Electoral Politics

Electoral politics refers to the competition among parties, candidates, and movements for public office through elections, together with the institutions, strategies, and social forces that shape campaigns, voting, and governance. Joseph Schumpeter defined democracy as a method in which elites compete for the people’s votes, and Anthony Downs modeled parties as vote-maximizers who converge on the median voter. Maurice Duverger’s law proposed that plurality systems tend toward two parties, while Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan explained party systems through historical social cleavages of class, religion, region, and center and periphery. Paul Lazarsfeld and the Columbia school emphasized social networks in voting, and Pierre Bourdieu analyzed the political field as a space of struggle. Robert Michels’s iron law of oligarchy warned that parties concentrate power in leaders, and Peter Mair argued that parties have grown detached from civil society. Thomas Frank and Arlie Hochschild examined why voters support parties against apparent economic interests, and Colin Crouch described post-democracy. Campaign finance, media, polarization, and populism shape contemporary contests. Electoral politics remains central to research on democracy, parties, class, identity, and political change.