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In the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, campaigns suddenly seem to matter, as do questions about the electoral process. Professors Johnston, Hagen and Jamieson have examined the US electoral process as an integrated event spanning a full year, drawing upon a data set that is massive in scale and novel in execution: the Annenberg 2000 Election Study. The scale of their fieldwork is such that they have been able to isolate key turning points and that dynamics can be studied within certain segments. The interviews are rich in opinion about policy, perception, information and judgement about candidates, media use and strategy. What is more, the authors have used candidate appearances, news coverage, and campaign advertising to provide the first integrated account of this or any US campaign.

Organized interest groups tend to focus on a narrow set of issues that promote the common interests of their members. They support political candidates who are favorable toward the group’s interests. But whereas interest groups support politicians based on a narrow set of issues, politicians have platforms that cover the entire political spectrum, so supporting a politician implies supporting all of that politician’s positions. A secondary effect of interest group support for politicians on one issue is that they are also supporting positions on other issues that are well outside the scope of that group’s interests. This analysis shows that the systematic relationships among politicians’ political platforms result in interest groups supporting issues that are well outside the stated common interests of the groups.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been regarded by international society as a major policy tool in China’s geo-economic strategy. Under this policy platform, Beijing has pledged to invest billions of dollars in the infrastructure and industrial sectors across Eurasia and in the Indo-Pacific nations. It is widely believed that such huge amount of investment will inevitably generate significant geostrategic repercussions in these regions. In response to the BRI, the United States and other powers have come up with a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ strategy. This article attempts to address the following question: what impact is the BRI likely to have on the security ties between China and the other major players in the Indo-Pacific? The author finds that the BRI may significantly transform China’s international security policy and the expansion of Beijing’s security influence may further intensify the security competition between China and other major powers in the Indo-Pacific region. The article also proposes a new analytical angle for the study of geo-economics that unpacks the role of economic activities and processes in generating geopolitical intentions and catalysing geopolitical competition.

A standard view of elections is that parties should choose moderate platforms to maximize their probability of winning. However, some parties embrace more extreme positions. These parties often feature an energized activist group that is optimistic about the party’s probability of winning – contradicting the standard view. We build and analyze a gametheoretic model of electoral competition that simultaneously explains the prevalence of extreme platforms and activists’ biased beliefs. We show that the activists’ interests and role within the campaign induce them to optimally misperceive the interests of the electorate because such a bias shifts the party’s equilibrium policy platform closer to the activist faction’s ideal point. We also find that even though the more optimistic an activist faction, the more it learns from electoral defeat, the divergence between activist and elite beliefs may worsen after a loss.

Should turning out to vote in mass elections be voluntary or compulsory? Previous normative arguments for compulsory voting often rely on contested normative claims about the moral duty to vote or about the democratic legitimacy conveyed by high turnout. Our article strengthens the normative case for compulsory voting by arguing that it could improve democracy by reducing polarization, which existing work suggests can lead to democratic backsliding. Drawing on spatial models of electoral competition, we argue that, by reducing more extreme voters’ ability to threaten to abstain due to alienation, the introduction of compulsory voting can push party platforms toward the median voter’s preferences. This directly decreases party polarization, defined as the distance between party platforms. We examine potential normative and empirical objections to this argument and provide scope conditions under which compulsory voting is likely to decrease polarization.

In a randomized experiment in cooperation with two national parties competing in a congressional election in the Philippines, we estimate the causal effect on voting behavior of a town‐hall style campaign in which candidates discuss their campaign platform with small groups of citizens. Keeping the parties' platform fixed, we find that town‐hall meetings have a positive effect on parties' vote shares compared to the status quo, in which voters play a passive role. Consistent with the parties' advocacy for underprivileged groups, we observe heterogeneous effects by income, education, and gender. Deliberative campaigns increase voters' awareness on the issues parties campaign on, affecting the vote of the direct beneficiaries of the parties' platform.

A digital platform economy is emerging. Companies such as Amazon, Etsy, Facebook, Google, Salesforce, and Uber are creating online structures that enable a wide range of human activities. This opens the way for radical changes in how we work, socialize, create value in the economy, and compete for the resulting profits. Their effects are distinct and identifiable, though certainly not the only part of the rapidly reorganizing global economy. As the work by Michael Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, and Peter Evans has shown, these digital platforms are multisided digital frameworks that shape the terms on which participants interact with one another. The initial powerful information technology (IT) transformation of services emerged with the Internet and was, in part, a strategy response to intense price-based competition among producers of relatively similar products. These digital platforms are diverse in function and structure. Google and Facebook are digital platforms that offer search and social media, but they also provide an infrastructure on which other platforms are built.

We develop a model in which reward-based crowdfunding enables firms to obtain a reliable proof of concept early in their production cycle: they learn about total demand from a limited sample of target consumers preordering a new product. Learning from the crowdfunding sample creates a valuable real option because firms invest only if updated expectations about total demand are sufficiently high. This is particularly valuable for firms facing a high degree of uncertainty about consumer preferences, such as developers of innovative consumer products. Learning also enables firms to overcome moral hazard. The higher the funds raised, the lower the firms’ incentives to divert them, provided third-party platforms limit the sample size by restricting campaign length. Although the probability of campaign success decreases with sample size, the expected funds raised are maximized at an intermediate sample size. Our results are consistent with stylized facts and lead to new empirical implications. This paper was accepted by Gustavo Manso, finance.

Despite common perception, existing theoretical literature lacks a complete formal argument regarding the relationship between the electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization. In this article, we build a model that incorporates the disproportionality of the electoral system in a standard Downsian electoral competition setup with mainly, but not necessarily purely, policy-motivated parties. We first show that in equilibrium, platform polarization is decreasing in the level of the electoral rule disproportionality. We then argue that the number of parties has a positive effect on platform polarization when polarization is measured by the distance between the two most distant platforms. This effect does not hold when polarization is measured by the widely used Dalton index. Constructing a data set covering more than 300 elections, our main theoretical findings are empirically supported, pointing toward the electoral rule disproportionality as a major determinant of polarization.

Women have more protectionist trade preferences than men do. We assess whether this well-documented relationship between gender and protectionism in the mass public carries over into a relationship between women’s political representation and (a) party platforms, and (b) governments’ trade policy choices. Looking across countries and over time, we demonstrate that with an increase in women’s representation, political party trade policy positions become more protectionist. For government trade policy choices, we identify more nuanced results. The protectionist effect of women’s representation is limited to the most visible products: consumption goods. Women’s representation has no effect on intermediate inputs, where firm demands for trade liberalization are more pronounced and policy makers are thus constrained in implementing a protectionist agenda. These findings contribute to scholarship on the descriptive–substantive representation link, add a new dimension to our understanding of trade politics, and demonstrate the importance of applying a gendered lens to international political economy research.