Approval voting is an electoral system in which voters can select any number of candidates instead of selecting only one.
A political party is an organization that coordinates candidates to compete in a particular country's elections. It is common for the members of a party to hold similar ideas about politics, and parties may promote specific ideological or policy goals.
Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of society", established in the 18th century. In addition to sociology, it now encompasses a wide array of academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, human geography, linguistics, management science, communication science, psychology and political science.
In social choice theory, a Condorcet paradox is a situation where majority rule behaves in a way that is self-contradictory. In such a situation, every possible choice is rejected by the electorate in favor of another, because there is always some other outcome that a majority of voters consider to be better.
Theories of political behavior, as an aspect of political science, attempt to quantify and explain the influences that define a person's political views, ideology, and levels of political participation. Political behavior is the subset of human behavior that involves politics and power. Theorists who have had an influence on this field include Karl Deutsch and Theodor Adorno.
In political science, Duverger's law holds that in political systems with only one winner, two main parties tend to emerge with minor parties typically splitting votes away from the most similar major party. In contrast, systems with proportional representation usually have more representation of minor parties in government.
Arrow's impossibility theorem is a celebrated result and key impossibility theorem in social choice theory. It shows that no ranked voting rule can produce a logically coherent ranking in elections with more than two candidates. Specifically, no such rule can satisfy a key criterion of decision theory, called independence of irrelevant alternatives: that its choice between and should not depend on the quality of a third, unrelated outcome .
Accountability, in terms of ethics and governance, is equated with answerability, culpability, liability, and the expectation of account-giving.
In political science, voter turnout is the participation rate of a given election. This is typically either the percentage of registered voters, eligible voters, or all voting-age people. According to Stanford University political scientists Adam Bonica and Michael McFaul, there is a consensus among political scientists that "democracies perform better when more people vote."
Political polarization is the divergence of political attitudes away from the center, towards ideological extremes.
Ghana elects on national level a head of state, the president, and a legislature. The president is elected for a four-year term by the people. The Parliament of Ghana has 275 members, elected for a four-year term in single-seat constituencies. The presidential election is won by having more than 50% of valid votes cast, whilst the parliamentary elections is won by simple majority, and, as is predicted by Duverger's law, the voting system has encouraged Ghanaian politics into a two-party system, creating extreme difficulty for anybody attempting to achieve electoral success under any banner other than those of the two dominant parties. Elections have been held every four years since 1992. Presidential and parliamentary elections are held alongside each other, generally on 7 December every four years.
The University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR) is the largest academic social research and survey organization in the world, established in 1949. ISR includes more than 300 scientists from a variety of academic disciplines – including political science, psychology, sociology, economics, demography, history, anthropology, and statistics. The institute is a unit that houses five separate but interdependent centers which conduct research and maintain data archives. In 2021, Kathleen Cagney became the first woman in its history to be named Director of the institute.
A hybrid regime is a type of political system often created as a result of an incomplete democratic transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one. Hybrid regimes are categorized as having a combination of autocratic features with democratic ones and can simultaneously hold political repressions and regular elections. Hybrid regimes are commonly found in developing countries with abundant natural resources such as petro-states. Although these regimes experience civil unrest, they may be relatively stable and tenacious for decades at a time. There has been a rise in hybrid regimes since the end of the Cold War.
The term issue voting describes when voters cast their vote in elections based on political issues. In the context of an election, issues include "any questions of public policy which have been or are a matter of controversy and are sources of disagreement between political parties.” According to the theory of issue voting, voters compare the candidates' respective principles against their own in order to decide for whom to vote.
A major branch of social choice theory is devoted to the comparison of electoral systems, otherwise known as social choice functions. Viewed from the perspective of political science, electoral systems are rules for conducting elections and determining winners from the ballots cast. From the perspective of economics, mathematics, and philosophy, a social choice function is a mathematical function that determines how a society should make choices, given a collection of individual preferences.
Steven Robert Reed is a political scientist and Professor of Modern Government in the Faculty of Policy Studies at Chuo University in Tokyo. He has held positions at the University of Alabama and Harvard University, and he has served as a Visiting Professor at Stanford University, University of Washington, and Chiba University.
The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is a collaborative research project among national election studies around the world. Participating countries and polities include a common module of survey questions in their national post-election studies. The resulting data are collated together along with voting, demographic, district and macro variables into one dataset allowing comparative analysis of voting behavior from a multilevel perspective.
In political science and social choice theory, the spatialmodel of voting is a mathematical model of voting behavior. It describes voters and candidates as varying along one or more axes, where each axis represents an attribute of the candidate that voters care about. Voters are modeled as having an ideal point in this space and voting for the candidates closest to them.
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