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What explains party unity in legislatures? Prior research suggests when candidate selection and electoral rules create incentives for legislators to cultivate a personal vote, party unity should decline. However, previous theories often treat candidate selection rules as exogenous institutions that have independent effects on legislative behavior despite the fact the choice of nomination rules are often an intraparty issue and a key component of partisan electoral strategies. Here, we develop a theory linking candidate selection rules to party unity through the strategic behavior of party leaders. Our main finding is that, under personalized electoral rules, the effects of nomination rules on legislative behavior are conditional on parties' electoral incentives. We test our theory using data from the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, a case where our results are unlikely to be explained by personal vote‐seeking incentives since legislators are banned from seeking reelection.

It is not easy to gauge the extent to which the European Employment Strategy (EES) has influenced the EU labour market over the last five years but it has surely contributed to the creation of more than 10 million new jobs and 4 million fewer unemployed. However, is this common strategy the right answer for the labour markets of the future member states? This article examines how the candidate countries are adapting to the EES and where they stand as compared to the current EU countries in achieving the Lisbon targets. The article assesses whether the EES is appropriate for the labour markets of the future member states by analysing both the deficiencies and the positive elements of this strategy for these countries, taking into account proposals for a new revised EES adapted to the needs of changing labour markets, globalisation and enlargement.

Political parties in Western democracies with significant ethnically heterogeneous populations have become increasingly interested in nominating immigrant-origin candidates. This paper investigates how contextual factors explain political parties' effort of immigrant representation. I argue that minority nominations are shaped by parties' strategic calculations weighing out potential vote gains among immigrant voters compared to a potential native backlash. I contend that alien enfranchisement and liberal naturalization policies provide important incentives to nominate minority candidates. In contrast, poor economic conditions imply potential material threat perceptions generating a native backlash against minority representatives, therefore reducing minority nomination. Using a novel dataset on candidates in Switzerland that enables party-municipality-level analysis unlike most previous studies, the analysis reveals that the political and economic context indeed heavily constrains parties' nomination strategies. The findings of this paper have significant implications for our understanding of strategic behaviors of political parties and the promotion of minority representation.

The analyst of campaign strategy in American elections is usually confronted by the apparent impossibility of demonstrating that campaign behavior actually matters. Although candidates possess numerous options in strategy and tactics, it is clear that incumbent members of the majority party (commonly joint phenomena) usually win and opposition candidates of the minority party usually lose. Lewis Froman has even argued that " … the behavior of the candidates during the campaign is one of the least influential factors in determining electoral outcomes.The effects, if any, of campaign behavior are the residue to be examined after the partisan distribution of the electorate, the nature of the times, the power of incumbency and any number of variables beyond the ready control of the candidates themselves have been employed to explain or predict the popular vote distribution. The perceived general ineffectiveness of candidate strategy and tactics is usually explained by the low public saliency of the typical election contest, in which most voters are unlikely to be aware even of the names of the candidates, much less their policy positions or, presumably, any other of their behaviors.But this circumstance may change when "ordinary" election contests are connected to contests of much higher saliency, especially that for the Presidency. It is at this time, at least, when the strategic decisions and behaviors of certain classes of candidates may attract the attention of voters otherwise preoccupied with that more dramatic battle for power.

The UK Independence Party (UKIP) came second in the 2009 European elections, but niche parties associated with a single issue face a dilemma about how to progress. On one hand, if they move too far beyond their core issue, they risk losing their distinctive position and support base. On the other, if they are to grow their representation, they need to develop a broader platform and this can provoke internal tensions. We assess the political attitudes and views on party strategy of UKIP candidates using surveys at the 2009 European and 2010 general election, and compare them with the views of UKIP supporters using opinion poll data. We demonstrate that UKIP's candidates and supporters are closely aligned, with both groups being strongly Eurosceptic, favouring tighter immigration policies and distrusting the main parties. We also show that UKIP's leadership and candidates wish to extend the party's narrative, but differences remain over what issues it should focus on, as well as over competition with the Conservatives and UKIP's role in the European Parliament. Adapted from the source document.

In this paper problems of social choice in general, and political choice in particular, are considered in light of uncertainty. The space of social alternatives in this formulation includes not only pure social states, but lotteries or probability distributions over those states as well. In the context of candidate strategy selection in a spatial model of political choice, candidate strategy sets are represented by pure strategies—points in the space of alternatives—and ambiguous strategies—lotteries over those points. Questions about optimal strategy choice and the equilibrium properties of these choices are then entertained. Duncan Black's theorem about the dominance of the median preference is generalized, and further contingencies in which the theorem is false are specified. The substantive foci of these results are: (1) the conditions in which seekers of political office will rationally choose to appear equivocal in their policy intentions; and (2) the role of institutional structure in defining equilibrium.