Cleavages in World Politics

This chapter systematically examines the potential cleavages that run between the rising and the established powers in international politics. To that end, it analyses and compares the voting behaviour of the BRICS, IBSA, and G7 states in the United Nations General Assembly (GA). GA voting is particularly suited to identify the potential conflict lines between ‘new’ and ‘old’ powers as it runs the gambit of issues confronted in the international system and provides a forum where states can express their preferences relatively freely. Using a spatial model of voting (W-NOMINATE), this chapter analyses more than 500 roll-call votes in the GA over the period 2002–11.

Sophisticated Voting on Competing Ballot Measures: Spatial Theory and Evidence

Are voters sophisticated? Rational choice theories of voting assume they are. Students of voting behaviour are more doubtful. This article examines voting in a particularly demanding setting: direct democratic elections in which two competing proposals are on the ballot. It develops a spatial model of voting and proposal qualification with competing proposals. If voters are naïve, then competing proposals can be used to block the direct democratic route to change, but, if voters vote strategically, competing proposals can bring outcomes closer to the median voter. Voting intention data from California polls provide evidence that some votes are cast strategically even in these demanding circumstances. However, the level of strategic voting appears to be affected by the nature of the election campaign.

HOW POLITICAL PARTIES ADJUST TO FIXED VOTER OPINIONS

We propose a new version of the spatial model of voting. Platforms of five parties were allowed to evolve in a two-dimensional landscape of political issues so as to get maximal numbers of voters. For a Gaussian landscape the evolution leads to a spatially symmetric state, where the platform centers form a pentagon around the Gaussian peak. For a bimodal landscape the platforms located at different peaks get different numbers of voters.

Political Confederation

This article extends the spatial model of voting to study the implications of different institutional structures of federalism along two dimensions: degree of centralization and mode of representation. The representation dimension varies the weight between unit representation (one state, one vote) and population-proportional representation (one person, one vote). Voters have incomplete information and can reduce policy risk by increasing the degree of centralization or increasing the weight on unit representation. We derive induced preferences over the degree of centralization and the relative weights of the two modes of representation, and we study the properties of majority rule voting over these two basic dimensions of federalism. Moderates prefer more centralization than extremists, and voters in large states generally have different preferences from voters in small states. This implies two main axes of conflict in decisions concerning political confederation: moderates versus extremists and large versus small states.