Benford's Law and the Detection of Election Fraud

The proliferation of elections in even those states that are arguably anything but democratic has given rise to a focused interest on developing methods for detecting fraud in the official statistics of a state's election returns. Among these efforts are those that employ Benford's Law, with the most common application being an attempt to proclaim some election or another fraud free or replete with fraud. This essay, however, argues that, despite its apparent utility in looking at other phenomena, Benford's Law is problematical at best as a forensic tool when applied to elections. Looking at simulations designed to model both fair and fraudulent contests as well as data drawn from elections we know, on the basis of other investigations, were either permeated by fraud or unlikely to have experienced any measurable malfeasance, we find that conformity with and deviations from Benford's Law follow no pattern. It is not simply that the Law occasionally judges a fraudulent election fair or a fair election fraudulent. Its "success rate" either way is essentially equivalent to a toss of a coin, thereby rendering it problematical at best as a forensic tool and wholly misleading at worst

Constitutional Stability

Despite attempts to paper over the dispute, political scientists in the pluralist tradition disagree sharply with public and social choice theorists about the importance of institutions and with William Riker in particular who argues in Liberalism against Populism that the liberal institutions of indirect democracy ought to be preferred to those of populist democracy. This essay reconsiders this dispute in light of two ideas unavailable to Riker at the time. The first, offered by Russell Hardin, is that constitutions can more usefully be conceptualized as coordinating devices as opposed to social contracts. The importance of this idea is that it allows for a more theoretically satisfying view of the way that constitutions become self-enforcing. The second idea, which derives from the various applications of concepts such as the uncoveted set, argues that although institutions such as the direct election of president are subject to the usual inabilities that concern social choice theorists, those instabilities do not imply that "anything can happen" - instead, final outcomes will be constrained, where the severity of those constraints depend on institutional details. We maintain that these ideas strengthen Riker's argument about the importance of such constitutional devices as the separation of powers, bicameralism, the executive veto, and scheduled elections, as well as the view that federalism is an important component of the institutions that stabilize the American political system. We conclude with the proposition that the American Civil War should not be regarded as a constitutional failure, but rather as a success

Constitutions for New Democracies: Reflections of Turmoil or Agents of Stability?

Despite the widely held view in newly emerging democracies that constitutions are mere words on paper or that parchment barriers cannot render a state stable or democratic, those who draft such documents commonly act as if words ARE of consequence. The difficulty, however, is that contemporaneous conflicts too easily intervene so as to corrupt the drafting process and to preclude optimal constitutional design. The specific principle of design most likely to be violated is the proposition that we treat all parts of the constitution as an interconnected whole and that we not try to assess the consequences of one part without appreciating the full meaning of all other parts. This essay illustrates this violation by looking at the new Russian Constitution, ratified by direct popular vote in December 1993, with special attention paid to that document's treatment of federalism. We offer the additional argument, however, that even contemporary research in political institutional design pays insufficient heed to this principle

The Reintegration of Political Science and Economics and the Presumed Imperialism of Economic Theory

No discipline can claim a greater impact on contemporary political theorizing than that of economics, whether that theorizing concerns the study of legislatures, elections, international affairs, or judicial processes. This essay questions, however, whether this impact is a form of "economic imperialism," or the logical development of two disciplines whose artificial separation in the first part of this century merely allowed the development and refinement of the rational choice paradigm, unencumbered by the necessity for considering all of reality. Indeed, applications to specific substantive political matters -- most notably collective and cooperative processes where game theory proves most relevant -- reveal the paradigm's incompleteness. These applications, however, illuminate the necessary theoretical extensions, which is no longer the sole domain of the economist

The Spatial Analysis of Elections and Committees: Four Decades of Research

It has been more than thirty five years since the publication of Downs's (1957) seminal volume on elections and spatial theory and more than forty since Black and Newing (1951) offered their analysis of majority rule and committees. Thus, in response to the question "What have we accomplished since then?" it is not unreasonable to suppose that the appropriate answer would be "a great deal." Unfortunately, reality admits of only a more ambiguous response

The Reintegration of Political Science and Economics and the Presumed Imperialism of Economic Theory

No discipline can claim a greater impact on contemporary political theorizing than that of economics, whether that theorizing concerns the study of legislatures, elections, international affairs, or judicial processes. This essay questions, however, whether this impact is a form of "economic imperialism," or the logical development of two disciplines whose artificial separation in the first part of this century merely allowed the development and refinement of the rational choice paradigm, unencumbered by the necessity for considering all of reality. Indeed, applications to specific substantive political matters -- most notably collective and cooperative processes where game theory proves most relevant -- reveal the paradigm's incompleteness. These applications, however, illuminate the necessary theoretical extensions, which is no longer the sole domain of the economist

Constitutional Secession Clauses

Taking the view that constitutions are devices whereby people coordinate to specific equilibria in circumstances that allow multiple equilibria, we show that a constitutional secession clause can serve as such a device and, therefore, that such a clause is more than an empty promise or an ineffectual threat. Employing a simple three-person recursive game, we establish that under certain conditions, this game possesses two equilibria - one in which a disadvantaged federal unit secedes and is not punished by the other units in the federation, and a second equilibrium in which this unit does not secede but is punished if it chooses to do so