Suchergebnisse

A form of elitism undermines much writing on voter competence. The elitist move occurs when an author uses a self-serving worldview as the basis for evaluating voters. Such elitism is apparent in widely cited measures of "political knowledge" & in common claims about what voters should know. The elitist move typically limits the credibility & practical relevance of the analysis by leading writers to draw unreliable conclusions about voter competence. I propose a more constructive way of thinking about what voters know. Its chief virtue is its consistency with basic facts about the relationship between information & choice. Figures. Adapted from the source document.

Abstract.  One of the criticisms often levelled against direct democracy is that citizens lack sufficient knowledge to vote directly on policy issues. The 'No' votes in the French and Dutch referendums on the Constitutional Treaty have highlighted the importance of examining voter competence in referendums. This article proposes a theoretical framework for evaluating competence in EU referendums. It suggests that competent voting in EU referendums is based on issue‐specific preferences and requires political information. Since most voters have little detailed knowledge of European integration, they rely on heuristics and cues when deciding how to vote. The important question is how much and which type of information voters require to make competent choices. This article examines whether and under what conditions the use of party endorsements as information cues can enhance competent voting in EU referendums. These theoretical questions are examined in an analysis of the 1994 Norwegian referendum on EU membership.

We develop a model of strategic interaction between voters and potential electoral challengers to sitting incumbents, in which the very fact of a costly challenge conveys relevant information to voters. Given incumbent failure in office, challenger entry is more likely, but the threat of entry by inferior challengers creates an incentive for citizens to become more politically informed. At the same time, challenges to incumbents who perform well can neutralize a voter's positive assessment of incumbent qualifications. How a voter becomes politically informed can in turn deter challengers of different levels of competence from running, depending on the electoral environment. The model permits us to sharpen our understanding of retrospective voting, the incumbency advantage, and the relationship between electoral competition and voter welfare, while pointing to new interpretations of, and future avenues for, empirical research on elections.

Under the assumptions of the standard Condorcet Jury Theorem, majority verdicts are virtually certain to be correct if the competence of voters is greater than one-half, and virtually certain to be incorrect if voter competence is less than one-half. But which is the case? Here we turn the Jury Theorem on its head, to provide one way of addressing that question. The same logic implies that, if the outcome saw 60 percent of voters supporting one proposition and 40 percent the other, then average voter competence must either be 0.60 or 0.40. We still have to decide which, but limiting the choice to those two values is a considerable aid in that.

Voters use observed economic performance to infer the competence of incumbent politicians. These economic perceptions enter the voter's utility calculations modified by a weight that is minimized when the variance in exogenous shocks to the economy is very large relative to the variance in economic outcomes associated with the competence of politicians. Cross-national variations in the political and economic context systematically increase or undermine the voter's ability to ascertain the competency of incumbents. We test one hypothesis: As policy-making responsibility is shared more equally among parties, economic evaluations will be more important in the vote decision. We employ two multilevel modeling procedures for estimating the contextual variations in micro-level economic voting effects: a conventional pooled approach and a two-stage procedure. We compare the multivariate results of a pooled method with our two-stage estimation procedure and conclude that they are similar. Our empirical efforts use data from 163 national surveys from 18 countries over a 22-year period.

This article asks if voters' participation in federal elections is lower in the new Länder (East Germany) than in the old Länder (West Germany). It is assumed that voters in the new Länder are less convinced they can influence politics by voting. Using the perspective of cognitive psychology the article stresses differences in individual interpretations of the election context among citizens of both the new and old Länder. Furthermore, it is argued that the strength of the expected influence by voting depends on the structure and direction of individuals' beliefs in their competence and control as well as their belief in causality and self efficacy. These beliefs may differ among voters in the new and old Länder. For empirical analysis, the article uses data from the German General Social Survey 1998. (German Politics / FUB)