Suchergebnisse

Despite strong theoretical claims that politicians should target swing voters with distributive benefits, empirical evidence in the United States is inconclusive. This paper addresses the puzzle by focusing on two factors overlooked in previous work. First, I show that, owing to the bimodal distribution of partisanship among the U.S. public, swing voters can be targeted efficiently through the allocation of federal resources to areas where the opposition is strong. Secondly, I hypothesize that presidents limit swing-voter targeting to times when they are actually up for reelection; thus, the opposition county advantage appears only in first presidential terms. An analysis of the geographic distribution of federal project grants awarded between 1986 and 2009 supports the theory. Presidents target swing voters within competitive states; they do so only in the years when they seek reelection, however, and they channel benefits to counties where the opposition party maintains a stronghold.

AbstractRegional bloc voting in South Korea has been ascribed to voters' psychological attachments to birthplace. This article seeks to expand the existing discussion of regionalism by showing that economic conditions in voters' places of residence affect vote choices at the individual level and produce clustering of votes at the aggregate level in South Korea. While the idea of residence-based regionalism has previously been suggested, empirical scrutiny of the idea has been limited. Exploiting a Bayesian multilevel strategy, this article provides evidence that short-term economic changes at the province level affected voters' choices in the 2007 presidential election in South Korea, independent of the long-term political affiliation between regional parties and their constituents. The positive association between local economic conditions and vote choices remains significant, controlling for perceptions of national economic conditions and other individual level covariates such as age and political attitudes.

Existing studies—most importantly, Gomez, Hansford, and Krause—provide empirical support for an idea often embraced by popular media: The vote share of the Republican Party (as the percentage of total votes) increases when it rains, because the magnitude of decrease in turnout is larger among Democratic vis-à-vis Republican supporters. Considering the compositional nature of aggregated data, we show that the alleged Republican advantage derives in part from an increase in the number of votes for the Republican Party. Based on the extensive literature of psychology and related fields, we provide a possible interpretation of this counter-intuitive empirical finding. Methodologically, our evidence suggests that researchers must be alert when using rainfall as an instrument to estimate the causal effects of voter turnout on electoral outcome.