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Previous literature on political participation and voting behavior has often overlooked invalid votes as an expressive and rational act. Few comparative studies seeking to understand why some voters intentionally spoil their ballots, on the one hand, commonly employ aggregate data to empirically analyze their theoretical expectations. Even fewer studies employing individual-level data, on the other hand, only look into countries with high invalid vote shares, and with varied political and institutional characteristics. Based on an article investigating individual- and contextual-level determinants of casting an invalid vote in multiparty European democracies, this case study demonstrates the added value of employing survey data to examine individual behavior, ruling out alternative explanations via operational decisions, modeling distinct choices available to individuals using multinomial logistic regression, taking account of individual and contextual heterogeneity among examined cases, positing and testing interactive hypotheses, and investigating social and political phenomena from a comparative perspective.

Invalid votes are often considered as simple failure to cast a valid vote. In fact, they might be a rational expression of discontent with party policy offerings. By employing individual and party system-level data on eighteen European party systems, this article focuses on voter discontent and voter apathy as two major determinants of casting an invalid vote and seeks to answer why some voters intentionally waste their votes despite paying the costs of voting. I find that higher distinct policy offerings decrease the probability of casting an invalid vote. However, voting behaviors of politically sophisticated and unsophisticated voters vary conditionally on the diversity of policy offerings and the cost of information. On one hand, when a party system offers a larger set of policy offerings, politically sophisticated voters become less likely to cast an invalid vote and more likely to support niche parties. On the other hand, sophisticated voters cannot deal with increasing cost of information, and are more likely to cast an invalid vote, especially in party systems with compulsory voting where the cost of nonvoting is higher.

AbstractPrevalent models of issue voting view vote choice as a choice among party policies. Choice sets are implicitly assumed to be the same for all voters, and their composition is left to researchers' discretion. This article aims to relax such assumptions by presenting a model with a varying probability of inclusion in the choice set. We apply the "constrained choice conditional logistic regression" to survey data from the 1989 parliamentary election in Norway to examine the effects of party identification of voters and electoral viability and policy extremity of parties on individual voters' choice set compositions. Further, we look into the effect of parties' policy positions on their electoral fates under alternative assumptions about the composition of voters' choice sets. We find that voters' choice set composition conditions both the effects of their policy considerations on vote choice and those of parties' policy offerings on their electoral fates.

Examining justice-level determinants of party dissolution decisions can reveal how high Courts may influence the public choice by constraining the representation of political ideologies. We argue that Constitutional Court justices strategically engage in politics through party dissolution cases, and justices 'en garde' act to guard the regime against anti-establishment ideologies. As a graveyard of political parties, Turkey is an appropriate case to study this claim. By introducing a unique dataset, we demonstrate that communist, religious and ethnic parties in Turkey with considerable public support are more likely to be dissolved by justices having an activist and pro-status quo ideological stance.

Do party policy offerings simply reflect public opinion or do parties shape public demand for policies? Theories of party position-taking and the operation of democracy expect parties to track their supporters' positions, while scholarship of public opinion has shown voters often adopt the position of their preferred parties. We apply both of these theoretical expectations to the relationship between citizen polarization and party polarization and additionally argue that the relationship between them should be stronger among politically more engaged and sophisticated citizens. We draw on aggregated survey data from 174 cross-national and national election studies from 19 established democracies, to assess the extent to which citizen polarization responds to party polarization, the extent to which parties respond to changes in citizen polarization, and whether these relationships differ across different groups of citizens. We estimate seemingly unrelated error-correction models employing data on party and citizen positions from 1971 to 2019. Our findings suggest that citizen polarization follows party polarization and also that politically engaged and sophisticated citizens are more responsive to changes in party polarization than the politically less engaged and unsophisticated. In contrast, we find little evidence that party polarization responds to changes in citizen polarization.

Popülizmin son yıllardaki yükselişine talep temelli açıklamalar getiren çalışmalarda seçmenlerin popülist tutumları ile popülist parti ve adaylara oy destekleri arasında pozitif bir örüntü olduğu öne sürülmektedir. Popülizmin çeşitli tanımlarında yer alan elit karşıtlığı ile seçmen davranışı arasındaki ilişkiye odaklanan çalışmalardaysa kuramsal beklentilerle aynı ölçüde uyumlu sonuçlara ulaşılmamaktadır. Bu ilişkiyi Türkiye özelinde değerlendiren makalede temsili bir anket çalışmasının verileri ve nicel yöntemler kullanılarak, 2018 Genel ve Cumhurbaşkanlığı seçimlerindeki oy verme ve seçime katılım davranışları incelenmektedir. Çalışmada popülist bir partinin uzun süredir iktidarda olduğu Türkiye'de elit kavramının iktidardaki partinin seçkinlerini tanımlar hale geldiğini ve elit karşıtlığının bu nedenle popülist parti ve adaylara oy verme olasılığı üzerinde pozitif bir etkisi olmadığı öne sürülmektedir. Çokterimli lojistik regresyonlar bu beklentileri destekleyerek, elit yanlısı seçmenlerin popülist partilere ve adayına oy verme eğiliminde olduğunu göstermektedir. Ampirik bulguların popülizm, karşılaştırmalı siyaset, Türkiye siyaseti ve demokratik temsiliyet açılarından birçok önemli sonucu tartışılmaktadır.

AbstractIn recent decades, political science literature has experienced significant growth in the popularity of nonlinear models with multiplicative interaction terms. When one or more constitutive variables are not binary, most studies report the marginal effect of the variable of interest at its sample mean while allowing the other constitutive variable/s to vary along its range and holding all other covariates constant at their means, modes, or medians. In this article, we argue that this conventional approach is not always the most suitable since the marginal effect of a variable at its sample mean might not be sufficiently representative of its prevalent effect at a specific value of the conditioning variable and might produce excessively model-dependent predictions. We propose two procedures to help researchers gain a better understanding of how the typical effect of the variable of interest varies as a function of the conditioning variable: (1) computing and plotting the marginal effects at all in-sample combinations of the values of the constitutive variables and (2) computing and plotting what we call the "Distribution-Weighted Average Marginal Effect" over the values of the conditioning variable.