Popular elections are at the heart of representative democracy. Thus, understanding the laws and practices that govern such elections is essential to understanding modern democracy. In this book, Cox views electoral laws as posing a variety of coordination problems that political forces must solve. Coordination problems - and with them the necessity of negotiating withdrawals, strategic voting, and other species of strategic coordination - arise in all electoral systems. This book employs a unified game-theoretic model to study strategic coordination worldwide and that relies primarily on constituency-level rather than national aggregate data in testing theoretical propositions about the effects of electoral laws. This book also considers not just what happens when political forces succeed in solving the coordination problems inherent in the electoral system they face but also what happens when they fail.

Gary W. Cox is a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego. In addition to numerous articles in the areas of legislative and electoral politics, he is author of The Efficient Secret (winner of the Samuel H. Beer dissertation prize in 1983), coauthor of Legislative Leviathan (winner of the Richard F. Fenno Prize in 1993), and author of Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral Systems (1997), which was awarded APSA's awards for the best book in political science (Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award), the best book in comparative politics (Gregory Luebbert Prize), and for the best book in political economy. His latest book, Elbridge Gerry's Salamander, analyzes the political consequences of the reapportionment revolution in the United States. Cox is a former Guggenheim Fellow and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996.