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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.

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.

We analyze contributor behavior when there are two types of voters: positioned voters, who care about the ideological positions of candidates, and swing voters, who care about only the leadership abilities of candidates. Campaign expenditures, which are funded by contributions, are assumed to influence voters' perceptions of a candidate's ability. We find that the number of swing voters may have unexpected consequences on equilibrium campaign contributions. In particular, total contributions may increase as the number of swing voters decreases.Elections are won by doing two things: mobilizing your base and winning the independent swing voters.(Karl Rove, campaign strategist for George W. Bush)

AbstractTheory has long suggested that swing voting is a response to cross-pressures arising from a mix of individual attributes and contextual factors. Unfortunately, existing regression-based approaches are ill-suited to explore the complex combinations of demographic, policy, and political factors that produce swing voters in American elections. This gap between theory and practice motivates our use of an ensemble of supervised machine learning methods to predict swing voters in the 2012, 2016, and 2020 U.S. presidential elections. The results from the learning ensemble substantiate the existence of swing voters in contemporary American elections. Specifically, we demonstrate that the learning ensemble produces well-calibrated and externally valid predictions of swing voter propensity in later elections and for related behaviors such as split-ticket voting. Although interpreting black-box models is more challenging, they can nonetheless provide meaningful substantive insights meriting further exploration. Here, we use flexible model-agnostic tools to perturb the ensemble and demonstrate that cross-pressures (particularly those involving ideological and policy-related considerations) are essential to accurately predict swing voters.

This article describes and analyses voter alignments in the new democracy of Ghana in two recent elections, 1996 and 2000. These elections are a part of the Fourth Republic that began with a 'founding' election in 1992, ushering Ghana into Africa's new wave of democratisation. First the size of the core voting population is established to be about 82% of the voting population, refuting the assumption that voting volatility in new and transitional democracies is always extremely high. A second conclusion is that core and swing voters cannot be distinguished by structural factors, whereas thirdly, the factors behind the party alignment of core voters are similar to Western patterns; primarily level of education, the rural-urban divide, income, and occupation. Finally, swing voters seem to be characterised by a conscious evaluation of government and candidate performance in a sign of relatively 'mature' democratic voting behaviour.

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.