Two Faculty Members and a Ph.D. Student Publish Together in the APSR

Three members of the department — Professor John Gerring, Assistant Professor Max Palmer, and Ph.D. student Dominic Zarecki have an article together in the latest issue of the American Political Science Review (with a fourth colleague, Jan Teorell from Lund University). The article, titled “Demography and Democracy: A Global, District-level Analysis of Electoral Contestation” investigates variations in electoral competition and competitiveness. The authors assembled a massive database that covers hundreds of years, “88 countries, 2,344 elections, 79,658 districts, and more than 400,000 elections.” The article speaks to fundamental questions about democracy and challenges conventional wisdom about electoral competitiveness.