Suchergebnisse

An analysis of the 1999 elections in Peoria, IL, sheds additional light on cumulative voting, the increasingly popular solution in voting rights litigation. First, the chief beneficiary of cumulative voting was not a descriptive minority candidate (eg, representative of a demographic group), rather it was an individual who might best be called a substantive minority (eg, representative of a political view or policy option). Second, the elections created a "quasi" experiment for comparing voting behavior under cumulative & traditional straight voting systems. This is important not only because there are few empirical studies that compare the hypothesized effects of cumulative voting with actual voting behavior, but also because there are no real-world comparisons of voting behavior under straight voting in a multimember district, the system cumulative voting usually replaces. After providing background material, a series of hypotheses are tested relying heavily on the actual election ballots. First, hypotheses about aggregate differences are advanced & empirically tested. Second, the rationales for these aggregate hypotheses contain assumptions about how particular voters respond to cumulative voting. These assumptions are advanced as separate hypotheses & tested. The analysis reveals that voter behavior under cumulative voting clearly differs from that under a traditional straight election. With a cumulative voting system, participants vote for fewer candidates, voting is more racially polarized, & majority voters appear to alter their voting behavior more than minority voters. Very unexpected was the form of white flight produced by cumulative voting. White voters, who voted for only African-American candidates under straight voting, voted for only white candidates under cumulative voting. In sum, voters appear to understand the rules of both systems, & they adjust their behavior as they move down the ballot shifting from one system to another. 7 Tables, 13 References. Adapted from the source document.

Retention elections are that part of the merit selection plan designed to hold judges accountable to the public. While more than one scholar has concluded that votes cast in a retention election are often not informed evaluations of the judge's qualifications and/or conduct on the bench, the few existing systematic empirical studies have failed to explain why people vote for or against retention. This study fills part of this void by testing the hypothesis that political trust is a major cue in judicial retention voting. In contrast to most previous work which was either limited to the appellate level or to elections in a single state, the data set consists of 1,864 retention elections held from 1964 through 1984 for major trial court judges. The national trends in political trust in the last two decades are found to be reflected in the trends in the mean vote for retention.