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This study examines economic components of the support base for each party in Ghana's de facto two-party system. Most accounts of partisan voting in African democracies contend that some voters routinely support the same party because it rewards co-ethnics through patronage in the form of private and local community goods. A few recent studies have found that some voters vote retrospectively and sociotropically, rewarding or punishing the incumbent party on the basis of its overall performance in office. However, neither the ethno-clientelist account nor the performance assessment account addresses the possibility that African parties build their support bases around competing economic policy interests. Using a merged dataset from the Afrobarometer Survey Round 5 and district-level industrial employment and agricultural production data from Ghana, I find that it is economic interests by agricultural sub-sector that are highly predictive of parties' issue-based platforms. Voters who do not share a common interest with any of the main parties' key policies are most likely to switch party preferences election to election.

Political scientists often assume that parties listen to some voters more than others. However, this theoretical perspective has rarely been applied to explain political responsiveness to advocacy groups. This article argues that the type of voter mobilised by protest activities plays a role in determining whether advocacy groups are able to influence political decisions. The explanatory value of this approach is demonstrated by a study of the geographic distribution of school closures among Swedish local governments during the 2002–10 period. School issues have been important drivers of contentious politics in Sweden. Two hypotheses are tested. The first hypothesis predicts that protesters in districts with numerous swing voters are more likely to achieve their goals. The second hypothesis predicts that protesters in districts with numerous core voters are more likely to achieve their goals. In line with the swing hypothesis, the main results suggest that protesters are more likely to stop school closures in volatile polling districts.

In the aftermath of a disappointing showing in the 1998 midterm elections, Republican party leaders and strategists have been debating what went wrong on November 3, and what the party needs to do differently in the future. Two competing explanations for the election results appear to be emerging from this debate (Berke 1998).According to one explanation, favored by party moderates, Republicans lost ground in 1998 because moderate and independent swing voters were alienated by the party's conservative image and by the partisan tone of the presidential impeachment inquiry. The lesson to be learned from the 1998 elections, according to the proponents of this theory, is that the GOP needs to move toward the center and seek compromises with moderate Democrats.In sharp contrast, some conservatives attribute Republican losses in the midterm elections to their party's failure to energize its partisan and ideological base. In order to be successful, these conservatives argue, the GOP needs to mobilize a larger proportion of its base by taking clear positions on issues and aggressively pursuing a conservative agenda.One way to test the validity of these competing theories is to examine data from the 1998 voter exit polls. These polls were conducted in every state holding a Senate or gubernatorial election except Alaska and Hawaii (CNN 1998).

This article describes Japanese Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko's policy-focused struggles in an environment where voters swing, then swing away soon.

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