Editors’ Introduction to JTP issue 30.3

This issue of Journal of Theoretical Politics contains four original articles focusing on elections and electoral design. In the first article, ‘Directional equilibria’, Chung and Duggan define a new solution concept for spatial voting models. Their notion of directional equilibrium extends the majority rule core and reflects the spirit of the utilitarian equilibrium (the policy that maximizes the sum of voters’ utilities). In addition to providing noncooperative foundations for the solution concept, Chung and Duggan also show that directional equilibria possess desirable continuity and welfare properties and, when voters’ preferences are Euclidean, there is at most one equilibrium point.