An election is a formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual or multiple individuals to hold public office.
In political science, Duverger's law holds that in political systems with single-member districts, 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.
William Harrison Riker was an American political scientist who is prominent for applying game theory and mathematics to political science. He helped to establish University of Rochester as a center of behavioral revolution in political science.
Public choice, or public choice theory, is "the use of economic tools to deal with traditional problems of political science." Its content includes the study of political behavior. In political science, it is the subset of positive political theory that studies self-interested agents and their interactions, which can be represented in a number of ways—using standard constrained utility maximization, game theory, or decision theory. It is the origin and intellectual foundation of contemporary work in political economy.
Arrow's impossibility theorem is a key result in social choice showing that no ranked voting rule can behave rationally. Specifically, any such rule violates independence of irrelevant alternatives, the idea that a choice between and should not depend on the quality of a third, unrelated option . The result is most often cited in election science and voting theory, where is called a spoiler candidate. In this context, Arrow's theorem can be restated as showing that no ranked voting rule can eliminate the spoiler effect.
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 political science and social choice theory, Black'smedian voter theorem states that if voters and candidates are distributed along a one-dimensional spectrum and voters have single peaked preferences, any voting method that is compatible with majority-rule will elect the candidate preferred by the median voter. The median voter theorem thus shows that under a realistic model of voter behavior, Arrow's theorem does not apply, and rational social choice is in fact possible if using a Condorcet method.
Positive political theory (PPT), explanatory political theory, or formal theory is the study of politics using formal methods such as social choice theory, game theory, and statistical analysis. In particular, social choice theoretic methods are often used to describe and (axiomatically) analyze the performance of rules or institutions. The outcomes of the rules or institutions described are then analyzed by game theory, where the individuals/parties/nations involved in a given interaction are modeled as rational agents playing a game, guided by self-interest. Based on this assumption, the outcome of the interactions can be predicted as an equilibrium of the game.
Calculus of voting refers to any mathematical model which predicts voting behaviour by an electorate, including such features as participation rate. A calculus of voting represents a hypothesized decision-making process.
The probabilistic voting theory, also known as the probabilistic voting model, is a voting theory developed by professors Assar Lindbeck and Jörgen Weibull in the article "Balanced-budget redistribution as the outcome of political competition", published in 1987 in the journal Public Choice, which has gradually replaced the median voter theory, thanks to its ability to find equilibrium within multi-dimensional spaces.
Melvin Jay "Mel" Hinich was a professor of government and economics at the University of Texas at Austin. Hinich was also a research professor at UT's Applied Research Laboratories. Known as an expert in political science with a long record of distinction in a number of fields, he wrote seven books and published more than 200 papers in statistics/statistical theory, signal processing, economics, political science, biomedical engineering, pharmacy, and library science.
Robert M. Stein is an American political scientist and Lena Gohlman Fox Professor of political science at Rice University. He is an expert in urban politics and public policy.
Benjamin Radcliff was an American political scientist and a professor at the University of Notre Dame. He was also affiliated with the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy and the Higgins Labor Studies Program. Though best known for his work on the connections between politics and human happiness, his research also encompassed democratic theory, political economy, and the study of organized labor.
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.
The altruism theory of voting is a model of voter behavior which states that if citizens in a democracy have "social" preferences for the welfare of others, the extremely low probability of a single vote determining an election will be outweighed by the large cumulative benefits society will receive from the voter's preferred policy being enacted, such that it is rational for an “altruistic” citizen, who receives utility from helping others, to vote. Altruistic voting has been compared to purchasing a lottery ticket, in which the probability of winning is extremely low but the payoff is large enough that the expected benefit outweighs the cost.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to politics and political science:
Rebecca Morton was an American political scientist. She was Professor of Political Science at New York University New York and New York University Abu Dhabi.
Orit Kedar is an Israeli political scientist. She is a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she is also affiliated with the Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality. She specializes in electoral politics, electoral systems and party systems, and comparative vote choice under different political systems.
Heresthetic is an approach to understanding how political actors manipulate the decision-making process so they can win. Heresthetic is a positive political theory, including aspects of game theory, public choice theory, rational choice theory, and social choice theory to political science. Political scientist William H. Riker is considered the creator and one of the most prominent supports of theory.
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.
