Electoral accountability relies, in part, on voters willingness to cross party lines to select a competent opposition politician. Knowing when voters will cross party lines is essential for democratic representation. I argue that two critical constituency-level factors will jointly influence the likelihood that a voter will vote for an opponent: the partisan geography and the level of electoral competition. Regarding the first, voters have an incentive to vote for opponents in partisan non-segregated districts because, in these settings, politicians cannot channel goods to home areas.

A workshop co-sponsored by DPIR, Department of Social Policy, and the European Studies Centre (University of Oxford), in cooperation with The Joint Research Centre, European Commission, Brussels (based on the report by David Mair for the EU).

Cornelia Navari, of the University of Buckingham, will give an expert talk on Susan Strange, one of the world's leading scholars in international relations and the major European figure in its sub- discipline of international political economy (IPE).

All welcome / bring lunch!

Professor Kilcullen will present a talk based on the topic of his latest book, The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West. In 1993, a newly-appointed CIA director warned that Western powers might have ‘slain a large dragon’ with the fall of the USSR, but now faced a ‘bewildering variety of poisonous snakes’.