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, Professor Cox views electoral laws as posing a variety of coordination problems that political actors must solve. Under plurality rule, for example, not every leftist aspirant for the presidency can run at once, if the Left is to have a good chance of winning.

But although all leftists will benefit from unifying behind a single candidate, they may not agree on which candidate that should be. Analogous coordination problems - and with them the necessity of negotiating withdrawals, strategic voting, and other species of strategic coordination - arise in all electoral systems.

Although the classics of electoral studies have dealt with issues of coordination, this is the first book that 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 is also the first book that 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.