Suchergebnisse

AbstractAlthough strategic voting is common in the first tier of the German electoral system, large-scale campaigns designed to foster strategic voting have rarely been observed in Germany. This changed in the General Election of 2021 when the left-wing organization Campact ran campaigns in several electoral districts supporting the most promising left-wing candidate in order to impede the election of a more right-wing candidate. Especially, Campact's campaign in favor of the SPD candidate Frank Ullrich, with the goal of impeding the election of the controversial CDU candidate Hans-Georg Maaßen, received much public attention. Drawing on this case as an example, I address the question of how Green voters evaluate such campaigns. To do so, I conducted a survey experiment in which different information about the campaign of Campact is provided to Green voters. I find that providing more information about the German electoral system does not increase support for the campaign. However, Green voters react to a party cue, i.e., they become more favorable towards the campaign when they know that the Green Party supported the campaign.

AbstractDespite the ongoing success of populist parties in many parts of the world, we lack comprehensive information about parties' level of populism over time. A recent contribution to Political Analysis by Di Cocco and Monechi (DCM) suggests that this research gap can be closed by predicting parties' populism scores from their election manifestos using supervised machine learning. In this paper, we provide a detailed discussion of the suggested approach. Building on recent debates about the validation of machine-learning models, we argue that the validity checks provided in DCM's paper are insufficient. We conduct a series of additional validity checks and empirically demonstrate that the approach is not suitable for deriving populism scores from texts. We conclude that measuring populism over time and between countries remains an immense challenge for empirical research. More generally, our paper illustrates the importance of more comprehensive validations of supervised machine-learning models.

AbstractMany democracies are witnessing the rise and continuing success of parties and politicians who oppose fundamental principles of liberal democracy. Recent research finds that voters support illiberal politicians, because they trade off policy congruence against attitudes toward liberal democracy. Other studies, however, suggest that authoritarian and populist voters might actually have a preference to vote for illiberal candidates. We argue that both factors interact: Authoritarian and populist voters are more willing to trade off policy representation against support for liberal democracy. To test this mechanism, we rely on a survey experiment conducted in Germany. The results clearly demonstrate that voters indeed trade off policy congruence against liberal democracy. Moreover, this effect is particularly strong for populist and authoritarian voters. Overall, the results have important implications for understanding when and which voters support or oppose liberal democracy.

Candidate selection is one of the most relevant tasks of parties and has important consequences for various aspects of political representation. While previous research has addressed many important aspects of the candidate selection process, we know little about the question of which candidate characteristics are preferred by party members. We address this research gap by conducting a conjoint experiment among more than 300 local party leaders in Germany. In the experiment, potential candidates differed on various important dimensions regarding their socio-demographic background, prior political experience, local roots, and work within the political party. We find that prior political experience and engagement within the party are the most important features. However, socio-demographic characteristics and deviation from the party line also matter. These findings have implications for theories of descriptive representation as well as the impact of decentralization on party cohesiveness.

AbstractVarious studies demonstrate that candidates at the top of the party list have a strong advantage in preferential voting systems, particularly under open-list PR. Such ballot position effects can be explained by voters' tendency to rely on easily available information shortcuts when selecting a candidate. In this paper, we argue that the strength of ballot position effects depends on the context of how voters cast their vote. Specifically, we argue that postal voters are less likely to rely on the ballot position cue compared to voters who vote on election day for two reasons. First, postal voters might be more politically interested. Second, postal voters have more time to assess additional information about the candidates. The hypothesis is tested by analyzing newly collected data from two open-list PR elections in the German federal state of Hamburg. The results confirm the theoretical expectations: Ballot position effects are substantively weaker among postal voters. Additional analyses suggest that differences in the political interest between postal voters and election day voters are unlikely to fully explain these results. These findings advance our understanding of ballot position effects and voters' use of information shortcuts more generally.

AbstractMaciej Górecki provides a detailed and interesting discussion of our analysis regarding women's electoral success in the Polish open-list proportional representation (PR) system and the impact of a gender quota implemented in 2011. In essence, he claims that it remains an open question whether the gender quota had a 'paradoxical' effect (i.e., whether the introduction of the gender quota had a negative impact on female candidates) due to 'debatable' methodological choices in our analysis. In this article, we respond to Górecki's critique. First, we demonstrate that we do not necessarily disagree on the paradoxical impact of the gender quota but rather on the strength of the paradoxical effect. Second, we discuss some drawbacks of using the raw number of votes cast for a candidate as the dependent variable. Finally, we respond to the critique of including the ballot position in the regression model. We emphasize that even if one agrees with Górecki's critique that the ballot position is endogenous, excluding this variable leads to a severely misspecified model that does not allow one to reliably identify the effect of gender.