from about 1948 through 1994). Italian public administration is normally characterized as poorly designed and ine#cient. A principal-agent framework would lead one to believe that political control of the bureaucracy was inadequate in Italy, and that extensive bureaucratic slippage must have existed. Drawing on an alternative model originally elaborated to study bureaucratic ine#- ciency in the United States, I argue instead that Italian legislators exercised adequate control over the bureaucracy, and that the characteristics of the system to elicit such severe public disapprobation were e#ects of practices -- especially the extensive use of political patronage -- that had been deliberately designed to enhance the reelection opportunities of parliamentary incumbents. I interpret political patronage as the individuization of benefits that are usually allo...

Using a two-stage game model, with the second stage being a system of ordinary differential equations, I argue that candidates, political parties and financial contributors interact strategically in American congressional elections in a way that is inherently nonlinear. The nonlinearity explains longstanding anomalies in the congressional elections literature regarding candidate finances, district service and votes for the incumbent. Congressional races in which the incumbent faces a challenge are generated by dynamical systems that have Hopf and saddle connection bifurcations. A small change in the challenger's quality or in the type of district service can change a stable incumbent advantage into a race with growing oscillations in which the incumbent's chances are uncertain. Normal form equations from local bifurcation theory, and topological considerations, motivate a statistical model that can recover qualitative features of the dynamics from cross-sectional data. I estimate and test the model using district-level data from the 1984 and 1986 U.S. House election periods for political action committee campaign contributions, intergovernmental transfers and general election vote shares.

This paper examines the collapse of the Italian postwar party system in 1992, and documents that international economic factors contributed significantly to the end of Christian Democratic hegemony. The paper speculates that the reason may be that the prospect of European monetary integration changed the preferences of important social groups in Italy so that they came to favor a change of regime in order to obtain significant changes in public policy. The paper proposes three channels of transmission from the international environment to domestic political change: an electoral channel, a party channel, and an interest group channel. I examine the first with a statistical analysis of the impact of trade openness on the extent of the DC vote loss in 1992, documenting that trade openness was a significant determinant of the DC's change in vote share across Italy's electoral districts. Likewise, I show that the share of votes going to the Northern League was significantly related to exposure to int...

This work attempts to refocus the discussion about strategic voting from its narrow focus on single-member district systems. It provides several contribution to the literature on strategic voting, ticket-splitting and on electoral systems. My first contribution is to allow the electoral institutions to vary, thereby opening up the possibility to provide di#erent incentives to operate at the same time for the same voter. I o#er a theory that particular institutions not only determine the degree of strategic voting, but also the kind of strategies voters employ. In mixed electoral systems strategic voting has two facets. Strategic voters employ either a wasted-vote strategy or a coalition insurance strategy. My second contribution is to provide evidence that people vary in their proclivity to vote strategically, as determined by various motivational factors as well as their capability to comprehend the strategic implications that are o#ered by particular electoral rules. Evidence supporting these contributions is stemming from an appropriate choice-model using individual-level data from the 1998 German National Election Study.

Scholars disagree on what effect, if any, presidential versus parliamentary government has on political parties. In this paper, I measure unity in parties on legislative votes for parties and coalitions in 20 legislative chambers in 18 countries. I then estimate the effects of both regime type and membership in government on parties on legislative voting unity. I find that presidentialism undermines party unity. Furthermore, within presidential systems, parties that control the presidency, and parties allied with the government, do not win any more than do opposition parties, and their losses are more apt to result from breakdowns in legislative voting unity.

democratization in competitive authoritarian regimes and the formation and success of opposition parties. His other research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, PS: Political Science and Politics, Política y Gobierno, Foreign Affairs en Español, and edited volumes. He has served as co-principal investigator on two National Science Foundation grants for elite and voter survey research in Mexico, won a Fulbright-García Robles fellowship, and held visiting positions at the Center for Democracy and Civil Society at Georgetown University and

This volume collects empirical studies of elections and electoral politics in seven Asian countries. Unlike many election studies, the chapters were not concerned with explaining who won, when and why. Rather, the studies were concerned with the role that competitive ‘democratic ’ elections play in various