Following an overview of French presidential elections, their organization, & the issue of candidate information dissemination, the impact of leadership qualities & personal attributes on voting behavior & electoral outcomes is assessed for elections, 1965-1995, drawing on a variety of sources. Much attention is given to the degree to which the constitutional standing of the French presidency promotes strong leadership & how the electoral system proceeds in a manner that directs increasing scrutiny on individual candidates. Analysis of each election indicates that such candidate-centered variables are but one factor among many that influence outcomes. In general, while the French system seems an appropriate milieu for candidates to stress their leadership qualities, findings do not bear this out. However, focusing on the traditional left-right division, some support is found for the hypothesis that the strength of the left-right orientation's impact is undercut in elections where personal qualities are stronger. 4 Tables. J. Zendejas
Considers whether personality is important in US electoral politics, drawing on American National Election Study & other survey data from the six recent presidential elections. Candidate images, their bases in voter fundamental political predispositions, & the influence of those evaluations of candidate personal qualities on individual voting behavior & aggregate election outcomes are examined. The usual traits assessed in surveys are morality, knowledgeable, inspirational, leadership strength, & caring of the people. While modest aggregate differences in public perceptions of candidate leadership traits may be apparent, this is seen to mask wider divergence among respondents taken as a function of personal partisan bias. In this light, & per Warren E. Miller & J. Merrill Shanks (1982), a multistage causal model of voting behavior is devised to take systematic account of the degree to which voter evaluations are epiphenomenal. Then, focus turns to measuring the impact of candidate public image on voting behavior & the outcomes of 1980-2000 elections on the basis of "neutral observer" trait ratings, focusing on the 2000 presidential election. It is concluded that candidate images are essentially epiphenomenal & have only a modest impact on election outcomes. 6 Tables, 3 Figures. J. Zendejas
Examines German voter orientations toward chancellor candidates, drawing on survey data gathered on elections since 1961 in a discussion of the nonpersonalization of candidates. Considered first is whether assessments of candidates determine individual votes, focusing on the impact of candidate orientations on the voting behavior of those lacking any long-term party identification. Conditions fostering candidate-centered voting on the part of weak identifiers as well as shifts in supply- & demand-side factors are addressed. Next, a short overview of voter preference development since 1969 is provided, &, following, an approach employed by Wolfgang Jagodzinski & Stefan Kuhnel (1990), the affect of candidate evaluations on electoral choice is assessed. Attention turns to various elements of candidate images & which ones determine a good leader, highlighting survey data from the 1998 elections between Helmut Kohl & Gerhard Schroder. It is concluded that candidate personalities & personal characteristics do not figure too heavily in German voter decisions, as they are mediated by situational factors, eg, strength & direction of partisan affiliations, presence or absence of contentious political issues, & voter evaluations of candidates not running for chancellor. The potential growth of personalization & its utility in describing trends in Germany are contemplated in closing. 4 Tables, 4 Figures, 1 Appendix. J. Zendejas
Concludes a collection of essays studying the impact of leadership personalities & personality traits on individual voters' decisions in the US, UK, France, Canada, Germany, & Russia. The seemingly narrow focus of the book's intent is noted before offering an estimate on which elections over the past 40 years have & have not been decided on the basis of voter's evaluations of leadership & candidates. Some country-specific points are addressed, & then the implications of the estimations are explored. It is found that, in general, it is rather unusual for leaders' & candidates' personalities & other traits to determine election outcomes. In addition, hypotheses presented in Chapter 1 are revisited in light of the estimations, & some complications are introduced. It is concluded that, for the six countries, personality factors impact election outcomes far less than generally assumed. 1 Table. J. Zendejas
In this paper, we describe our effort to create a new corpus for the evaluation of detecting and linking so-called survey variables in social science publications (e.g., "Do you believe in Heaven?"). The task is to recognize survey variable mentions in a given text, disambiguate them, and link them to the corresponding variable within a knowledge base. Since there are generally hundreds of candidates to link to and due to the wide variety of forms they can take, this is a challenging task within NLP. The contribution of our work is the first gold standard corpus for the variable detection and linking task. We describe the annotation guidelines and the annotation process. The produced corpus is multilingual - German and English - and includes manually curated word and phrase alignments. Moreover, it includes text samples that could not be assigned to any variables, denoted as negative examples. Based on the new dataset, we conduct an evaluation of several state-of-the-art text classification and textual similarity methods. The annotated corpus is made available along with an open-source baseline system for variable mention identification and linking.
The article describes the enlargement process of the EU towards the East in the nineties with its historic, political, security, economic & moral dimensions primarily focusing on the Czech Republic's Accession to the EU. The first section of the article covers the historical background of the relations between the EC/EU & the Czech Republic in the first half of the nineties, the Czech accession application & the approach of EU Member States versus the enlargement process. The discussion about enlargement depended on the internal political & economic situation in the Candidate Countries as well as on the willingness of the Member States. In 1996 the Czech Republic submitted a formal accession application. After the Commission issued its positive opinion on the Czech application & the Member States endorsed it, official negotiations started on 30 March 1998. The assessments of the Commission played a unique role in the enlargement process & clearly showed substantial, structural & sector deficiencies of the Czech Republic. In 1999 even the economic evaluation assigned it the last position of the "Luxembourg group." Compared to other states from this group the Czech Republic showed only little progress in several negotiation chapters & was warned by the Commission that a slow speed of harmonisation did not correspond to the political criteria. However, the 2000 Report could be seen more positive. The Czech Republic returned step by step to the group of the best-prepared candidates. The last part of the study concentrates on the "chapter by chapter" negotiations from the beginning in 1998 to the Summit in Copenhagen in 2003 & the dilemma of public support for enlargement in Member States as well as in the Czech Republic. It analyses the process whereas one party had to prove its maturity being subject to the process, which put extreme demands on it, while the other party had not been under such pressure. Appendixes, References.
Do informational interventions shape electoral choices and thereby promote political accountability? The chapters in Part II of this book provided answers to this question in particular contexts. The studies individually provide rich insights not only into the impact of interventions that were common to all studies, but also on the effects of alternative interventions that were specific to each one. In this chapter, we assess the larger lessons that we can glean from our coordinated studies. As outlined in Chapter 3, all studies seek to test common hypotheses about the impact of harmonized informational interventions, using consistent measurements of outcome variables. Our preregistered analysis allows us to evaluate whether, pooling data from the set of studies in the initiative, information about politician performance led voters to alter their electoral behavior. It also informs a discussion about the conditions under which they did or did not do so. We find that the overall effect of information is quite precisely estimated and not statistically distinguishable from zero. The analysis shows modest impacts of information on voters' knowledge of the information provided to them. However, the interventions did not appear to shape voters' evaluations of candidates, and, in particular, they did not discernibly influence vote choice. This slate of null results obtains in nearly all analyses for the individual country studies too. Nor is there strong evidence of impact on voter turnout, though under some specifications we find suggestive evidence that bad news may boost voter mobilization. Our results are robust to different analytic strategies and across a variety of modeling and dataset construction choices. The findings also suggest that the estimated effect in our missing study would have needed to be extremely large to alter our broader conclusions. The size of our meta-analysis reduces the chances that null estimated effects stem from low statistical power, and the fact that our results are so consistent across the individual studies limits the possibility that our mostly null effects are due to idiosyncrasies in implementation or study design. In the rest of this chapter, we first describe the prespecified approach that we use to analyze the pooled dataset. We then report our main findings, point out the consistency of results across studies, and report robustness checks. Next we consider several possible reasons for our null findings by testing the prespecified hypotheses. The most plausible reason for the null effects stems from the failure of the interventions to shape voters' perceptions of politicians; we do not find evidence, however, that this is due to partisan or ethnic attachments or other heuristic substitutes for information. It is critical to underscore the similarities of these interventions to previous treatments in the experimental research literature and to interventions for which donor organizations in the transparency space routinely advocate. Indeed, our interventions were crafted by researchers with substantial country-specific expertise, usually in collaboration with local NGOs. Our null results across wide array of contexts therefore provide an important baseline of evidence against which future studies can be weighed. This chapter could be profitably read in conjunction with Chapter 3, which discusses the common interventions and our measurement of key variables, but it can be read as a standalone chapter as well.
