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Research on party choice in elections shows that, in several Western democracies, voters tend to vote for the party they perceive to be closest to a certain policy or ideological space. This is often interpreted to indicate that voters are well represented by the party they voted for. An alternative explanation is that voters assimilate their perceptions of party positions in such a way that these become consistent with their attitudes. A method is proposed here to estimate the extent to which assimilation occurs in voters' perceptions, & to assess whether that affects evaluations of electoral processes. Application to data from various Dutch National Election Studies provides support for social judgment theory & balance theory. Nevertheless, although assimilation occurs, it has only a very modest impact on evaluations of how the electoral process works. A positive relationship between ambiguity of party positions & degrees of assimilation is found. Results are discussed from the perspective of social psychology & political science. 4 Tables, 1 Appendix, 44 References. Adapted from the source document.

"This book examines the history of the generational gap in American politics, with an emphasis on the remarkable contemporary gap. Using data derived primarily from the American National Election Studies (ANES), 2020 National Election Pool, A.P VoteCast, and the Pew Research Center, Patrick Fisher argues that the political environment experienced by successive generations as they have come of age, politically influences political attitudes throughout one's life. The result is that different generations have distinct political leanings that they will maintain over their lifetimes. Fisher examines each generation from the Greatest Generation through to Generation Z, who have recently started to come of voting age. He cites the entrance of the Millennial Generation and Generation Z into the electorate as completely changing the generational dynamics of American politics, through their distinct political leanings that are significantly to the left of older generations. As a result he concludes that demographically, politically, economically, socially, and technologically, the generations are more different from each other now than at any time in living memory. The Generational Gap in American Politics will appeal to a scholarly and public audience interested in American politics in general and political behavior in particular"--

"This book examines the history of the generational gap in American politics, with an emphasis on the remarkable contemporary gap. Using data derived primarily from the American National Election Studies (ANES), 2020 National Election Pool, A.P VoteCast, and the Pew Research Center, Patrick Fisher argues that the political environment experienced by successive generations as they have come of age, politically influences political attitudes throughout one's life. The result is that different generations have distinct political leanings that they will maintain over their lifetimes. Fisher examines each generation from the Greatest Generation through to Generation Z, who have recently started to come of voting age. He cites the entrance of the Millennial Generation and Generation Z into the electorate as completely changing the generational dynamics of American politics, through their distinct political leanings that are significantly to the left of older generations. As a result he concludes that demographically, politically, economically, socially, and technologically, the generations are more different from each other now than at any time in living memory. The Generational Gap in American Politics will appeal to a scholarly and public audience interested in American politics in general and political behavior in particular"--

This review evaluates the emerging legal & political science scholarship created in the wake of the US Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore, the case that ended the 2000 FL election controversy between supporters of George W. Bush & those of Al Gore. The article surveys scholars' answers to four central questions: (A) Were the Supreme Court's majority or concurring opinions legally sound? (B) Was the Supreme Court's result justified, even if the legal reasoning contained in the opinions was unsound? (C) What effects, if any, will the case & the social science research it has spurred have on the development of voting rights law? (D) What does the Court's resolution of Bush v. Gore tell us about the Supreme Court as an institution? 77 References. Adapted from the source document.

"Policy Making and Southern Distinctiveness examines the uniqueness of Southern politics and their policy choices. While decades of scholarship on the politics of the American South have focused on partisanship and electoral outcomes as the primary elements of interest in Southern politics, few works have focused on the more practical outcomes of these political processes; specifically, comparing state policy choices of Southern states to non-Southern states. This book examines six different policy arenas, voting access, gun control, health care, reproductive rights, water and COVID-19 pandemic response, comparing policy choices in states in the South with states in the non-South. The authors find that the South is distinct in several, but not all, of the policy arenas examined. They conclude that the South as a region is unique because of exceptional degree of one-party control evident in the South, coupled with a long-standing preoccupation with partisanship and race-based politics. Policy Making and Southern Distinctiveness provides valuable insights into how and why states behave in the manner they do and where Southern states may diverge from the rest of the country. It will be of interest to scholars of Southern politics, state comparative policy, public policy, American politics, and federalism/intergovernmental relations"--

Contrary to popular claims, religion played a critical role in Barack Obama's 2008 election as president of the United States. Religion, race, and gender entered the national and electoral dialogue in an unprecedented manner. What stood out most in the 2008 presidential campaign was not that Republicans reached out to religious voters but that Democrats did--and with a vengeance. This tightly edited volume demonstrates how Obama charted a new course for Democrats by staking out claims among moderate-conservative faith communities and emerged victorious in the presidential contest, in part, by promoting a new Democratic racial-ethnic and religious pluralism. Comprising careful analysis by leading experts on religion and politics in the United States, Gastón Espinosa's book details how ten of the largest segments of the American electorate voted and why, drawing on the latest and best available data, interviews, and sources. The voting patterns of Mainline Protestants, Evangelicals, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and seculars are dissected in detail, along with the intersection of religion and women, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. The story of Obama's historic election is an insightful prism through which to explore the growing influence of religion in American politics.

AbstractHow well are voters represented and what explains how well voters are represented? Answering these questions requires unpacking the mechanisms by which voters choose elected officials and elected officials implement policies. Though spatial theories of voting and legislative bargaining provide a broad framework for understanding these mechanisms, testing these theories involves a measurement problem where multiple political actors and outcomes must be located. We develop a technique for estimating policy outcomes, status quo locations, the ideology of elite political actors, and the ideology of voters, on a common scale. Using our new estimates, we demonstrate a similar level of incongruence for tax policies and spending policies. The incongruence arises for different reasons however—tax policies are over-responsive to the position of the median voter. Contrarily, spending policies are under-responsive and barely correlated with the position of the median voter. In examining the underlying mechanisms for policy change, we find that while the positions of elected officials over-respond to the median voter, the changing composition of state government has little immediate impact on policy. Instead, policy outcomes respond to long-term trends in the composition of government.

The risk of gridlock has been haunting discussions on European legislative decision-making for decades. All European Union legislation has to pass through the Council of the European Union, which has a relatively high voting threshold and whose members hold a diverse set of preferences, particularly after Eastern Enlargement. Nevertheless, the legislative output of the Union is relatively high. Existing explanations focus on process-related mechanisms (vote trading, cooperative problem-solving). In contrast, this study explains how member states can change the content of proposals to accommodate the specific concerns of recalcitrant governments. Several empirical examples show how member states have adapted European legislation to overcome the risk of gridlock. Based on a new data set covering a five year period in one policy field (environmental policy), this study shows that member states frequently put forward requests to limit the scope of European legislation, to extend transitional time periods or to lower standards. Furthermore, these requests are often successful. Besides allowing member states to opt out of European agreements (differentiated integration), EU legislation can accommodate concerns of individual member states, thus increasing the decision-making capacity of the Union.

Party competition is largely about making policy promises to voters. We argue that the clarity of the expressed policy position may be equally important. If blurred messages toward different audiences and therefore ambiguous positions can attract votes from different groups, parties have incentives to present ambiguous rather than clear-cut policy platforms. We present a formal model of multi-party competition with stochastic voting where party leaders make strategic choices on both the position and the level of ambiguity of their platforms. Leaders respond to the demands of two principals, the general public and party core constituencies. We derive two hypothesis on the location and ambiguity of party platforms and provide initial tests of these hypotheses in a comparative setting in 14 Western European democracies gathering data on voter and party left-right positions from Eurobarometer surveys and electoral manifestos. Ambiguity of party profiles is estimated using a variant of Wordscores on a newly established data set of electoral manifestos. We find that platforms become more ambiguous as the preferences of the two principals diverge. Our findings imply that ambiguity can be a winning strategy for parties, especially in settings with strong partisan lines.

NATIONAL ELECTION SURVEYS IN FRANCE AND IN THE UNITED STATES DO NOT POSE MANY OF THE SAME QUESTIONS, AND THE DOMINANT RESEARCH PARADIGMS IN EACH COUNTRY OFFER OPPOSING EXPLANATORY MODELS OF VOTE CHOICE. THIS ARTICLE REPORTS THE PRELIMINARY RESULTS FROM A JOINT EFFORT OF U.S. AND FRENCH RESEARCHERS, WHICH SEEKS TO INCLUDE NUMEROUS CROSS-NATIONAL ITEMS IN THE FRENCH NATIONAL ELECTION STUDY FOR 1995. THE FOLLOWING AMERICAN NATIONAL ELECTION STUDY-TYPE ITEMS RECEIVE ATTENTION: CANDIDATE FEELING THERMOMETERS, JOB APPROVAL RATINGS, AND ECONOMIC EVALUATIONS. INCLUSION OF THESE MEASURES IN FRENCH SURVEYS MAY ALLOW AN IMPORTANT CROSS-NATIONAL EXTENSION OF VOTING MODELS THOUGHT TO BE PECULIAR TO ONE POLITICAL CULTURE, SUCH AS THE U.S.

"What difference do running mates make in a presidential election? Research shows that vice presidents matter while in office, and there has been ample evidence of their importance in recent administrations, as demonstrated by Dick Cheney, Joe Biden, and Mike Pence. But there has been no comprehensive, quantitative study of the significance of vice presidential candidates on presidential voting. In Do Running Mates Matter?, Christopher Devine and Kyle Kopko fill this gap in our understanding of presidential elections. They first analyze people's expectations of the influence that running mates have on an election before exploring in detail their actual influence. Building on their previous work in The VP Advantage, they show that voters rarely vote based on their approval or disapproval of the vice presidential candidate, but these candidates exert an indirect effect on voting by influencing voters' perceptions of the presidential candidates. Drawing on extensive empirical data, Devine and Kopko clear up illusions about the effects of running mates and remind us that presidential candidates should pick someone who can be a good vice president, not someone who they think will secure them the win"--

AbstractChoosing a candidate can be difficult in open‐list proportional representation systems, with many candidates on display. Under such circumstances, candidates' personal vote‐earning attributes (PVEAs) become useful for voters since PVEAs function as information shortcuts (heuristics) that reduce the cognitive costs of casting a ballot. However, recent research has demonstrated that more cognitively demanding information, namely candidates' ideological positions, also matters for candidates' electoral success. Yet, much is unknown about the circumstances under which ideology comes into play. In this study, we demonstrate that the availability of easily applied heuristics (operationalized via the level of recognizable candidates on party lists) conditions the effect of candidates' ideological positioning on intra‐party success. Our analyses show that ideology matters most when the share of recognizable candidates with typical PVEAs on the list is limited. The effect of ideological distance from the party gradually disappears as the share of recognizable candidates on the list increases. The results suggest that when the supply of candidates with PVEAs is limited, voters use ideological cues as the base for their voting decisions.

AbstractAlthough the welfare state is a core theme in most national elections in Western democracies, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the causes of welfare state pledge‐breaking. This article presents an argument that explains when governments donotdo what they promised and tests it using an innovative research design with data covering four decades and 18 countries. The argument is able to account for several important but, until now, undescribed phenomena. First, nowadays, governments, on average, deliver less welfare than they promised, whereas in the 1970s they used to deliver more than promised. Second, the pledge‐breaking of governments has become highly dependent on the parliamentary opposition's position on the welfare issue. When the opposition favours fiscal and economic responsibility, governments' tendency to deliver less welfare than promised is amplified. In contrast, when the opposition emphasises the positive benefits of generous welfare, such as equality and social justice, governments become more prone to keep their promises. Third, this conditional effect of the opposition is a recent occurrence that only emerged after the number of potential swing voters increased as class‐based voting gradually declined from the 1970s onwards.

Abstract. This paper focuses on the floating vote and the floating voter at three critical junctures in modern Swedish political history: the general elections of 1928, 1948, and 1968. The topic is in the mainstream of electoral research, but with one important proviso: it is a study of floating without the benefit of survey data. The analysis is based on Thomsen's (1987) method of ecological inference. The ecological estimates confirm the conventional wisdom that the Swedish elections of 1928, 1948 and 1968 were mobilizing elections, bringing large numbers of new voters to the polls, and marked by considerable mobility between the parties. They were also realigning in that they held out the possibility of a new status quo. In 1928 and 1948 the parties of the right were on the offensive; in 1968 the Social Democrats held the initiative. But the new coalitions were potentially unstable; it was the floating voters, particularly those with a previous history of non‐voting, who spelled the difference between defeat and victory. The paper makes an important contribution to the validation of Thomsen's method.

This article examines the spatial factors that shaped the 2021 parliamentary elections. Building on a great deal of research in electoral geography and spatial analysis, it focused on specific spatial elements of voting behaviour that have not been previously studied, and on the key time-specific factors that shaped the electoral map and party system in the 2021 elections. Employing a quantitative approach to aggregate electoral and socio-demographic data, the study maps the electoral dynamic by exploiting the unique political situations that were characterized by a competition between two blocs – the two centre-right coalitions, SPOLU and the Pirates and STAN, and the populist ANO and SPD parties. Despite profound changes in the party system, the spatial stratification of Czech politics remained unchanged. Quite the contrary, the societal cleavages shaped the spatial voting patterns even more intensively. Additionally, the study shows that regional context factors modified the overall nationwide trend. Varying from region to region, factors included religiosity, local patriotism, the role of local entrepreneurs, and the effect of a popular local leader.