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We present a unified model of turnout and vote choice that incorporates two distinct motivations for citizens to abstain from voting: alienation from the candidates, and indifference between the candidates. Empirically, we find that alienation and indifference each motivated significant amounts of voter abstention in the 1980-1988 U.S. presidential elections. Using model-based computer simulations-which permit us to manipulate factors affecting turnout-we show that distinguishing between alienation and indifference illuminates three controversies in elections research. First, we find that abstention because of either alienation or indifference benefited Republican candidates, but only very modestly. Second, presidential elections involving attractive candidates motivate higher turnout, but only to the extent that abstention stems from alienation rather than from indifference. Third, paradoxically, citizens' individual-level tendencies to abstain because of alienation are strongly affected by their evaluations of the candidates' policies, whereas aggregate turnout rates do not depend significantly on the candidates' policy platforms.

This study assesses whether gender-based differences in political knowledge primarily result from differences in observable attributes or from differences in returns for otherwise equivalent characteristics. It applies a statistical decomposition methodology to data obtained from the 1992-2004 American National Election Studies. There is a consistent 10-point gender gap in measured political knowledge, of which approximately one-third is due to gender-based differences in the characteristics that predict political knowledge, with the remaining two-thirds due to male-female differences in the returns to these characteristics. The methodology identifies the relative contribution of the predictors of political knowledge to each portion of the gap, and then uses this information to elucidate the underlying sources of the political knowledge gender gap and its prognosis. Education is the characteristic that most clearly enlarges the gap, with men receiving significantly larger returns to political knowledge from education than women. Group membership reduces the gap as women obtain gains in political knowledge from belonging to organizations that do not accrue to men. However, these gains are not sufficient to significantly reduce the gap.

This study evaluates the extent of party-system extremism in thirty-one electoral democracies as a function of electoral-system proportionality. It uses data from the Comparative Studies of Electoral Systems project to estimate the extent of party-system compactness or dispersion across polities and to determine whether more proportional systems foster greater ideological divergence among parties. Electoral system characteristics most associated with party-system compactness in the ideological space are investigated. The empirics show that more proportional systems support greater ideological dispersion, while less proportional systems encourage parties to cluster nearer the centre of the electoral space. This finding is maintained in several sub-samples of national elections and does not depend on the inclusion of highly majoritarian systems (such as the United Kingdom).Electoral systems are the architecture within which party systems exist. In democratic polities, the electoral system shapes the number of political parties, their cohesiveness and the characteristics of representative democracy. It is an open question, however, whether electoral systems influence the ideological positioning of political parties. That the question remains unresolved is itself surprising. The expectation that electoral rules influence spatial positioning has existed since Downs first explicitly linked electoral systems to party positioning in an ideological space and argued that majoritarian systems induce centripetal electoral incentives, whereas proportional systems induce centrifugal electoral incentives. 1 The theoretical literature largely echoes Downs, but it is also replete with studies demonstrating that both majoritarian and proportional systems may or may not encourage median voter behaviour. This might depend on whether the election is contested over one or more ideological dimensions, whether voters weigh 'valence' issues in their choice calculus, whether voters abstain if parties are too distant and a myriad of other considerations. 2 This points to the importance of the empirical literature, which should provide insight as to what is, rather than what might be, given the modelling assumptions. But here, too, the relationship between electoral system and party ideological positioning is uncertain. There are few comparative studies that draw sufficient case variation in party-system spatial dispersion across nations and in electoral-system characteristics to provide definitive conclusions. Schofield's assessment that 'there is no empirical evidence for Pev Squire and the Journal's reviewers for their helpful critiques and suggestions.