B. Grofman - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by B. Grofman

The American Political …, 1989

Journal of Baltic Studies

ABSTRACT. We provide a schematic history of contemporary Estonian political parties, 1987-99, in ... more ABSTRACT. We provide a schematic history of contemporary Estonian political parties, 1987-99, in which we specify dates of party origin and subsequent fissions and fusions of some fifty movements and parties, and we briefly discuss some important factors and features in ...

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

We review the use by New York State Courts of John Banzhaf Ill’s game-theoretic inspired index of... more We review the use by New York State Courts of John Banzhaf Ill’s game-theoretic inspired index of power as a measure of fair representation. We look at the extent to which game-theoretic arguments have been a) properly understood by the courts; b) integrated into constitutional and legal analysis; and c) properly applied. We pay particular attention to weighted voting in Nassau County, for which we provide a more detailed historical analysis.

Party Politics

Measures of electoral system disproportionality and of party system volatility (as well as malapp... more Measures of electoral system disproportionality and of party system volatility (as well as malapportionment and vote splitting) present similar statistical issues in terms of deciding what index is most appro- priate, but it is not common to view indices of disproportionality and volatility as ...

Public Choice, Jun 1, 1999

Controversy persists over the link between turnout and the likelihood of success of Democratic ca... more Controversy persists over the link between turnout and the likelihood of success of Democratic candidates (eg, DeNardo, 1980, 1986; Zimmer, 1985; Tucker and Vedlitz, 1986; Piven and Cloward, 1988; Texeira, 1992; Radcliff, 1994, 1995; Erikson, 1995a, b). We argue that the authors in this debate have largely been talking past one another because of a failure to distinguish three quite different questions. The first question is:“Are low turnout voters more likely to vote Democratic than high turnout voters?” The second question is:“ ...

CHAPTER 8 Electoral Systems and the Art of Constitutional Engineering: An Inventory of the Main F... more CHAPTER 8 Electoral Systems and the Art of Constitutional Engineering: An Inventory of the Main Findings Bernard N. Grofman and Andrew Reynolds I Introduction Electoral system choice, especially the distinction between proportional representation systems (PR) and ...

Legislative Studies Quarterly

An examination of the differences between the ideological positions of leaders and other members ... more An examination of the differences between the ideological positions of leaders and other members in the U.S. House of Representatives (1965-96) demonstrates that Republican leaders tend to be significantly to the right of the median Republican member and Democratic leaders tend to be significantly to the left of the median Democratic member. Furthermore, leaders from both parties tend to be ideologically located near the mode of their party's ideological distribution. These empirical results have implications for issues such as party polarization, conditional party government, and the possibility of separating out party and ideology. Consider a political party or other group electing one or more representatives from among its own members, as a party does when selecting its party leader(s). What characteristics might those representatives share? One body of comparative politics literature suggests that, for groups in which ideology is important, leaders will be more extreme than their followers (May 1973). But other authors have cast doubt on that claim (see e.g., Narud and Skare 1999; Norris 1995; cf. Dalton 1985). Specifically, the logic of the Black median voter theorem (Black 1958) suggests that if a single representative is to be chosen, and if voter preferences can be regarded as essentially one dimensional, then, ceteris paribus, the representative will be ideologically centrist relative to the other group members, since we would expect the median representative to be chosen. For the U.S. Congress, past research has offered these two main hypotheses with regard to party leadership characteristics: one following the logic of the median voter theorem, the other upholding

Race-conscious redistricting remains crucial to the election of an overwhelming number of African... more Race-conscious redistricting remains crucial to the election of an overwhelming number of African American and Latino officials. We present descriptive evidence, easily interpretable by nonspecialists, from recent elections at the state and federal levels to support our claims. The Voting Rights Act remains a valuable tool to protect the ability of minorities to elect their preferred candidates.

Basic Downsian theory predicts candidate convergence toward the views of the median voter in two-... more Basic Downsian theory predicts candidate convergence toward the views of the median voter in two-candidate elections. Common journalistic wisdom, moreover, leads us to expect these centripetal pressures to be strongest when elections are expected to be close. Yet, the available evidence from the US Congress disconfirms this prediction. To explain this counterintuitive result, we develop a spatial model that allows us to understand the complex interactions of political competition, partisan loyalties, and incentives for voter turnout that can lead office-seeking candidates, especially candidates in close elections, to emphasize policy appeals to their voter base rather than courting the median voter.

Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy

Political Geography Quarterly

Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 1985

He is a specialist in issues of representation and reapportionment and has written on a variety o... more He is a specialist in issues of representation and reapportionment and has written on a variety of topics dealing with collective decision-making. His most recent co-edited books are Information Pooling and Group Decision-Making, 1985, and Electoral Laws and Their Political Consequences,

Theory and Decision Library C, 2010

Questions involving (re)aggregating parts into wholes are fundamental to all branches of scientif... more Questions involving (re)aggregating parts into wholes are fundamental to all branches of scientific inquiry (Saari and Sieberg, 2001). After discussing two very general insights we derive from the aggregation literature, we look at how wholes may sometimes be reconstructed from their parts when we weight the parts appropriately, and we show that the notion of weighted averages can be used to make sense of seeming paradoxes: including how family income can go down even though per capita income is going up; how standardized test scores can go down even though the scores of every racial and ethnic group taking the test is going up; why most people think that roads are crowded even though most of the time there may be hardly any cars on the road; why teachers can teach mostly small classes, yet students can take mostly large ones; why George Bush could have won the Electoral College in 2000 even though he loses the popular vote; and why your friends can be expected to have more friends than you do.

Studies in Public Choice, 2009

Collective Decision-Making: Social Choice and Political Economy, 1996

North Carolina law review

When applying the Voting Rights Act, courts and commentators alike have too often fixated on the ... more When applying the Voting Rights Act, courts and commentators alike have too often fixated on the distinction between "majority-minority" districts and "majority-white" districts, while paying relatively little attention to the likely electoral outcomes that any given districting plan will actually generate. In this Article, three political scientists provide a conceptual framework for predicting minority electoral success, taking into account the participation rates and voting patterns of minority and white voters, as well as incorporating the multi-stage election process (primaries plus general elections, and sometimes runoff elections). The Authors also analyze empirical election data to demonstrate how the model can be applied to address voting rights disputes.

Perspectives in Business Culture, 2014