Gary W. Cox高分ZZ学作品。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, Cox views electoral laws as posing a variety of coordination problems that political forces must solve. Coordination problems - and with them the necessity of negotiating withdrawals, strategic voting, and other species of strategic coordination - arise in all electoral systems. This book 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 book also 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.<br>
本书在现代政治研究的文献里也算的上是必读书目的一类著作。作者从迪维尔热定律的最基本的讨论开始，逐渐将这个框架拓展到M+1法则，从这一点来说，真的是思路非常清晰，理论框架也非常的有力。在Cox这里，思考怎样解决选民和政治家的coordination problem是他写作此书的出发点，相较很多一开始上来鬼画符一样的搞一两个简单的博弈困境，然后直接切入不同的选举制度下可能的问题的学者不同，Cox此书的写作风格也是很值得学习的。