Approval voting is a single-winner electoral system in which voters mark all the candidates they support, instead of just choosing one. The candidate with the highest approval rating is elected.
Strategic or tactical voting is voting in consideration of possible ballots cast by other voters in order to maximize one's satisfaction with the election's results. For example, in plurality or instant-runoff, a voter may recognize their favorite candidate is unlikely to win and so instead support a candidate they think is more likely to win.
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.
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 key result in social choice showing that no rank-order method for collective decision-making can behave rationally or coherently. Specifically, any such rule violates independence of irrelevant alternatives, the principle that a choice between and should not depend on the quality of a third, unrelated option .
Accountability, in terms of ethics and governance, is equated with answerability, culpability, liability, and the expectation of account-giving.
The positive response, monotonicity, or nonperversitycriterion is a principle of social choice theory that says that increasing a candidate's ranking or rating should not cause them to lose. Positive response rules out cases where a candidate loses an election as a result of receiving too much support from voters ; rules that violate positive response are called perverse.
A political campaign is an organized effort which seeks to influence the decision making progress within a specific group. In democracies, political campaigns often refer to electoral campaigns, by which representatives are chosen or referendums are decided. In modern politics, the most high-profile political campaigns are focused on general elections and candidates for head of state or head of government, often a president or prime minister.
Psephology is the study of elections and voting. Psephology attempts to both forecast and explain election results.
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."
In an election, a candidate is called a majority winner or majority-preferred candidate if more than half of all voters would support them in a one-on-one race against any one of their opponents. Voting systems where a majority winner will always win are said to satisfy the majority-rule principle, because they extend the principle of majority rule to elections with multiple candidates.
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. According to the constitution, each President can be elected for only two (four-year) terms after which they are no longer eligible to run for Presidency. The Parliament of Ghana has 275 members, elected for a four-year term in single-seat constituencies. Unlike the Presidency, parliamentarians are eligible to run for as many terms as possible so long as they are of sound mind.
Social choice theory is the branch of welfare economics which studies processes of collective decision-making. It contrasts with political science in that it is a normative science studying how societies should make decisions, whereas political science is descriptive. Social choice incorporates insights from economics, mathematics, philosophy, and game theory to find the best ways to combine individual preferences into a coherent whole, called a social welfare function.
Political forecasting aims at forecasting the outcomes of political events. Political events can be a number of events such as diplomatic decisions, actions by political leaders and other areas relating to politicians and political institutions. The area of political forecasting concerning elections is highly popular, especially amongst mass market audiences. Political forecasting methodology makes frequent use of mathematics, statistics and data science. Political forecasting as it pertains to elections is related to psephology.
Voter turnout in US elections is measured as a percentage, calculated by dividing the total number of votes cast by the voting age population (VAP), or more recently, the voting eligible population (VEP). Voter turnout has varied over time, between states, and between demographic groups. In the United States, turnout is higher for presidential elections than for midterm elections. US turnout is generally lower than that in other advanced democracies.
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 or rank the candidates' perceived competence on an issue 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.
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 preferring candidates closer to this point over those who are further away; these kinds of preferences are called single-peaked.
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