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In recent decades, swing voters in courts and legislatures have made many of the United States' most important decisions of law and policy. It would be easy to conclude from the recent history of the Supreme Court and Congress that democracy or majority rule inevitably entails placing many of a society's most important decisions in the hands of swing voters. Far from being inevitable, however, swing voters result from a highly contingent set of circumstances, both ideological and institutional. This Article probes these contingencies, describing and evaluating swing voters and the power they hold. It first explains the conditions under which swing voters will exist and wield power, including an account of why swing voters hold greater power than other pivotal voters. Understanding swing voters requires understanding institutional design and internal procedures: some arrangements increase swing voter prevalence and power, while others have the opposite effect. The ways in which rules construct swing voters give institutional designers and reformers ample tools at their disposal to increase or decrease the prevalence of swing voters and the extent of their power. But nearly any judgment about swing voters and the power they exercise necessarily rests on thorny empirical and normative issues—including the relative importance of moderation and stability in different institutions, the performance of swing voters as compared to other voters, and how swing voter power interacts with principles of majority rule. Swing voters are therefore best understood not as ends unto themselves, but as windows into broader issues in democratic theory and institutional design.

The share of swing voters in Danish general elections has increased substantially over the past decades. Today, more than one-third of Danish voters switch party between national elections. Most literature peg swing voters as less politically engaged and competent. However, swing voters are not a homogeneous group. Analysis of panel survey data from 2001-2005 reveals significant differences between occasional and consistent swing voters. Whereas voters who switch party time after time indeed tend to be less engaged and knowledgeable about politics, this does not apply to voters who switch only occasionally.

Using actual voting records of simultaneous elections held for Indian federal and regional assemblies -- where same political parties contest against each other in both type of elections -- we identify swing voters. We find that the representatives supported by swing voters outperform significantly with respect to both constituency level outcomes as well as measures based on individual effort. Having controlled for the impact of observable factors, we follow Imbens (2003); Harada (2012) and conduct generalized sensitivity analysis in order to rule out the influence of unobservable factors. We show that the swing voters strengthen the positive association between democracy and growth.

Using actual voting records of simultaneous elections held for federal and regional assemblies - where same political parties contest against each other in both type of elections - we identify the swing voters in an electoral constituency. We compare the Parliamentary performance of elected representatives who enjoy high level of support among swing voters and those who enjoy low level of support among such voters. We measure performance of an elected representative based on her level of activity in Parliament. Specifically, we use attendance, number of questions asked, number of debates participated in and number of private member bills introduced as metrics for measuring performance. We find that representatives who enjoy high level of support among swing voters outperform others significantly in terms of all four parameters that we examine. The above differences are not explained by differences in observable candidate characteristics. We also find that reelection chances are more sensitive to performance in high swing constituencies. The above findings show that the presence of swing voters enhances the effectiveness of democratic institutions by significantly increasing activity level of such institutions.

"Ethnicity and Elections in Turkey attempts to understand the mobilization strategies of incumbent parties to consolidate and increase their support among swing voters of an ethnic group. By analyzing the strategy of AKP on voters of Kurdish origin, it investigates the conditions under which it can mobilize them through the clientelistic network and its effectiveness in increasing support for the party.

Ethnicity and Elections in Turkey attempts to understand the mobilization strategies of incumbent parties to consolidate and increase their support among swing voters of an ethnic group. By analyzing the strategy of AKP on voters of Kurdish origin, it investigates the conditions under which it can mobilize them through the clientelistic network and its effectiveness in increasing support for the party. This investigation is conducted through a district and neighborhood level case study conducted in the districts of Beyoğlu, Sancaktepe and Beykoz situated in Istanbul. The main hypotheses are te

"Ethnicity and Elections in Turkey attempts to understand the mobilization strategies of incumbent parties to consolidate and increase their support among swing voters of an ethnic group. By analyzing the strategy of AKP on voters of Kurdish origin, it investigates the conditions under which it can mobilize them through the clientelistic network and its effectiveness in increasing support for the party...

1. Identifying the nature of the competition in electoral terms -- 2. Theory : evaluating AKP's electoral support among voters of Kurdish origin -- 3. Research design and selection of the cases -- 4. The main district level organs responsible for the mobilization of the voters -- 5. Defining the mobilization strategy at the district level -- 6. The neighborhood organization and the effective mobilization of non-Kurdish and Kurdish voters -- 7. Divergence in the effectiveness of the mobilization strategies -- 8. Explaining divergence in the strength of the party organization and incorporation of co-ethnics.

This paper investigates the democratic accountability mechanism. It is essential to democracy that voters are able to create a shift in national political power through an election when they are dissatisfied with the performance of the current government. The question is who can trigger such a shift in Japan's 2009 LH election: knowledgeable or uninformed voters? Our result shows that swing voters are neither outstandingly knowledgeable nor ideal citizens. The study's findings on political knowledge indicate that they are very ordinary people. On the other hand, the DPJ stayers in the study were more knowledgeable than average voters, and the LDP stayers and swing voters followed the DPJ stayers. Given the unpopularity of the cabinet at the time of the election, some people who regarded the DPJ as more capable of managing government swung from the LDP to the DPJ. Thus, swing voters in 2009 made the same voting choice as the DPJ stayers, who were the most politically knowledgeable. Should their decision be criticized, or did it make sense in terms of political knowledgeability? ; Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu "Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia". Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00.

The ?swing voter? occupies a cherished place in American political lore. Candidates court swing voters, consultants target them, and pundits speculate constantly on which way they will lean. But nobody has adequately defined them as a group. What exactly is a swing voter? No one really seems to know.The Swing Voter in American Politics fills this conceptual gap. The book brings political scientists and pollsters together to answer four basic questions: What is a swing voter? How can analysts use survey data to identify swing voters? How do swing voters differ?if at all?from the rest of the ele

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.

This paper develops an infinite-horizon, political agency model with a continuum of political districts, in which incumbent politicians can improve their re-election probability by attracting swing voters in key states through strategic trade protection. A unique equilibrium is shown to exist where incumbents build a reputation of protectionism through their policy decisions. We show that strategic trade protection is more likely when protectionist swing voters have a lead over free-trade supports in states with relatively strong electoral competition that represent a larger proportion of Electoral College votes. US data is used to test the hypothesis that industrial concentration in swing and decisive states is an important determinant of trade protection of that industry. The empirical findings provide support for the theory and highlight an important, and previously overlooked, determinant of trade protection in the US Electoral College.

The empirical question of voting preferences and how these may change (swing) is yet to be answered, as there is little first-hand microeconomic evidence on swing voting. We focus on the interactions between voters' age and political cynicism. Towards this end, we apply a stated and revealed preference framework to assess swing voting, using data from the Dutch Parliamentary Election Survey (DPES) 1989 to 2010. Our results indicate that swing voting is less likely to occur in older age groups and more likely among individuals with higher levels of political cynicism. The age effects tend to be stronger among those with lower political cynicism values.