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An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports published within the issue on topics including political parties, regional politics and voting.

In this article, I examine several models of voter behavior that are consistent with recent work in political psychology (Fiske and Tetlock, 1997) concerning incommensurability and individuals' reluctance to make decisions involving explicit trade-offs between competing ideals or principles. In so doing, I show that one ramification of such cognitive dissonance is policy convergence in multidimensional (i.e. multi-issue) electoral competition between two parties or candidates. Furthermore, the predicted policy outcome is a weighted median, which represents, on each issue, each voter's preferences to the degree that he or she is likely to use that issue to choose between the candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper models the process through which proposals are placed on the ballot as initiatives. Importantly, proposals that reach the ballot were not enacted by the legislature. We show that this fact has important consequences for the type of policy proposals that reach the ballot: as the legislature would enact any proposal that increases everyone's utility (in expectation), proposals that reach the ballot must be bad for some segment of the population. We partition the population into voters who would benefit from a group's proposal and those who would not and show that voters can use the legislature's inaction to obtain a better estimate of the initiative's expected value. In particular, we show that voters that are not in the sponsoring group infer that proposals that become initiatives have negative expected value and that the expected value of an initiative is decreasing in the size of the group that sponsors it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper provides a game-theoretic model of probabilistic voting and then examines the incentives faced by candidates in a spatial model of elections. In our model, voters'' strategies form a Quantal Response Equilibrium (QRE), which merges strategic voting and probabilistic behavior. We first show that a QRE in the voting game exists for all elections with a finite number of candidates, and then proceed to show that, with enough voters and the addition of a regularity condition on voters'' utilities, a Nash equilibrium profile of platforms exists when candidates seek to maximize their expected margin of victory. This equilibrium (1) consists of all candidates converging to the policy that maximizes the expected sum of voters'' utilities, (2) exists even when voters can abstain, and (3) is unique when there are only 2 candidates. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: I explore a behavioral model of political participation, first introduced by , based on the primitives of prospect theory, as defined by . The model offers an alternative explanation for why the President''s party tends to lose seats in midterm congressional elections. The model is examined empirically and compared against competing explanations for the “midterm phenomenon”. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]