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AbstractThis article examines voting trends in recent Ontario elections and the impact of incumbency, gender, campaign expenditures and the number of candidates per seat on the electoral success of a candidate. Voter turnout is found to be consistently lower in larger cities. The number of females holding office has increased over time, with large cities having the highest proportion of females in office. As candidates, males and females have similar success rates. Incumbency provides a huge advantage, especially in large cities. The level of campaign spending also has a significant effect as does the number of candidates contesting a seat.

Most theories of elections assume that voters and political actors are fully rational. While these formulations produce many insights, they also generate anomalies--most famously, about turnout. The rise of behavioral economics has posed new challenges to the premise of rationality. This groundbreaking book provides a behavioral theory of elections based on the notion that all actors--politicians as well as voters--are only boundedly rational. The theory posits learning via trial and error: actions that surpass an actor's aspiration level are more likely to be used in the future, while those that fall short are less likely to be tried later. Based on this idea of adaptation, the authors construct formal models of party competition, turnout, and voters' choices of candidates. These models predict substantial turnout levels, voters sorting into parties, and winning parties adopting centrist platforms. In multiparty elections, voters are able to coordinate vote choices on majority-preferred candidates, while all candidates garner significant vote shares. Overall, the behavioral theory and its models produce macroimplications consistent with the data on elections, and they use plausible microassumptions about the cognitive capacities of politicians and voters. A computational model accompanies the book and can be used as a tool for further research.

We offer a novel rational explanation for cults of personality. Participation in a cult of personality is psychologically costly whenever it involves preference falsification, with the costs varying across individuals. We highlight two characteristics associated with lower individual costs of preference falsification: (i) loyalty to the regime and (ii) unscrupulousness. Different characteristics might serve the regime better in different roles. Using a simple formal screening model, we demonstrate that one's participation in a cult of personality improves the dictator's personnel decisions under a wide variety of circumstances. Decisions are most improved when subordinates' characteristics that better enable cult participation are correspondingly valued by dictators. Dictators who can manipulate the costs that cult participants pay find it easiest to ensure that correspondence. Our model also highlights the importance to dictators of not believing their own propaganda, and their need to offer increasingly extreme acts of cult participation as old acts become normalized.

One of the best known ideas in the study of bounded rationality is Simon's satisficing; yet we still lack a standard formalization of the heuristic and its implications. We propose a mathematical model of satisficing which explicitly represents agents' aspirations and which explores both single-person and multi-player contexts. The model shows that satisficing has a signature performance-profile in both contexts: (1) it can induce optimal long-run behavior in one class of problems but not in the complementary class; and (2) in the latter, it generates behavior that is sensible but not optimal. The model also yields empirically testable predictions: in certain bandit-problems it pins down the limiting probabilities of each arm's use, and it provides an ordering of the arms' dynamical use-probabilities as well.

How does third-party diplomatic and material support affect rebel groups' use of terrorism in civil wars? We argue via a game-theoretic model that diplomatic support prompts prospective shifts in rebel tactics, from civilian to military targets, in anticipation of material support, while material support alters the cost structure of attacks, leading to the same tactical shift. We empirically test the model's implications using an original dataset of UN resolutions about countries in civil wars as well as a case study of South Africa. In support of our theory, we find that both diplomatic resolutions and material interventions in favor of the rebels are associated with rebel tactical shifts, leading to decreased reliance on violence against civilians. These findings demonstrate the value of modeling civilian and military targeting as substitutes rather than examining civilian targeting in isolation.