Suchergebnisse

In this research note we present preliminary evidence on the characteristics of twenty-four congressional electoral campaigns during the Chilean national elections of 2005 & then utilize it to create a typology of campaign types for incumbents & challengers. The evidence was collected through participant observation & in-depth interviewing in six electoral districts of the Metropolitan Region of Santiago. Additionally, we systematized secondary information available for each district & candidate. The statistical & Boolean analysis of this data yields the following results: a) different campaign profiles exist; b) the most important variable in causing those divergent profiles is incumbency, as incumbent legislators seeking reelection spend systematically more than their challengers; c) although the previous trend holds among different types of districts & across political parties, incumbent candidates of the Alianza spend more than their counterparts of the Concertacion, especially when competing in popular districts; d) other theoretically important factors such as candidate's access to an extensive partisan network in the district, the use of party-symbols in campaigns, the reliance on anti-party or outsider rhetoric, or congressmen's Congress attendance record do not seem to affect election or reelection chances. Our analysis also identifies the campaign types that are most likely to generate the election of incumbents or challengers. Most notably we found that the most effective (but very unusual) way for challengers to beat an incumbent is to spend more than, & aggressively confront, their own coalition's incumbent candidate. Tables, Figures, References. Adapted from the source document.

Analyzes elections in 1991, 1994, and 1997 to explain changes in voting; relevance of incumbents' economic performance and voter turnout. Summary in English p. 309.

Electoral preferences radically changed between 1994 and 2012. Based on surveys taken from voters as they left the polling place, this article analyzes the relationship between the voter's perception of change in the economic situation and preference for the incumbent party in this period. Economic retrospective vote is one feature of voter's behavior widely present, of a small magnitude and almost constant in all elections, except in moments of big economic changes. The effect of economic perceptions on the vote for the incumbent party is of a limited magnitude, because voter's party identification mediates this relationship between perceptions and vote. Adapted from the source document.

This paper analyzes the influence of the electoral environment on the development of institutional capacities at the level of local government in Mexico. Drawing on the assumption that establishing professional, merit-based & impersonal administrative systems entails political costs to government leaders & their electoral activists, the article investigates whether electoral competition & party alternation have stimulated the development of necessary institutional capacities in municipal governments. The empirical evidence seems to support both hypotheses. It also suggests the possibility that strong local political machines deter the ability of incumbent leaders to reduce clientelism in the operation of public bureaucracies. Charts, References. Adapted from the source document.

For the 2006 legislative & municipal elections in the Dominican Republic, 32 senators (one for each one of the country's 31 provinces plus the National District), 178 representatives to the lower house (elected proportionally), & 151 mayors with their respective city councils (for a total of 934 city council members), were to be elected. The incumbent Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) achieved a major victory at the legislative level, which now gives it control over the Senate & the House for the next four years, while the opposition parties (represented in the Grand National Alliance) lost important enclaves. The PLD also won a majority of the country's municipalities. Tables, References. Adapted from the source document.

This work aims to develop a model to explain the behavior of the high court's judges when they take decisions that affect the access to the executive. For this purpose, this paper analyzes the cases in which the Supreme Courts in Central America have intervened to decide who can have access to presidential power and under which conditions that can happen. Through the analysis of constitutional interpretations of laws that control presidential re-election or who is the incumbent to the presidency of a country, this paper examines the explanatory factors that have led to the Supreme Courts to decide who is the holder of executive power. In this regard, the article considers the cases of Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras. Adapted from the source document.

The development of the pattern of territorial organization established in the Spanish Constitution of 1978 creates non-statewide institutions with legislative powers, and regional elections are held in order to choose non-national deputies. Turnout in these contests is usually lower than the one registered in the national congressional elections. The paper argues that some special groups of voters are particularly prone to vote in national but not in regional elections. This phenomenon, that is called differential turnout, is studied in the 2005 Basque Country and 2006 Catalonia regional elections. Econometric models show a relationship between voters' judgements on the performance of the regional incumbent and the quality of non-national candidates, on one side, and the propensity of differential turnout, on the other. Adapted from the source document.

This article analyses voters behavior & party nomination strategies in the Spanish Senate election, in the 2000 year. In Spanish Senate elections, the voter has the possibility to choose among a party's candidates & is also allowed to vote for candidates of more than one party. The study of the year 2000 Senate election shows that most Spanish voters cast their votes for candidates of the same political party. However, when voters choose among a party's candidates, they show preference for candidates placed first on party columns. The analysis of party nomination strategies suggests that the alphabetical rank-ordering of candidates on the ballot has been manipulated by parties to favor incumbent candidates by placing their names first on the list. Tables, References. Adapted from the source document.

Campbell and Miller's seminal paper in 1957 founds a tradition in political science that deals with split-ticket voting. The increasing implementation of mixed-member electoral systems during the nineties offers the opportunity of testing the validity of the theories that traditionally have explained split-ticket voting in a different institutional context. This research focuses on 1999 and 2002 New Zealand general elections and takes as its main independent variables the prospective and retrospective mechanisms of voting. In sum, the paper concludes that in countries with this kind of institutional arrangements bad feelings about the candidates (either in the constituency or in the party list), and bad judgements about the performance of national or local incumbents of the parties with which the voter is indentified increase the probability of casting a split-ticket vote. Adapted from the source document.

This article tests the economic voting hypothesis for the 1996 & 2000 Spanish general elections. The simplest economic voting hypothesis suggests that other things being equal, a good economic performance will make voters support the incumbent. In contrast, I propose to test the existence of economic voting in Spain by systematically considering the political, economic, & sociological contexts in which elections take place. The model seeks to identify the different ways in which public opinion may be related to the state of the economy. The main results of the empirical analysis presented in the article suggest that the economy entered the ballot-box both in the 1996 & 2000 general elections in Spain. While the electoral punishment of the socialists in the 1996 elections was not exclusively motivated by economic reasons, the electoral rewarding of the conservatives was mainly motivated by the positive economic performance, which generated a general trend of optimistic economic expectations in Spanish public opinion. Tables, Appendixes, References. Adapted from the source document.

The normative focus of the study of political behavior assumes that voters are rational & that all apply the same method of reasoning when they have to choose. Given the limitations of the normative view of voting theory, some authors have chosen to explain the voter's decision from a descriptive perspective. In this paper, we develop an adaptive model to describe the different decision-making processes that voters apply. Our ultimate goal is to identify rules that characterize the political behavior of individuals. To achieve this, we use a classification technique from the field of automatic learning: decision trees. At the empirical level, we have discovered that Spanish voters apply different decision processes chat are guided by the heuristic criterion of cost saving of information about the incumbent, the government's actions & the future of the country's economy. The decision trees obtained enable us to classify voters into four categories: ritualists, voters influenced by affective factors, those influenced by government performance & forward-looking voters. Adapted from the source document.

The article analyses the possible electoral consequences of being an outsider in the Spanish labor market. A theoretical model based on the premise that economic experiences are always filtered by, & interpreted through, ideological maps is defended against additive models, which assume that economic experiences have a direct electoral impact irrespectively of voters' ideological allegiances. Both models are tested empirically by analyzing voting intention in the 1996 general election as reported in a survey undertaken in 1995 by the Spanish Centre for Sociological Research of a representative sample of 4,000 adults. Empirical analysis provides evidence in favor of the interaction model & suggests that labor precarity in the flexible segment of the Spanish labor market could have induced two types of electoral punishment: 1) punishment of the incumbent Socialist party amongst left-wing voters either through voting for the United Left (IU) or for the Popular Party (PP); & 2) punishment of all parties amongst radicalized respondents through electoral abstention. Tables, Graphs, References. Adapted from the source document.

Does such a study have any meaning in the 20th cent, an era of multinational powers & of econ communities? In fact, the subject is important. The 19th cent made the error of abandoning regional divisions in favor of the provincial system, which has subsequently becomeweakened. It is necessary to revive this system by giving the provinces various cultural, & particularly econ functions. The province can, in effect, assume an econ function. The possibilities in this area are considerable, as has been demonstrated by the example of France. The recent Soc Emergency Law of Madrid tends to supply a solution of this kind. It is incumbent upon Madrid to discover such remedies, since it is the centralism of the capital which has made all plans for provincial autonomy impossible. The conditions in which the problem is present have been defined by Ortega y Gasset & Ramiro Ledesma Ramos in 1931. These conditions have changed little during the 30 yrs, & it cannot be said that this is a false problem since the average Spaniard lives in the province. Tr by J.A. Broussard from IPSA.