The June 1999 European Parliament elections

In countries with a majoritarian electoral system, the expenses of challengers are generally found to have a stronger effect on the electoral outcome than the expenses of incumbents. Research on campaign expenditure effects in Brazil suggests that this is not the case in countries with an open list PR system and large districts. This hypothesis is confirmed by an analysis of the effect of individual campaign expenses on the number of preferential votes in the 2003 legislative elections in Flanders/Belgium. An analysis of high quality candidates shows that the expenses have a substantial effect on the vote which does not vary according to incumbency status. However, the effect of media exposure on the vote is stronger than and largely independent of the effect of campaign expenses.     

The June 2015 legislative election in Turkey

The Republic of Turkey held its first presidential election, which employed a universal suffrage based on popular vote, on 10 August 2014. Unlike most of the countries organizing separate ballots for electing the president and the MPs, Turkey did not hold both elections on the same day. Instead, the subsequent parliamentary election would be held ten months later, i.e. on 7 June 2015. The reason behind this is not only due to the differences of the term lengths between parliament and the President (which are four and five years respectively), but also the peculiarity in the inclusion of a “presidential element” (a president elected by popular vote) into a political regime which must still be seen as a parliamentary system. This oddness arose from the political crisis in 2007.     

Incremental Thinking: "Report of the Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, (June 1955)"

Editor's Note : The budget reductions pushed through Congress by President Reagan have spurred interest in one of the oldest issues in American politics—the proper relationship among the various levels of government in the United States. One of the most important studies of this issue was issued by the Kestnbaum Commission on Intergovernmental Relations in 1955. The Commission attempted to devise a set of rules for determining which level of government should be responsible for particular activities. When the Commission issued its report, federal grants accounted for less than five percent of the national budget. During the next 25 years, they escalated to more than 17 percent of total outlays. But as a result of recent budget cuts, they are expected to be only about 13 percent in the mid 1980s. Clearly, states and localities will operate in a different fiscal and programmatic environment in the next decade than they did in the preceding two. This excerpt from the report of the Commission continues to be a relevant, though not universally accepted, statement of the principles that should govern intergovernmental finances.