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The advantage incumbent members of Congress hold over their opponents in campaigns for office has steadily grown over the past five decades. While students of congressional politics have analyzed the effect of this advantage on members' behavior in office, little is known of its effect on their opponents. Sitting members of the House frequently face underfinanced and obscure challengers. Conventional theories of electoral competition assume that the only hope those candidates have of even coming close to making such an election competitive is to align their policy positions as closely as possible to those of the median voter. Yet challengers to incumbents often run on quite extreme position platforms. In the majority of these uncompetitive races, Robert G. Boatright explains, a new type of politics is emerging—a politics of expressive campaigning, where challengers seek to use their campaigns as a platform for their own views and as a means of helping their party achieve goals other than winning the election at hand.

This research makes two types of contributions to existing political science literature. On a theoretical level, it argues for a reconceptualization of the motives of candidates and parties in rational choice analysis. On a practical level, it seeks to enrich our understanding of the role that challengers play in American elections and of the reason why different types of challengers emerge in different types of elections. Boatright argues that the role of challengers in the American electoral process can be understood only if we broaden our theories about rational candidate behavior.

How do voters weigh economic concerns in their calculus of partisan choice in voting booths and opinion polls? How do voters arrive at their perceptions of economic conditions and assign responsibility for them to incumbent governments? And when do people go beyond electoral reactions in expressing their sentiments about economic well-being?The contributors to Economics and Politics employ sophisticated methods of analysis to isolate the effects of specific economic conditions such as unemployment and inflation. While some look at the effects of aggregate data on the electorate taken as a whole, others examine individual perceptions of economic conditions gleaned from survey data. The contributors, from several European countries as well as the United States, consider the relationships between economics and politics both cross-nationally and individually in West Germany, the United States, France, Britain, and Italy.Taken together, these contributions present the most comprehensive comparative assessment of economic influence on mass political behavior. The crucial role of strategic politicians, intervening in the economy as well as in public evaluations of the economy, receives considerable attention; so do interventions such as wars and political turnover. In sorting out economic facts and assigning responsibility to politicians amid such uncertainty, the publics of Western democracies display considerable sophistication.

Russia held its first multiparty election in over 75 years in the hope that it would usher in a new democratic political order. However, the success of right-wing populist Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party of Russia and other anti-reform forces shocked the world. This study analyzes the background, events and main players of the elections, and examines their significance for the Russian political system. Describing in detail the December 1993 voting, it provides historical, political, regional and sociocultural interpretations of the elections and their results. The work attempts to answer such questions as: what were the keys to Zhirinovsky's success?; who are the new players on Russia's political scene?; what role will the new institutions play in Russian politics; and who actually holds power in Russia?