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This article presents evidence of name-order effects in balloting from a study of the 1998 Democratic primary in New York City, in which the order of candidates' names was rotated by precinct. In 71 of 79 individual nominating contests, candidates received a greater proportion of the vote when listed first than when listed in any other position. In seven of those 71 contests the advantage to first position exceeded the winner's margin of victory, suggesting that ballot position would have determined the election outcomes if one candidate had held the top spot in all precincts.

Theory: Theories of party government suggest that party strength and electoral competition have unique and independent influences on policy-making. Hypotheses: District-level electoral competition leads to increased public policy liberalism; greater liberalism among the public leads to the enactment of more liberal public policies; more liberal legislatures enact more liberal public policies; and the percentage of Democrats in a state legislature is related significantly to policy adoptions. Methods: Erikson, Wright, and McIver's (1989) cross-sectional model of state policy liberalism is replicated on the original set of states, a smaller set of states, and with an additional variable added. Estimates are from an OLS routine in SPSS-Windows software. Results: The original results are replicated successfully. The measure of district-level electoral competition enters the model positively and significantly and adds to the variation explained. The results provide evidence for independent effects of electoral competition and legislative party strength on state policy-making.

Many democratic governments give weight to political gains rather than to national interests while formulating foreign policy, and nonpartisan decisions may be taken only by a government which is sure of reelection. A government facing electoral uncertainties is more likely to be adventurous in its foreign policy. The chances of a government's misuse of foreign policy for electoral purposes are less in a political system involving more decision makers. A model is examined to show how reelection desires motivate governments to follow suboptimal foreign policies.

An early criticism of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) has pointed to its asymmetric nature and the weak mechanisms to prevent politically-motivated fiscal policies: its constraints would bite in downswings but not in upswings, especially if, in the latter, the electoral cycle increases the temptation to run expansionary policies. We find that the experience of the initial years of EMU lends support to this criticism. Overall, unlike the experience in the run-up to EMU, fiscal policies had an expansionary bias, and a 'genuine' discretionary boost took place in correspondence to political elections. Both sign and composition of such discretionary changes are in line with the predictions of the recent literature on electoral budget cycles. Closer fiscal surveillance may help detect such behaviour early on, but it is unlikely to curb the incentives to run politically-motivated fiscal policies when elections approach.

The serious flooding of parts of eastern and northern Germany is considered to be an important factor for boosting the opinion poll ratings of the governing coalition parties. The factors that influenced the campaigns of the parties and the behaviour of the voters and non-voters are described.

While many studies have generated negative findings regarding the general existence of electoral cycles in economic phenomena, we have found an apparently robust electoral cycle in veterans' benefits. This pattern was found between 1961 and 1978, but has disappeared since then. We use this case to investigate the possibility that electoral cycles might contribute to the growth of government spending. Using two different methods of inference, we find no strong basis to conclude that such cycles cause increasing public sector growth.

This paper examines electoral influence on monetary policy as measured by M1 money growth. I find a significant four-year electoral cycle in money growth even when controlling for the influence of interest rates, income, and budget deficits. Further, the residual electoral cycle produces the income and inflation movements associated with the political business cycle when it is used in simulations of simple reduced form macro models. The paper concludes by discussing the difficulties in rationalizing cyclical monetary policy with rational expectations.