Suchergebnisse

Examines two models of vote choice: one includes abstention, the other does not; focuses on advantages of incorporating choice and turnout decisions in the same model.

A voter's capacity to acquire and retain information moderates the relationship between issues and the vote. Issues differ in their distance from the voter's personal experience. Proximate issues, such as personal economic conditions, affect the vote decisions of highly informed and less informed voters equally. Distant issues, such as national economic conditions and foreign affairs, affect the vote of highly informed voters but not less informed voters. The 2008 presidential election on Taiwan provides a critical test of the effect of information on issue voting. Unification with mainland China versus Taiwan independence is the most important issue in the 2008 election, and voters with higher levels of political information show a larger effect of the issue on their vote. The national economy is also a significant predictor of vote choice, but only for highly informed voters. Personal economic conditions and other proximate issues are not significant predictors of the vote at any information level.

We derive Nash equilibrium candidate strategies in a double-member district election when voters have nonseparable preferences for candidates in a single-dimensional policy space. When candidates are elected simultaneously, nonseparable voter preferences create multiple equilibria, including some in which candidates adopt extreme positions. The results are robust to limited voter uncertainty about candidate interaction in the legislature. Nonseparable voter preferences create incentives for the formation of political parties and disincentives for candidates to moderate their positions.

Individuals tend to be very bad at predicting their emotional responses to future events, often overestimating both the intensity and duration of their responses, particularly to negative events. The authors studied affective forecasting errors in the 2008 election in a large sample of undergraduates at Dartmouth College. Replicating past research, McCain supporters overpredicted their negative affect in response to the (future) election of Barack Obama. Obama supporters, however, underpredicted their happiness in response to his victory. Results are discussed with reference to mechanisms proposed to underlie the impact bias, as well as the unique circumstances surrounding this historic election season.