From leading global experts in the fields of politics and mathematics comes this thoughtful analysis of the nature and distribution of power within the European Union and the practical implications of the current institutional design on its members. A valuable resource for scholars of political science, European studies and law, as well as to those working on game theory, theory of voting, and applications of mathematics to social science.
THIS PAPER USES THE CONCEPT OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ALIENATION AND ELECTION PARTICIPATION TO DISCUSS FRENCH VOTING BEHAVIOR. EVIDENCE IS PRESENTED IN SUPPORT OF THREE PROPOSITIONS. (1) PARTICIPATION AT THE SECOND BALLOT IN FRANCE IN FORCED-CHOICE SITUATIONS CAN BE ACCOUNTED FOR BY PARTISAN ATTITUDES (AS MEASURED BY THERMOMETER SCORES) BUT NOT BY PERCEPTIONS OF PARTISAN LOCATIONS ON THE LEFT-RIGHT DIMENSION; (2) THE PARTISAN CHOICES OF THE VOTERS IN SUCH SITUATIONS CAN BE BETTER EXPLAINED BY PARTISAN ATTITUDES THAN BY LEFT-RIGHT PERCEPTIONS; AND (3) DELIVERATE ABSTAINERS IN SUCH SITUATIONS RESEMBLE BALLOT SPOILERS, WHILE CHRONIC ABSTENTION AND RANDOM ABSTENTION ARE LONG-TERM PHENOMENA.
AbstractOfficials in China claim that voting rates in rural village elections are high. However, the true voting rate is lower, especially for women. We postulate that women are less likely to vote owing to insufficient knowledge about their rights. The objective of this paper is to test whether the knowledge levels of women and village leaders about women's voting rights can affect women's voting behaviour. We report on the results of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving 700 women in China's Fujian and Liaoning provinces. Villages were randomly assigned to either a control group or one of three intervention groups. One intervention provided voting training to women only, another provided training to both women and village leaders, and the third provided training to village leaders only. After women received training, their scores on a test of voting knowledge increased, and they more fully exercised their voting rights. When only village leaders were trained, test scores and voting behaviour were not statistically different from the control villages.
PRIOR WORK ON U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS HAS CONCLUDED CONSISTENTLY THAT VOTER EVALUATIONS OF NATIONAL ECONOMIC CONDITIONS HAVE HAD A GREATER IMPACT ON ELECTORAL OUTCOMES THAN HAVE PERCEPTIONS OF PERSONAL ECONOMIC SITUATIONS. UTILIZING DATA FROM THE 1984 NATIONAL ELECTION STUDY, WE FIND CONFIRMATORY EVIDENCE FOR SUCH A PATTERN. A MORE DISAGGREGATED EXAMINATION OF VOTERS AND THEIR ECONOMIC PERCEPTIONS FOR THAT YEAR, HOWEVER, REVEALS SOME IMPORTANT REFINEMENTS OF EARLIER FINDINGS. SPECIFICALLY, THERE IS A SIZABLE MINORITY FOR WHOM PERSONAL ECONOMIC CONDITIONS APPEAR TO MATTER MORE. FURTHER, THE ROLE OF NONECONOMIC ISSUE VOTING IN DISTINGUISHING ECONOMIC GROUPS, A TOPIC WHICH HAS BEEN LARGELY IGNORED UP TO THIS POINT, IS FOUND TO BE QUITE PRONOUNCED-OVERRIDING, IN SEVERAL INSTANCES, THE INFLUENCE EVEN OF PARTISAN AND ECONOMIC PREDISPOSITIONS.
Part 4: eParticipation Initiatives and Country Studies ; International audience ; Questão Pública was a Voting Advice Application website set up for the 2010 Senate elections in Brazil. Promoted by a consortium of Brazilian and international NGOs as well as universities, Questão Pública was not only a research but also a political initiative. The consortium understood Questão Pública as a complementary tool to reinforce transparency and accountability during an election campaign. The paper presents a description of this experience, of candidate and user response resps wellas a discussion of the main features of the Voting Advice Application. We furthermore report on technical aspects, the questionnaire, and the diffusion activities the consortium undertook to convince candidates to participate as well as to attract users.
Two recent research programs—one on the sources of democratic consolidation and another on the causes and consequences of violent conflict—have tended to evolve in relative isolation. The contributions to this special issue of Journal of Conflict Resolution help to bridge this gap, through explicit theoretical and empirical analysis of the relationship between fighting and voting. Armed conflict and electoral politics may be strategic substitutes, in that political actors may optimally choose to submit to the ballot box or instead attempt to impose their will by force; or they may be strategic complements, in that actors use violence to bolster their electoral aims, or use electoral returns as sources of information on underlying preferences that they exploit in armed campaigns. In either case, the distribution of popular support for contending parties can shape not only the incidence but also the type of armed conflict, and it can also influence the incentives of parties to invest in institutional mechanisms that mitigate commitment problems and help to bring violent conflicts to an end. The contributions to this issue illuminate these themes and demonstrate the value of bringing these separate research programs into closer dialogue.
Since no 'responsible' continental party system has yet emerged to provide stable cues to European Parliament (EP) voters, they are left to choose between their countries' domestic parties. Though the large majority of participants act just as they did in the previous national election, some switch their votes. This essay investigates the divergence between EP & national election results, finding evidence that voters who change their behavior often act in a rational manner. Two empirical regularities have been reported in the literature on EP electoral outcomes, & two theories posited to explain them. First, parties that hold power in domestic governments tend to do poorly in EP races, with their greatest losses coming when the elections fall midway through their tenures. Previous explanations of this phenomenon focus on a natural 'cycle of popularity' that all governments face. I test the competing theory that this cycle is not natural but driven by retrospective judgments of a government's record. Macroeconomic performance, rather than time itself, is the key explanatory factor. Second, minor parties tend to improve upon their domestic vote totals in EP elections. Is this because voters who have become unhappy with major parties use European races, which usually fall between domestic contests, to cast a protest vote? I consider this theory along with an alternative explanation in which voters move to small parties even though their preferences remain stable. The different electoral rules that govern EP races & the lower stakes involved provide voters with new strategic incentives, which guide their votes. Tests of these four theories using aggregate election returns from every EP contest along with survey data from the 1994 races provide much evidence of retrospective voting & strategic behavior. 6 Tables, 1 Figure, 1 Appendix, 48 References. Adapted from the source document.
By means of a reanalysis of the most relevant data source—the International Social Mobility and Politics File—this article criticizes the newly grown consensus in political sociology that class voting has declined since World War II. An increase in crosscutting cultural voting, rooted in educational differences rather than a decline in class voting, proves responsible for the decline of traditional class-party alignments. Moreover, income differences have not become less but more consequential for voting behavior during this period. It is concluded that the new consensus has been built on quicksand. Class is not dead—it has been buried alive under the increasing weight of cultural voting, systematically misinterpreted as a decline in class voting because of the widespread application of the so-called Alford index.
The purpose of this paper is to explain why voters made the choices that they did in Britain's Alternative Vote (AV) referendum on 5 May 2011. The paper utilises four alternative theoretical models to analyse individual voting behaviour. They are described as the cost-benefit, cognitive engagement, heuristics and mobilisation models. The explanatory power of these models is investigated using a large survey data set gathered in the AV referendum study conducted in conjunction with the British Election Study. Multivariate analyses show that all four models contribute to explaining why some people voted in favour of electoral reform, with the cost-benefit model exhibiting particularly strong effects. The conclusion discusses public reactions to the referendum and possible implications of the decisive rejection of electoral reform after a campaign characterised by disaffection and disengagement. Adapted from the source document.
By means of a re-analysis of the most relevant data source – the International Social Mobility and Politics File – this paper criticizes the newly grown consensus in political sociology that class voting has declined since World War II. An increase in crosscutting cultural voting, rooted in educational differences, rather than a decline in class voting proves responsible for the decline of traditional class-party alignments. Moreover, income differences have not become less, but more consequential for voting behavior during this period. It is concluded that the new consensus has been built on quicksand. Class is not dead – it has been buried alive under the increasing weight of cultural voting, systematically misinterpreted as a decline in class voting, due to the widespread application of the so-called Alford index.
Previous studies have portrayed the personalization of politics as a consequence of the changes in the electoral market and the resulting transformations at the party level. However, empirical research has not reached a consensus on whether this process has actually exerted an impact on citizens' voting calculus. Long-term feelings of partisan attachment appear still central in voters' behavior, whereas party leader evaluations seem to play only a marginal role. This paper tries to examine the electoral consequences of the personalization of politics employing an alternative approach. In particular, we hypothesize that leader evaluations have become the key determinants of partisan ties at the individual level. We focus on the Italian case, a prototype of personalized parliamentary democracy. In the empirical section, we examine the ways in which leaders have influenced Italian voters' behavior in the last two decades. The results show that the electoral effect of party leaders (once the mediating effect of partisanship is taken into account) has steadily increased during the period under analysis. Adapted from the source document.
Empirical models of spatial voting allow legislators' locations in a policy or ideological space to be inferred from their roll‐call votes. These are typically random utility models where the features of the utility functions other than the ideal points are assumed rather than estimated. In this article, we first consider a model in which legislators' utility functions are allowed to be a mixture of the two most commonly assumed utility functions: the quadratic function and the Gaussian function assumed by NOMINATE. Across many roll‐call data sets, we find that legislators' utility functions are estimated to be very nearly Gaussian. We then relax the usual assumption that each legislator is equally sensitive to policy change and find that extreme legislators are generally more sensitive to policy change than their more centrally located counterparts. This result suggests that extremists are more ideologically rigid while moderates are more likely to consider influences that arise outside liberal‐conservative conflict.
