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The study of critical elections in American politics has been marked by a steady growth of knowledge and a remarkable consensus among practitioners in the field. Although minor quibbles have appeared from time to time, the work within each generation has set the agenda for the work of the next. The pioneering efforts of Key (1955, 1959), Schattschneider (1960), and MacRae and Meldrum (1960) produced clear descriptions of the phenomenon of critical elections, as well as operational definitions of the concepts. This group of studies paved the way for the systematic analysis and classification of elections in the work of Campbell et al. (1960), Sellers (1965), Pomper (1967), and Burnham (1968). The election patterns discovered in these studies, however, required explanation. The next wave of interest in critical elections, ushered in by the theoretical works of Burnham (1970) and Sundquist (1973), identified the essential variables governing electoral dynamics, but still did not explain precisely how these variables worked. That explanation is the next obvious step in the theory of critical elections, and it is the subject of this discussion.

Does the public perception of governments' coronavirus pandemic responses actually make a difference to their electoral fortunes? In this research note, we answer that question by presenting the preliminary results of a survey of more than 3,000 voters in Croatia and Serbia conducted on a dedicated mobile app and web platform directly preceding parliamentary elections that took place in these two countries during the summer of 2020. This survey was part of our larger project tracking political competition, public discourse, and conspiracy theories in Southeast Europe during the coronavirus pandemic. The preliminary findings presented in this research note demonstrate Croatian and Serbian voters were rationally retrospective and rewarded parties in power based on evaluations of their crisis management performance. We also find evidence of voters who have personally witnessed the health consequences of the coronavirus being more likely to support the parties in power. We believe this is evidence of the coronavirus pandemic increasing affected citizens' expectations of and trust in national governments where those governments respond strongly to the pandemic's first wave, as was the case in both Croatia and Serbia.

AbstractThis article studies voter behavior in Argentina. Do voters vote based on issues? Do they vote based on economic performance? What segments of the population are more or less likely to do so? What is the relative impact of issues and the economy in vote choice? To provide a reliable answer to these questions, this study uses a mixed-logit model of spatial voting with nonpolicy components. Contrary to the common belief, the analysis finds that issue voting is a statistically significant and important factor. Economic voting is prevalent in the middle and upper classes, but not among poor voters.

Studies of gubernatorial elections have found vote choice to be a function of party identification, assessments of economic conditions, & the president's job performance but have not tested for a referendum effect concerning the incumbent governor. This analysis uses state polling data to demonstrate that voters with favorable images of the incumbent governor have a higher probability of voting for the candidate of the incumbent's party. The effect is greater when the incumbent seeks reelection, but it is present in open contests as well. 4 Tables, 1 Appendix, 42 References. Adapted from the source document.

Research on voting, particularly on legislative behavior, tends to focus on the choices of those casting ballots. Yet, intuitively, abstentions and vote choice should be jointly determined. As such, the relevance of participation depends upon both the extent to which it can be explained by the costs and the benefits of voting and on the nature of the interactions between participation and preferences. To this end, we provide a framework for explaining roll call behavior that simultaneously considers legislators' decisions about whether and how to vote. Application to roll call voting in the 104th Congress finds that abstention and voting choices are integrated; our approach generates sensible and substantively important results which yield important insights into legislative behavior and public policy.

Much recent political psychology scholarship has examined the role of anxiety in vote choice. This work generally argues that anxiety affects vote choice indirectly by causing citizens to more thoroughly search for and process political information. This indirect effect of anxiety leads citizens to rely less on heuristics, such as party, and more on substantive information, such as policy positions. The most prominent example of this scholarship is the Affective Intelligence (AI) theory of emotions. In this paper, we use cross‐sectional and panel survey data to test AI against two simpler alternatives: (1) that emotions directly influence candidate evaluations and (2) that candidate evaluations directly influence emotions. We first show that these simpler alternatives can produce the complex, cross‐sectional interactions that provide the principal support for AI. Then, using panel data to better assess causal direction, we find little support for AI, some evidence that emotions directly influence candidate evaluations, and strong evidence that candidate evaluations directly influence emotions. Scholars, we conclude, should be hesitant to abandon these simpler explanations in favor of AI.

This paper examines the impact of liberal-conservative ideology on voting behavior in the 2004 presidential election, using data from the CPS National Election Study for that year. The empirical results show that there was widespread recognition of the candidates' and parties' ideological positions. However, liberal-conservative identifications exerted no direct impact on voting choices within the 2004 electorate. On the other hand, liberal- conservative identifications did show an indirect effect which operated through their influence on the more proximate determinants of electoral decisions. These findings clarify the role of ideology in the 2004 presidential election. They also conform very closely to the basic theoretical structure laid out in The American Voter. This paper examines the role of ideology as a determinant of recent voting behavior in the American electorate. The analysis uses data from the 2004 CPS National Election Study, and the empirical results suggest a somewhat complicated interpretation. On the one hand, liberal-conservative orientations had no direct impact whatsoever on citizens' voting choices. On the other hand, mass perceptions and evaluations of the candidates, issues, and conditions within the external environment were clearly structured along ideological lines. And, the latter did influence electoral decisions. Therefore, liberal-conservative ideology exerted an important, but completely indirect, effect on citizens' 2004 voting choices. These findings have important implications, not only for understanding the role of ideology in American elections, but also for theories of voting behavior. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]