Before the parliamentary elections in 2018, the ruling party in Turkey, AKP, introduced a new apparentement provision in the electoral law, which allowed parties to make electoral alliances in order to meet the electoral threshold. We claim that this was an ex post mistake. AKP’s electoral engineering was motivated by their fear that its coalition partner, MHP, would not exceed the 10% threshold. While MHP actually met the threshold in the election, the opposition party, İP, failed to do so. Thanks to the new law, the votes for İP were not wasted, as would have happened under the old law. AKP less than 50% of seats and it consequently lost the parliamentary majority. Under the old electoral law, AKP would have won the majority. We use four alternative scenarios in order to estimate the seats and evaluate the political consequences of the unsuccessful electoral manipulation

Why do political actors pass legislation that seemingly hurts them? Lustration laws limit access to public offi ce of the ancien regime's collaborators and hurt members of post-communist parties in East-Central Europe. So why has lustration in Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria been passed when post-communist parties held parliamentary majorities? Why did the postcommunist party in Romania switch from no-lustration to pro-lustration after the 1992 elections? We explain this phenomenon by electoral timing and rules of rocedure in legislatures. Specifi cally, we develop an agenda-setter model with a finite number of parties, imperfect information, and multiple potential medians. Our main argument can be summarized as follows: Suppose that the Postcommunists do not introduce any lustration bill and then lose proposal power in elections. If Anti-communists come to power, they are sure to introduce a harsher bill, and the median of the legislature may prefer such a bill to a no-bill status quo. Post-communists can prevent such a scenario by implementing a mild bill themselves. If they manage to appease the new parliamentary median, they will block a harsher bill that would be implemented after they lose power. Additional results show how electoral perspectives and uncertainty affect and modify this typical scenario. We test our model with an exhaustive analysis of all cases from East- Central Europe that meet our assumptions that a Postcommunist party is in power and no lustration bill is already in force.

The paper starts with the defi nitions of fi ve major voting methods that can be applied in single-member districts. Then the political consequences of single-member districts are discussed. The special attention is paid to those consequences that are considered negative and to potential ways of neutralizing them. The next section compares selected subtle effects of using simple majority rule versus alternative vote. The fi nal section reviews methods that mix proportional representation and majoritarian components.

Non-cooperative games such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Stag Hunt, Asymmetric Coordination and others are primary tools used for modeling collective action. I consider formal models that are close cousins of such standard games: Schelling’s games, Kuran’s dominos and partition function form games. For certain empirical problems, each of these formalisms may have advantages over standard games. Among the benefi ts there are mathematical simplicity, more intuitive depiction of represented phenomena, and better operationalizability. I formalize all three models and prove simple existence theorems for two of them. The detailed examples of applications include vaccination, unpredictability of revolutions, and electoral coalitions.

The article examines the decision-making components of Jane Austen’s six major novels as reconstructed in Michael Chwe’s book and his argument that Austen was a precursor of game theory. In her novels, Austen describes an abundance of strategic situations in the mating process within the British higher classes. Social constraints made mating within this world a tough game due to harsh punishments for failure, especially for women, and severe limitation on signaling interest or sympathy. Austen cleverly investigates this environment and reconstructs many aspects of strategic behavior that have their counterparts in formal concepts of game and decision theory. While she hasn’t made contributions to theory per se, she deserves being named a precursor of applied strategic thinking and an expert on a particular strategically sophisticated social environment.

The paper analyzes unintiutive properties (paradoxes) of the FIFA's ranking of national football teams. The most surprising phenomenon is underrating the teams of the main championship tournament hosts. This "host effect" follows the absence of hosts in preliminaries and the resulting restriction of hosts' pre-tournament matches to friendlies that enter the FIFA system with low weights. Various models built with the FIFA data allow to estimate that the place of the Polish team as a host of Euro 2012 was lowered from 16 to 35 positions.