Segnalazione bibliografica Autori: Sarah Botterman, Marc Hooghe Acta Politica 47, 1-17 (January 2012) Abstract In this article, we investigate the impact of religious involvement on voting preference for the Christian Democratic party in Belgium. Although religious involvement is declining in Western European democracies, there is still significant evidence for the influence of religion on voting behaviour. We examine the relationship between individual religiosity, community religious involvement and vote preference for the Christian Democratic party in Belgium in 2009. The results show that a Catholic denomination is the most important predictor for vote preference for the Christian Democratic party, followed by church...

Segnalazione bibliografica West European Politics, Volume 34, Number 3, May 2011 , pp. 607-625(19) Autore: Csaba Nikolenyi Abstract This article examines the failure of three attempts to replace proportional representation with a majoritarian alternative in post-communist Eastern Europe: Slovenia in 1996; the Czech Republic in 2000; and Romania in 2008. The central argument of the article is that majoritarian electoral reform is both incompatible with and prevented by the institutions of consensus democracy. The constitutional design of consensus democracy creates multiple veto points and veto players that limit major policy and legislative change, such as electoral reform. As such, they also provide for self-enforcing...

Segnalazione bibliografica. American Political Science Review (2011), 105: 115-134 Autori: Henry E. Brady, John E. McNulty Abstract Could changing the locations of polling places affect the outcome of an election by increasing the costs of voting for some and decreasing them for others? The consolidation of voting precincts in Los Angeles County during California's 2003 gubernatorial recall election provides a natural experiment for studying how changing polling places influences voter turnout. Overall turnout decreased by a substantial 1.85 percentage points: A drop in polling place turnout of 3.03 percentage points was partially offset by an increase in absentee voting of 1.18 percentage...

Segnalazione bibliografica. American Political Science Review (2010), vol.104, n.4: 625-643 Autore: David Stasavage Abstract Scholars investigating European state development have long placed a heavy emphasis on the role played by representative institutions. The presence of an active representative assembly, it is argued, allowed citizens and rulers to contract over raising revenue and accessing credit. It may also have had implications for economic growth. These arguments have in turn been used to draw broad implications about the causal effect of analogous institutions in other places and during other time periods. But if assemblies had such clear efficiency benefits, why did they not become a universal phenomenon in Europe prior...

Segnalazione bibliografica. American Political Science Review 01 August 2011 105: 530-551 Autori: Boris Shor; Nolan McCarty Abstract The development and elaboration of the spatial theory of voting has contributed greatly to the study of legislative decision making and elections. Statistical models that estimate the spatial locations of individual decision-makers have made a key contribution to this success. Spatial models have been estimated for the U.S. Congress, the Supreme Court, U.S. presidents, a large number of non-U.S. legislatures, and supranational organizations. Yet one potentially fruitful laboratory for testing spatial theories, the individual U.S. states, has remained relatively unexploited, for two reasons. First, state legislative...