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Although retrospective evaluations of the economy and other issues have been hypothesized as major determinants of vote choice in national and congressional elections, there has been little systematic analysis of retrospective voting in presidential primary elections. Using the 1980 Democratic primary, the author examines the influence of perceptions of the economy and other retrospective issues in selecting a party's nominee for the presidency. Although the voters' family financial situation was a significant determinant of vote choice, voters' perceptions of Carter's handling of the economy exhibited the greatest relative impact in the model. Retrospective evaluations of the energy crisis and foreign affairs, as well as ideological orientation (representing "prospective" evaluations), were also found to have an important impact on vote choice in the presidential primaries. In short, this study demonstrates that, when a primary is contested by an incumbent president, primary voters behave in a similar manner to general election voters.

It is widely believed that democracies require knowledgeable citizens to function well. But the most politically knowledgeable individuals tend to be the most partisan and the strength of partisan identity tends to corrupt political thinking. This creates a conundrum. On the one hand, an informed citizenry is allegedly necessary for a democracy to flourish. On the other hand, the most knowledgeable and passionate voters are also the most likely to think in corrupted, biased ways. What to do? This paper examines this tension and draws out several lessons. First, it is not obvious that more knowledgeable voters will make better political decisions. Second, attempts to remedy voter ignorance are problematic because partisans tend to become more polarized when they acquire more information. Third, solutions to citizen incompetence must focus on the intellectual virtue of objectivity. Fourth, some forms of epistocracy are troubling, in part, because they would increase the political power of the most dogmatic and biased individuals. Fifth, a highly restrictive form of epistocracy may escape the problem of political dogmatism, but epistocrats may face a steeper tradeoff between inclusivity and epistemic virtue than they would like.

Three different constituencies are becoming increasingly common across Western European electorates: mainstream voters, non-voters and populist voters. Despite their distinct behaviours in electoral politics, we have limited empirical knowledge about the characteristics that distinguish these three groups, given the typical underrepresentation of non-voters in surveys and the relative recency of large-scale research on populist voters. To address this gap, we analyse novel survey data from contemporary Germany that oversamples non-voters and includes a sizeable share of both populist radical left and populist radical right party supporters. Two main findings with broader implications stand out. First, populist voters resemble their mainstream counterparts in their expectations about democracy but correspond more closely to non-voters regarding (dis-)satisfaction with democracy. Second, non-voters and populist voters seem to reject mainstream democratic politics in distinct ways, throwing doubt on the (further) mobilization potential of abstainers for populist projects.

Three different constituencies are becoming increasingly common across Western European electorates: mainstream voters, non-voters and populist voters. Despite their distinct behaviours in electoral politics, we have limited empirical knowledge about the characteristics that distinguish these three groups, given the typical underrepresentation of non-voters in surveys and the relative recency of large-scale research on populist voters. To address this gap, we analyse novel survey data from contemporary Germany that oversamples non-voters and includes a sizeable share of both populist radical left and populist radical right party supporters. Two main findings with broader implications stand out. First, populist voters resemble their mainstream counterparts in their expectations about democracy but correspond more closely to non-voters regarding (dis-)satisfaction with democracy. Second, non-voters and populist voters seem to reject mainstream democratic politics in distinct ways, throwing doubt on the (further) mobilization potential of abstainers for populist projects.

Three different constituencies are becoming increasingly common across Western European electorates: mainstream voters, non-voters and populist voters. Despite their distinct behaviours in electoral politics, we have limited empirical knowledge about the characteristics that distinguish these three groups, given the typical underrepresentation of non-voters in surveys and the relative recency of large-scale research on populist voters. To address this gap, we analyse novel survey data from contemporary Germany that oversamples non-voters and includes a sizeable share of both populist radical left and populist radical right party supporters. Two main findings with broader implications stand out. First, populist voters resemble their mainstream counterparts in their expectations about democracy but correspond more closely to non-voters regarding (dis-)satisfaction with democracy. Second, non-voters and populist voters seem to reject mainstream democratic politics in distinct ways, throwing doubt on the (further) mobilization potential of abstainers for populist projects.

Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of tables -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Part 1: The parties -- 1 The Social Democrats -- An ascendant party -- Charting the rise of the Social Democrats -- Party voters, non-voters and the SPD -- Organization, agitation, and persecution -- Protestants, Catholics, and Social Democrats -- People's party or labor party? -- The Social Democratic electorate and the Social Democratic movemen -- 2 The minority parties -- Opposition or affirmation -- A dynamic stability: the minority parties and the voters -- The party loyalty of the minority electorate -- Organization and orientation of the minority parties -- Intransigent opposition to Bismarck's regime -- A difficult reorientation after 1890 -- Social groups and the minority party electorate -- Changing to stay the same -- 3 The "national" parties -- Parties of government / parties of the "nation -- Liberals, conservatives, and the voters -- A "national camp?" Party loyalty of liberal and conservative voters -- Liberals, conservatives, and the authorities -- Liberal and conservative voters by confession and class -- Liberal and conservative voters: change and stability -- Part 2: The elections -- 4 The Bismarckian elections -- The elections of the 1870s -- The elections of 1871 -- The Kulturkampf elections of 1874 -- The elections of 1877 and 1878 -- Electoral politics in the 1880s -- The elections of 1881 -- The elections of 1884 -- The Kartell elections of 1887 -- 5 The Wilhelmine elections -- The elections of the 1890s -- The elections of 1890 -- The elections of 1893 -- The elections of 1898 -- The twentieth-century general elections of the German Empire -- The elections of 1907 -- The elections of 1912 -- 6 A century of democratic elections -- Elections, parties, and voters in the Kaiserreich -- Elections

In a symmetric information voting model, an individual (politician) can influence voters' choices by strategically designing a policy experiment (public signal). We characterize the politician's optimal experiment. With a nonunanimous voting rule, she exploits voters' heterogeneity by designing an experiment with realizations targeting different winning coalitions. Consequently, under a simple-majority rule, a majority of voters might be strictly worse off due to the politician's influence. We characterize voters' preferences over electoral rules and provide conditions for a majority of voters to prefer a supermajority (or unanimity) voting rule, in order to induce the politician to supply a more informative experiment. (JEL D72, D83)

We show how an outside party offering incentives to voters can manipulate at no cost collective decisions made through voting. Under influence, these decisions can become inefficient. Therefore, the market for policies may be more likely to fail than the markets for goods, because (democratic) politics involves influence and collective decisions to a greater extent than markets for goods do. We develop and use a model to analyze different incentive schemes, credibility situations, and payoff and information structures. We discuss implications for the efficiency of democracy, voting, lobbying, committee decision making, and legislatures.

Motivated by recent interest and initiatives taken by several governments and international organizations to come up with indicators of well-being to inform policy makers, we test if subjective well-being measures (SWB) can be employed to study voting behaviour. Controlling for financial and economic circumstances, we find that when citizens are more satisfied with their life, they are also more likely to cast their vote in favor of the ruling party. We address the possible concern of reverse causality in the relationship between SWB and political support by (i) analysing the political behaviour of a sample of ideologically neutral voters, and (ii) by identifying the effect of SWB on voting intentions in individuals' response to an exogenous shock of (un)happiness (i.e. the death of husband or wife). We conclude that SWB explains voting decisions, even when the event affecting well-being is beyond government's control.

We present a model of influence over collective decisions made through voting. We show how an outside party offering incentives to a committee can manipulate the committee's decisions at no cost and induce inefficient outcomes. A key condition is that the outsider be able to reward decisive votes differently. Inefficiency results from voting externalities. We relax all initial assumptions to investigate how to insulate committees. We study different information settings, credibility assumptions, payoff structures (voters caring about the collective decision and about their own votes), and incentive schemes (offers contingent on pivotal votes, individual votes, vote shares, and the collective decision). We analyze when voting should be made secret; we elucidate the role of individual accountability and various political institutions in preventing vote buying. We discuss implications for lobbying, for clientelism, for decisions in legislatures, boards, and central banks, and for the efficiency of democracy. Adapted from the source document.

Scholars have long deplored voters' lack of interest in politics and argued in favor of greater political engagement. We present a formal theory of elections where successful communication of campaign messages requires both effort by candidates and attention from voters. Voters' interest in politics affects their attention and impacts the effectiveness of the electoral process as a screening and disciplining device. In line with existing theories, there exists a curse of the uninterested voter: When voters have little interest in politics, the electoral process performs poorly, and voters' attention to politics is low. Surprisingly, we uncover a curse of the interested voter, by which the same happens when voters have a strong interest in politics. Our results highlight the importance of distinguishing between voters' interest and attention, two notions often conflated in empirical studies. Moreover, policy interventions aimed at subsidizing the cost of acquiring political information can have unintended consequences.