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This paper specifically reviews activities of political parties in terms of voters' inducement during elections period in Nigeria. The paper deconstructs voters' inducement as political economy created to attract electorates purposely to swing votes to benefit political party. The paper relied on secondary data retrieved through content analysis. It was evidently established that political parties in Nigeria especially the case in Edo, Ondo and Ekiti State, discretely engaged in voters' inducement which come in the form of financial and material gifts. Financial gift was often distributed during voting period such that eligible voters were whisked and wooed by parties' agents to swing votes. Some willing voters negotiated depending on the highest bidders. Yet some voters grabbed the opportunity to create economy for themselves such that they invested the fund in small scale business and ventures to survive. Besides, mega political parties with robust financial elbow were fingered as major perpetrators of voters' inducement. Some voters apparently were overshadowed by the inducement due to tight economic condition and poverty. This paper recommends voters' education to enlighten electorates and expose the consequence. The role of the media, church, mosque and schools is indispensable in this situation.

Cet article analyse brièvement les cultures politiques respectives des deux grands camps en présence dans le champ politique taiwanais après quatre années de recomposition idéologique à Taiwan depuis le retour du Kuomintang (KMT) à la Présidence en 2008. Répondant à l'article publié par le même auteur et dans les mêmes conditions post-électorales en 2008 sur ce même site, la présente analyse fait le point les différences réelles entre le parti tenté par l'unification future entre les deux rives, le Kuomintang, et le Parti Démocrate Progressiste (PDP). ; This article aims at clarifying the differences between the Kuomintang, the Chinese national party based on Taiwan, tempted by conditional unification with China, and the DPP, the indigenous pro-Taiwan party. After showing how these two parties share a basic common understanding of the Republic of China on Taiwan as being a sovereign entity, this paper shows where are the true lines of demarcation between the two political forces: on the ultimate goals on terms of nation building, on social policy and on the best way to negotiate with an ever growing China. The article questions the reasons behind the obvious diminished importance of the national identity debate in the 2012 elections, and shows that the vote for Ma Ying-jeou, in 2012 just as in 2008, is not equivalent to a vote for China, nor to a vote for unification. Last, it tries to understand what are the reasons that led swing voters, who hesitated until the last moment, to finally decide to give a second mandate to a President that is not anymore popular, and who is generally not considered by most of them as being very competent.

Despite limited government control over the pre-1914 economy, opposition politicians were enthusiastic in blaming bad economic news on the incumbent. In a study of 458 by-elections between 1857 and 1914, we find that voters typically gave new governments a 'honeymoon' but thereafter held them responsible for high unemployment and high prices. Each 1% rise in the price level, on average, brought about a 0.21% swing against the government of the day, while each one-point rise in the percentage unemployed had double this effect. However, when we split the electorate into borough and county constituencies, economic voting appears to be confined to the former. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

Abstract
The swing voter's curse is useful for explaining patterns of voter participation, but arises because voters restrict attention to the rare event of a pivotal vote. Recent empirical evidence suggests that electoral margins influence policy outcomes, even away from the 50% threshold. If so, voters should also pay attention to the marginal impact of a vote. Adopting this assumption, we find that a marginal voter's curse gives voters a new reason to abstain, to avoid diluting the pool of information. The two curses have similar origins and exhibit similar patterns, but the marginal voter's curse is both stronger and more robust. In fact, the swing voter's curse turns out to be knife-edge: in large elections, a model with both pivotal and marginal considerations and a model with marginal considerations alone generate identical equilibrium behavior.

Voting for presidential, senate, & house elections is analyzed at the state level on the basis of 83 time series of election statistics for the years 1914-1980. Since WWII, there has been a pronounced trend toward particularization of voting for federal offices. This trend includes not only the erosion of party attachments, but also the dissolution of traditional electoral ties such as presidential coattails, the midterm congressional swing, & incumbency. As a result, the vote in federal elections is now largely determined by factors specific to the setting in which each election occurs, & by candidates' ability to convert these factors to political advantages through mass media campaigns. 3 Tables, 6 Figures, Appendixes. Modified HA.

This article draws on the racial threat thesis to test if white voters who lived in areas with larger African American populations were less receptive to Barack Obama in 2008. Racial context is found to structure white voters' evaluations of Obama and, thus, affect where the Democrats gained presidential vote share over 2004. The overall Democratic swing was lower in states where a white Democrat (Hillary Clinton) had more appeal to white voters than Obama. Obama increased the Democrats' share of the white vote, but gains were associated with positive evaluations of Obama among white voters in places with smaller African American populations. The likelihood that a white voter supported Obama also decreased as the African American population of the respondent's congressional district increased. The results are relevant to discussions of the future of the Voting Rights Act and to conceptions of a "postracial" America.

We propose a new method to test for the existence of the bandwagon effect, the notion that voters are more likely to vote for a given candidate if they expect the candidate to win. Two-round election systems with a large number of single-member districts offer an ideal testing ground because results from the first round provide a better benchmark for voter expectations than any possible alternative measure. Using data from the 2002 and 2006 general elections in Hungary, we find that the lead of a candidate in the first round is magnified by about 10 percent in the second round, controlling for country-wide swings of the electorate between the two rounds and for the behavior of voters of smaller parties. A separate exercise suggests that at least part of the effect is caused by the lower probability of individuals voting in the second round if their preferred candidate is likely to lose by a large margin. Adapted from the source document.

Climate change is a political as well as an environmental issue. Climate change beliefs are commonly associated with voting behaviour, but are they associated with swings in voting behaviour? The latter are arguably more important for election outcomes. This paper investigates the predictive power of these beliefs on voting swings at the 2010 Australian federal election after controlling for a range of other related factors (demographic characteristics of voters, different worldviews about nature and the role of government, and the perceived opportunity cost of addressing climate change). Drawing on data from two nationally representative surveys of voters and data from the Australian Electoral Commission, this paper investigates relationships between climate change beliefs and voting swings at both the individual and electorate levels. At an individual level, a hypothetical 10% change in climate change beliefs was associated with a 2.6% swing from a conservative Coalition and a 2.0% swing toward Labor and 1.7% toward the Greens party, both left on the political spectrum. At the electorate level, this equates to a shift of 21 seats between the two main political parties (the Coalition and Labor) in Australia's 150 seat parliament, after allocating Green preferences. Given many seats are marginal, even modest shifts in climate change beliefs can be associated with changes in electoral outcomes. Thus, climate change is expected to remain a politically contested issue in countries like Australia where political parties seek to distinguish themselves, in part, by their responses to climate change. ; peerReviewed ; publishedVersion

Climate change is a political as well as an environmental issue. Climate change beliefs are commonly associated with voting behaviour, but are they associated with swings in voting behaviour? The latter are arguably more important for election outcomes. This paper investigates the predictive power of these beliefs on voting swings at the 2010 Australian federal election after controlling for a range of other related factors (demographic characteristics of voters, different worldviews about nature and the role of government, and the perceived opportunity cost of addressing climate change). Drawing on data from two nationally representative surveys of voters and data from the Australian Electoral Commission, this paper investigates relationships between climate change beliefs and voting swings at both the individual and electorate levels. At an individual level, a hypothetical 10% change in climate change beliefs was associated with a 2.6% swing from a conservative Coalition and a 2.0% swing toward Labor and 1.7% toward the Greens party, both left on the political spectrum. At the electorate level, this equates to a shift of 21 seats between the two main political parties (the Coalition and Labor) in Australia's 150 seat parliament, after allocating Green preferences. Given many seats are marginal, even modest shifts in climate change beliefs can be associated with changes in electoral outcomes. Thus, climate change is expected to remain a politically contested issue in countries like Australia where political parties seek to distinguish themselves, in part, by their responses to climate change.

The objective of this paper is to model the incumbent's allocation of efforts that maximize his electoral chances in the presence of both vote buying (persuasion) and turnout buying (mobilization). The existing literature on distributive politics concludes that political candidates should concentrate their campaigning efforts either on safe districts or on swing districts. This paper shows that when candidates can use both persuasion and mobilization strategies, and the ideology of voters is unknown to the incumbent party, a third option should be taken into account. In fact, the optimal allocation of resources—rather than focusing on safe or swing districts—should target opposition strongholds, that is, the incumbent should try to sway voters in those districts in which the challenger is favored. The intuition for this result is simple. Since the incumbent does not know individual preferences (he only observes the distribution of preferences in the districts), all voters in a given district look identical to him. Hence, when approaching voters in a district to buy their vote, the incumbent always faces the risk of buying the vote of his supporters (who would have voted for him anyway).

In recent decades, there has been a considerable expansion of citizen participation in protests and voluntary advocacy groups. To analyze this development, the social movement literature and the interest group literature have emerged. Yet these two bodies of literature have not communicated with each other and have rarely incorporated knowledge from other fields in political science. As a result, critical questions remain unanswered regarding the political influence of advocacy groups. How do they affect politicians? To what degree do informal groups use lobbying tactics? Are socioeconomically advantaged groups more influential? This thesis endeavors to address the above shortcomings by bridging the literature on social movements, interest groups and political parties. The purpose of the thesis is to explain if and how advocacy groups affect public policy and to analyze which resources that are required to influence political decisions. The focus is on informal and loosely organized social movement organizations (informal SMOs): parental networks, staff networks, and village networks. To test my arguments, I use a unique database on protests and lobbying against school closures in Sweden. Closures of public schools have been one of the most important drivers of political activism in Sweden. The results are presented in three essays. Essay I tests new electoral mechanisms that could condition the political influence of advocacy groups. The results suggest that the political influence of informal SMOs on school closure decisions varies according to the type of voter they mobilize: swing voters or core voters. Essay II demonstrates how informal SMOs use lobbying tactics, such as presenting policy-relevant information, to influence politicians. Social movement scholars often focus on protests and ignore lobbying tactics. However, the results show that SMOs that present policy-relevant information are more likely to stop school closures than SMOs that mobilize large protests. Essay III analyzes which informal SMOs exchange policy-relevant information with politicians. Previous studies on the use of lobbying tactics have ignored activist resources. My results suggest that SMOs mobilizing high-income activists and activists with analytical and civic skills are more likely to present policy-relevant information. This is problematic given normative ideals of equal access to decision-making by all members of society.

We analyse the results of British general elections from 1950 to 2015. In our model, voting is both instrumental and expressive, and is driven both by ideology and the perceived valence of different parties. On most assumptions the model predicts that the safer the seat the lower the swing. The exception is where ideological factors are relatively dominant in instrumental voting, and valence factors are relatively dominant in expressive voting. In this case the highest swings might be in the safest seats. Alternatively swing might peak at intermediate majorities, and this is what we find when we look at swings between Conservative and Labour in seats held by one or other of these parties. We also find that marginals behave more distinctively when the national result is expected to be close or when there has been another general election recently; and that at least some voters have a sense of what is a 'bellwether' seat i.e. one that would be marginal in a close election. However in those seats where the main contest has been between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, the swing is positively related to the closeness of the contest.

We analyse the results of British general elections from 1950 to 2015. In our model, voting is both instrumental and expressive, and is driven both by ideology and the perceived valence of different parties. On most assumptions the model predicts that the safer the seat the lower the swing. The exception is where ideological factors are relatively dominant in instrumental voting, and valence factors are relatively dominant in expressive voting. In this case the highest swings might be in the safest seats. Alternatively swing might peak at intermediate majorities, and this is what we find when we look at swings between Conservative and Labour in seats held by one or other of these parties. We also find that marginals behave more distinctively when the national result is expected to be close or when there has been another general election recently; and that at least some voters have a sense of what is a 'bellwether' seat i.e. one that would be marginal in a close election. However in those seats where the main contest has been between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, the swing is positively related to the closeness of the contest.

Abstract.  The allocation of resources between the federal and state levels of government is a key institutional variable explaining the congruence or similarity of party systems. It affects the incentives voters and parties face, and opportunities for cleavage mobilization. This article pioneers measures for comparing congruence across federations. Evidence from state and federal elections in six federations produces clear evidence that party systems are least congruent in decentralized federations and most congruent in centralized federations. Voter behaviour, indicated by the variation of electoral support for parties across units of the federation and the similarity of swings in support between the state and federal levels, is most responsive to the allocation of resources. Party system structure is less responsive to this variable.