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Turnout in municipal elections is even lower than that in presidential elections. Yet the problem has been largely ignored by academicians. In recent years, there have been court challenges under the 1982 Voting Rights Act to majority vote and other than single‐member districting provisions as requirements that are believed to dilute the political impact of minorities. The present analysis presents an overview of our knowledge to date, relating electoral districting and majority vote arrangements to black patterns of participation. It reviews the available literature, traces the associations that exist, identifies the problems in data collection and analysis that are present and sets forth a propositional inventory and set of conclusions that can serve as the basis for future research. The analysis incorporates original data and insights from the author's research and from cities in which he has served as a consultant.

Political campaigns are just now learning how to put the Internet to best use. Low transaction costs and huge economies of scale tempt campaigns to move traditional activities online, but the effectiveness of virtual campaigns is unknown. This paper conducts 13 field experiments on 232,716 subjects to test whether email campaigns are effective for voter registration and mobilization. Both registration and turnout were unaffected, suggesting that email, while inexpensive, is not cost-effective. Adapted from the source document.

Differences in electoral rules and/or legislative, executive or legal institutions across countries induce different mappings from election outcomes to distributions of power. We explore how these different mappings affect voters' participation in a democracy. Assuming heterogeneity in the cost of voting, the effect of such institutional differences on turnout depends on the distribution of voters' preferences for the parties: when the two parties have similar support, turnout is higher in a winner-take-all system than in a power sharing system; the result is reversed when one side has a larger base. The results are robust to a wide range of modeling approaches, including the instrumental voting model, ethical voter models, and voter mobilization models. Findings from laboratory experiments provide empirical support for most of the theoretical predictions.