Suchergebnisse

The article discusses the issues of political competence, political activity and political communication in Lithuania. The concept of political competence is operationalized and measured in terms of threefold sub-levels: the level of political information, the congruence between the perception of left-right wing politics, and self-placement on the left-right wing political scale together with the actual voting preferences. Analysis revealed the dependence of the level of political competence upon demographic criteria and personal values. The main problem is incompatibility between the level of political competence and political activity. The most active citizens do not necessarily have substantial political knowledge while the most competent citizens often abstain from active civic and political involvement.

The article discusses the issues of political competence, political activity and political communication in Lithuania. The concept of political competence is operationalized and measured in terms of threefold sub-levels: the level of political information, the congruence between the perception of left-right wing politics, and self-placement on the left-right wing political scale together with the actual voting preferences. Analysis revealed the dependence of the level of political competence upon demographic criteria and personal values. The main problem is incompatibility between the level of political competence and political activity. The most active citizens do not necessarily have substantial political knowledge while the most competent citizens often abstain from active civic and political involvement.

The article discusses the issues of political competence, political activity and political communication in Lithuania. The concept of political competence is operationalized and measured in terms of threefold sub-levels: the level of political information, the congruence between the perception of left-right wing politics, and self-placement on the left-right wing political scale together with the actual voting preferences. Analysis revealed the dependence of the level of political competence upon demographic criteria and personal values. The main problem is incompatibility between the level of political competence and political activity. The most active citizens do not necessarily have substantial political knowledge while the most competent citizens often abstain from active civic and political involvement.

Institutions are common predictors of voter turnout. Most research in this field focuses on cross-country comparisons of voting systems, like the impact of compulsory voting or registration systems. Fewer efforts have been devoted to understand the role of local institutions and their impact on political participation. Especially the impact of divided competences in relation to public good provision and its impact on voter turnout has been widely ignored. In the present paper, we analyze the effects of different institutional settings for inter-municipal cooperation on voter turnout. We use data from local elections in Germany, held in 2003 and 2004. Overall, we analyze aggregate voter turnout of 1661 municipalities and find strong evidence for our hypothesis that local institutional settings are influential in this context. Further, our results indicate that the better competences correspond to the spatial dimension of local public goods, the higher should be the voter turnout. ; Seit geraumer Zeit gibt es die Tendenz, kommunale Institutionen zu bündeln um damit Größenvorteile in der Leistungserstellung zu erreichen. In Deutschland haben sich auf der Gemeindeebene unterschiedliche Modelle durchgesetzt, die sich zwischen den Extremen der gemeinsamen Aufgabenwahrnehmung von Gemeinden oder vollständigen Gemeindefusionen bewegen. Das Diskussionspapier geht der bisher wenig untersuchten Frage nach, wie sich dies auf die Beteiligung an lokalen Wahlen auswirkt. Im Zusammenhang mit Institutionen werden in der vorliegenden Literatur überwiegend Auswirkungen des Wahlrechts ländervergleichend diskutiert. Vor allem der Einfluss einer Wahlpflicht oder die Notwendigkeiten der Registrierung zu einer Abstimmung waren Gegenstand der Untersuchungen. Die hier aufgeworfene Fragestellung geht auf lokale institutionelle Aspekte ein. Im Speziellen werden dabei unterschiedliche Formen der interkommunalen Zusammenarbeit und der Verteilung von Entscheidungskompetenzen betrachtet. Aufgrund der vielfältigen Formen der kommunalen Zusammenarbeit in der Bereitstellung öffentlicher Güter, sind diese Fragen vor allem für die Mitgliedsstaaten der Europäischen Union relevant. Betrachtet werden in dem vorliegenden Papier deutsche Gemeinderatswahlen in den Jahren 2003 und 2004. Der Einfluss unterschiedlicher Gemeindetypen wird modelliert und ökonometrisch untersucht. Dabei finden sich deutliche Anzeichen für einen Einfluss der institutionellen Ausgestaltung interkommunaler Kooperationen auf die lokale Wahlbeteiligung. Darüber hinaus zeigt die empirische Analyse, dass die Wahlbeteiligung dort höher ausfällt, wo die Nutznießer öffentlicher Leistungen den Wahlberechtigten entsprechen und diese die entscheidenden Gremien direkt wählen können. Die institutionelle Ausgestaltung kommunaler Zusammenarbeit in Verbandsgemeinden nach Rheinland-Pfälzischem Vorbild scheint diesen Erfordernissen am ehesten zu entsprechen.

Leaders' persona and the state of the economy are among the two most salient topics during election campaigns. Existing scholarship treats these as two independent or even competing factors. Economic perceptions are overlooked as cues for leader evaluations, while leader evaluations rarely enter considerations of the economic vote. This article builds on evolutionary leadership theory to bridge these distant literatures. It proposes that evaluating leaders' performance based on the resources available to group members may have improved followers' fitness ancestrally. Accordingly, it predicts that the effect of economic perceptions on vote choice is mediated by leaders' warmth and competence impressions in modern democracies. To test these predictions, the article first analyzes representative survey data from seventeen elections in three countries (USA, Australia and Denmark). Second, it relies on two original, well-powered manipulation-of-process experiments to test the validity of the causal claims.

This article develops the reward-punishment issue model of voting using a newly collated aggregate measure of issue competence in Britain between 1971 and 1997, revealing systematic differences between governing and opposition parties in the way citizens' evaluations of party competence are related to vote intention. Using monthly Gallup 'best party to handle the most important problem' and vote intention data, time series Granger-causation tests give support to a classic issue reward-punishment model for incumbents. However, for opposition parties this reward-punishment model does not hold: macro-issue competence evaluations are Granger-caused by changes in vote choice or governing party competence. An explanation is offered based upon the differentiating role of policy performance and informational asymmetries, and the implications are considered for comparative studies of voting, public opinion and for political party competition. © 2011 European Consortium for Political Research.

In this paper, my primary goal is to test if vote conversion is in line with voters' perceptions of parties' competence, i.e. if the competence change in favor of a party during the political campaign triggers vote conversion in favor of this same party. Then, I assess the moderating role of saliency and political knowledge and the difference between 'valence' and 'positional' issues. I use a four-waves panel data gathered before and after the 2015 Swiss national elections. The results indicate that if a voter changes her competence perceptions in favor of a party, she is more likely to convert her vote in favor of this party. In general, saliency and knowledge are not strong moderators of this relationship. While the study also points out the major role of the 'migration' and the 'European Union' issues, the findings about valence and positional issues are not crystal clear.

We set up an experiment to measure voter preferences trade-offs between competence and honesty. We measure the competence and honesty of candidates by asking them to work on a real effort task and decide whether to report truthfully or not the value of their work. In the first stage, the earnings are the result of the competence and honesty of one randomly selected participant. In the second stage, subjects can select who will determine their earnings based on the fi rst stage's competence and honesty of the alternative candidates. We find that most voters tend to have a bias towards caring about honesty even when this results in lower payoffs.

We set up an experiment to measure voter preferences trade-offs between competence and honesty. We measure the competence and honesty of candidates by asking them to work on a real effort task and decide whether to report truthfully or not the value of their work. In the first stage, the earnings are the result of the competence and honesty of one randomly selected participant. In the second stage, subjects can select who will determine their earnings based on the fi rst stage's competence and honesty of the alternative candidates. We find that most voters tend to have a bias towards caring about honesty even when this results in lower payoffs.

We set up an experiment to measure voter preferences trade-offs between competence and honesty. We measure the competence and honesty of candidates by asking them to work on a real effort task and decide whether to report truthfully or not the value of their work. In the first stage, the earnings are the result of the competence and honesty of one randomly selected participant. In the second stage, subjects can select who will determine their earnings based on the fi rst stage's competence and honesty of the alternative candidates. We find that most voters tend to have a bias towards caring about honesty even when this results in lower payoffs.

We set up an experiment to measure voter preferences trade-offs between competence and honesty. We measure the competence and honesty of candidates by asking them to work on a real effort task and decide whether to report truthfully or not the value of their work. In the first stage, the earnings are the result of the competence and honesty of one randomly selected participant. In the second stage, subjects can select who will determine their earnings based on the fi rst stage's competence and honesty of the alternative candidates. We find that most voters tend to have a bias towards caring about honesty even when this results in lower payoffs.

Our study examines the influence of various candidate characteristics (sociodemographic profile, competence and experience, issue positions, and party affiliation) on voters' preference for a candidate, and investigates the impact of voters' levels of political sophistication on their likelihood of considering various candidate characteristics voters when deciding whom to support. Using data from the 2015 Finnish National Election Study, this study is situated within the complex Finnish open list system with many candidates at display and mandatory preference voting. We find that voters mostly argue to make their choice based on candidate characteristics with direct politically relevant information such as candidate party affiliation and issue positions. Candidate sociodemographic profile has relatively little stated impact. Overall, voters with higher levels of political sophistication tend to be more likely to consider a broad range of candidate characteristics. When investigating the relative impact of each candidate characteristic (that is, their impact relative to the other candidate characteristics) on voting behaviour, political sophistication increases the likelihood of saying to rely on candidate characteristics that are more demanding in terms of information processing such as competence and experience, and issue positions. Our analyses also show how different measures of political sophistication have distinct effects.

Explanations of party competition and vote choice are commonly based on the Downsian view of politics: parties maximise votes by adopting positions on policy dimensions. However, recent research suggests that British voters choose parties based on evaluations of competence rather than on ideological position. This paper proposes a theoretical account which combines elements of the spatial model with the 'issue ownership' approach. Whereas the issue ownership theory has focused mainly on party competition, this paper examines the validity of the model from the perspective of both parties and voters, by testing its application to recent British general elections. Our findings suggest that as parties have converged ideologically, competence considerations have become more important than ideological position in British elections. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

At the core of democracy is a simple idea: one person, one vote. However, all democracies disenfranchise citizens below a certain age. What justifies this practice? The answer seems obvious: voting isn't a children's game. When citizens head to the ballots, a lot is at stake: who runs the government and what policies are implemented significantly affects the lives of many citizens. According to a widely held view, voting requires a certain competence that children lack. If we take this idea a little further, we may conclude that adult citizens ought to demonstrate a certain level of competence before receiving the right to vote, too. However, most contemporary political philosophers reject this "epistocratic" line of thought. Either for epistemic, moral, or pragmatic reasons, they endorse enfranchising every adult. This raises the central question of this dissertation: can we justify giving the right to vote to all and only citizens above a certain age? I argue that we cannot. To establish this claim, I assess three different voting schemes: Standard Democracy, which gives exactly one vote to all and only citizens above a certain age; Epistocratic Democracy, which gives more voting power to "politically knowledgeable" citizens; and Ageless Democracy, which gives all citizens, regardless of age, the right to cast exactly one vote in democratic procedures. First, I defend Standard Democracy against Epistocratic Democracy. This amounts to an argument that all citizens above a certain age should have equal voting rights. I then evaluate potential justifications for conceding these rights only to citizens above a certain age, and reject them. This amounts to a case for Ageless Democracy. Abandoning the voting age is both a theoretically consistent implication of rejecting Epistocratic Democracy and a practically desirable approach to reinvigorating democratic procedures.

The potential effects of mass polarization has become a major subject of study in political science. Multiple studies have shown that polarization at the mass level has caused political attitudes and opinions to be increasingly driven by party identification over the past few decades. Even responses to questions as nonpartisan as "Has the economy gotten better or worse over the past year?" show a partisan bias (Bartels 2002). In this paper, I look at whether party identification is having an increasing impact on party competence evaluations, as would be expected if polarization has happened at the mass level. I first study whether the effect of party identification on vote choice in House and Senate elections from 1986 through 2012 has increased, or whether the growing power of party identification is being filtered through party competence evaluations, causing the effect of these evaluations on vote choice to increase. I then look at the direct effect of party identification on party competence evaluations to see if the effect of party identification on competence evaluations has grown between 1986 and 2012, and if the effect of retrospective economic evaluations on competence evaluations has decreased at the same time. Results show that there is no clear trend in the effect of party competence evaluations and party identification on vote choice over time. However, the effect of party identification on competence evaluations has clearly risen between 1986 and 2012.