The Use of the Endorsement Heuristic in Swiss Popular Votes

There already exists an impressive body of literature studying the use of voting recommendations in elections and popular votes. The main shortcoming of most of these observational studies is the measurement of voting recommendations. There is rarely any direct evidence to show that voters did indeed follow a recommendation when making a vote decision. Thus, it is not clear how widespread the use of such voting endorsements is. We measured the use of endorsements by evaluating the voting motives reported by the voters themselves. Employing this measure, we could show that endorsements have an impact on Swiss referendum votes. Depending on the issue at stake, between 2 and 27 percent of the voters admitted that they based their decision on recommendations. Moreover, the use of endorsements heavily depends on motivation, project‐specific knowledge level, and degree of ambivalence towards the issue at stake.     

Uncounted Votes: Informal Voting in the House of Representatives as a Marker of Political Exclusion in Australia

This article examines the implications of high levels of informal (or invalid) voting in Australian national elections using a social exclusion framework. The rate of the informal vote is an indicator of social and political exclusion with particular groups of Australians experiencing inordinate electoral disadvantage. Poorer voters, voters from non‐English speaking backgrounds and those with low education levels are especially disadvantaged by factors peculiar to the Australian voting experience. We begin by exploring the character and pattern of informal voting and then canvass the technical and socio‐economic factors which explain it. We conclude by considering proposed options for reducing informality, some of which are: the abandonment of compulsory voting, major structural change to the voting system as well as ballot re‐design, electoral education and community information initiatives.     

The mirror has broken: Increasing divergence between national and land elections in Austria

Austrian party politics has involved increasing dissimilarity between national and Länder voting, with the ÖVP now doing much better in Land elections than in national elections, and the SPÖ showing a reverse pattern. This analysis measures dissimilarity and related values both over time and across the Länder. It is shown that there have been three phases in terms of overall dissimilarity. Moreover, the nine Länder are grouped into four clusters based on the national‐Lander variations in voting for each of the two major parties. Such variations are best explained by the more decentralised organisation of the ÖVP.     

韩国选民的政治社会化和支持候选人决定的稳定性——以第十七、十八届总统大选为中心

本文旨在从经验的角度,探讨不同的政治社会化经历对选民支持候选人决定的稳定性产生的影响。鉴于韩国政党政治历史不长,笔者将西欧意义上的政治社会化概念引入韩国社会。因此,本文以"和参照组的政治沟通"作为政治社会化指标,考察在2007年和2012年两次总统选举中韩国选民的政治社会化水平对支持候选人决定的稳定性产生的影响力。研究结果表明,韩国选民越是通过具有相同政治倾向的周围人实现政治社会化,稳定地支持同一政党候选人的倾向就越明显。这个结果意味着不同于以往不同居住地选民支持不同政党的惯例,韩国选民通过政治社会化来加强与特定政党之间关联性的基础正在形成。     

Are European Elections Second-Order Elections for Everyone?

Second-order election (SOE) theory has been used to explain voting behaviour in European elections. Voters believe that less is at stake in some elections and some voters hence tend to cast a protest vote. However, most studies on the topic have focused on the demand side of SOEs – i.e. on the voters – and have ignored or only partially tackled the supply side – i.e. the strategic behaviour of parties – and excluded small and marginal parties (SMPs). However, SMPs may have greater incentive to seriously compete in SOEs. The 2019 European Parliament elections in Germany were particularly interesting to SMPs as there was no voting threshold, thereby increasing the chances of SMPs. To capture whether SMPs view European elections as first-order elections and therefore expend more resources than parliamentary parties on these elections, I analysed campaign expenditures and manifestos. Results indicate that SMPs act within a rational actor framework, though not unequivocally.     

Electoral Accountability in the Midst of Criminal Violence: Evidence from Mexico

Rising levels of crime and insecurity affect the quality of life. A fundamental question for the prospects of democracy is whether voters, in hopes of reaching better solutions to conditions of prevailing insecurity, can hold their elected officials accountable for such situations. This article argues that electoral accountability amid criminal violence requires voters to be able to assign responsibility for crime, and that partisan alignment across levels of government facilitates this task. Recent Mexican elections are examined to test this argument. Relying on both aggregate electoral data and individual survey evidence, this study shows that voters hold politicians accountable for crime in the narrow circumstances of organized crime–related violence and political alignment. This evidence not only provides additional caveats to issue voting models, but also opens new avenues of research on electoral accountability.     

Economic voting in South Korea: The 1988 assembly elections

The 1988 Assembly elections in South Korea provide an opportunity to explore whether voting based on short-term economic fluctuations was a feature of the elections. The research design regresses party votes from a large sample of the 224 electoral districts against several well-known determinants of Korean voting behavior (regionalism, urban-rural residence, and social class), as well as district unemployment rates and levels and changes in income. With traditional explanations of voting behavior held constant, income variables had no apparent influence on the vote. However, the coefficients for unemployment rates are large, statistically significant, and in a direction entirely consistent with the theory of rational economic voting. There are grounds for including short-term economic variables in future modeling of Korean electoral behavior.     

German Voters in Times of Crisis: The Impact of Perceptions and Economic Context on Electoral Behaviour

This paper analyses the connection between economic context, voters’ individual assessment of the economy, and party identification, taking the German national elections of 2009 as an example. Based on the results of multinomial and multilevel regression models, the article shows that partisanship moderates how the economy affects the vote. In cases of increasing unemployment in the constituency, voters are less likely to vote for the Social Democrats instead of the CDU and the opposition. This effect is particularly strong amongst voters who report that they identify with the Social Democrats. Regarding the effect of voters’ assessment of the national economy, the results are different. In this case, a better evaluation of the regional economy increases the probability to vote for right-wing parties – notably amongst voters without partisanship. These findings suggest that the moderating effect of partisanship on the economy’s impact on voting behaviour should not be overestimated. What is more, this analysis implies that research on economic voting should always account for both contextual factors and voters’ personal assessment of the economy, as these measures reveal different dimensions of economic voting.     

Contrasting First- and Second-Order Electoral Behaviour: Determinants of Individual Party Choice in European and German Federal Elections

In contrast to national elections, both parties and voters are assumed to think that ‘less is at stake’ in European elections: Campaigns are less intense, turnout is lower, and citizens are more inclined to ‘vote with their hearts’. The latter should be reflected in differing rationales of voting – party choice should not be based on identical determinants in national and European elections. However, this hypothesis has not been sufficiently tested and most of the research is based on the analysis of aggregated data while causal explanations are located on the micro level. This paper compares vote functions of individuals in regard to the 2009 European Parliament election as well as the 2009 German Federal election. Using data from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), comparison of explanatory models shows that party choice on both levels is neither fundamentally different nor does it fit into the pattern of second-order electoral behaviour.     

Local Elections and the Turkish Voter: Looking for the Determinants of Party Choice

On 30 March 2014 Turkish voters elected their local (city) councillors. Their party preferences seem to indicate considerable correspondence with the national vote choices. So, do voters' choices in local elections differ from voters' party preferences at the national legislative elections? Based on previous research findings on Turkish voting behaviour, a list of hypotheses was compiled and tested, using binary logistic regression analyses and survey data collected immediately prior to the 2009 and 2014 local elections. The main findings are that the party lists are supported at the ballot boxes on the basis of the voters' party identification, ideological positions, and economic (dis)satisfaction, whether in national or local elections.     

Is Consensual Politicizing Being Punished in Switzerland?

Over the last decade, Switzerland has been characterized by both a radicalization of its political system and the relative success of the SP and SVP parties, which tend to adopt a strategy of permanent campaigning. Because of this, it is often argued that politicians are held accountable for their behaviour and that their electoral successes depend on their voting behaviour in parliament. We thus explore whether the voting behaviour of representatives, or citizens' evaluations of parties' ideological positions had an impact on their electoral success in the 1995, 1999, and 2003 national elections. More precisely, we assess how far the proximity and directional models explain the electoral success of incumbents and parties using roll call data for the National Council as well as the Selects surveys at the individual level. The results at both levels suggest that voters' choice is largely consistent with what is predicted by the spatial models of electoral behaviour. Swiss voters form their party preference on both proximity and direction, which supports a mixed model of electoral behaviour.     

Suffrage Extensions and Voting Patterns in Latin America: Is Mobilization a Source of Decay?

This article examines whether changes in electoral participation contributed to electoral volatility in Latin America between 1945 and 2000. As a result of literacy voting requirements and authoritarian interludes that disenfranchised large portions of the population, new voters in Latin America probably had different political interests from the previous electorate and were not socialized to electoral politics. The article considers the hypothesis that the inclusion of new voters with different interests produces an immediate, short‐term change in aggregate voting patterns, and a lack of socialization of new voters generates lingering instability in electoral behavior. Accounting for confounding factors, the analysis of legislative elections in 12 countries indicates that the expansion of the electorate temporarily disrupted voting patterns in Latin America but did not lead to long‐run party system decay.     

Compensatory Voting in Direct Legislation. Evidence from Switzerland

In elections, voters sometimes compensate for post‐election bargaining processes by electing parties that are more extreme than themselves. We investigate compensatory voting in direct democracy. Our goals are to develop and test a measure of compensatory voting in direct legislation and assess its extent of compensatory voting. Empirically, we draw on the case of Switzerland, a country with frequent popular votes. We operationalize compensatory voting as voting ‘yes’ on a popular initiative in spite of endorsing arguments that speak against this initiative, under the condition of being well‐informed about the initiative. Using data from post‐ballot surveys on 17'570 individuals having voted on 63 popular initiatives in the period 1993 to 2015, our analysis shows that compensatory voting has not significantly increased in Switzerland in this period.     

Economic Conditions and the Vote for Incumbent Parties in Russia,Poland, Hungary,Slovakia, and the Czech Republic from 1990 to 1996

An American political scientist employs regional electoral, economic, and demographic data across several transition countries—Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Czech Republic, and Russia—to examine the effects of economic conditions on the electoral fortunes of thirty-two incumbent political parties in ten parliamentary elections. “Primary Incumbents” and “Other Incumbents” are distinguished in order to analyze how the “Degree of Incumbency” affects the relationship between economic conditions and election results for these two different types of incumbents in post-communist countries. The article points to new questions and methods for examining multiparty elections as well as for the relationship between economic conditions and voting outcomes.     

Mixed electoral systems in Britain and the Jenkins Commission on electoral reform

Mixed electoral systems seek to combine elements from different voting methods so as to maximise the numbers of individually accountable constituency MPs, while achieving more proportional outcomes in terms of parties' representation. This paper looks in detail at two kinds of mixed systems: variants of the Additional Member System; and AV Plus (or SV Plus). We examine how they would have operated in British conditions during the 1990s—how ballot papers would be structured, how voters respond to them and what electoral outcomes would have resulted. Both approaches offer good prospects for achieving a consensus amongst electoral reformers on an alternative to first-past-the-post elections. We also show how the Jenkins Commission's proposals can be located within the broader development of 'British AMS' by the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties. In addition, we quantify the main impacts of the policy choices which the Commission made in designing the proposed system to be submitted to a referendum. The British case will be a key one for the wider debate in political science about the endogenisation of voting system changes within party systems.     

Representation and Austerity Politics: Attitudes of Greek Voters and Elites Compared

Drawing on surveys of voters and MPs in Greece, this article analyses elite–mass interaction on key policy (austerity, European integration, immigration) and ideological issues after the 2012 elections. We find that while for the government parties, New Democracy and PASOK, the level of congruence is quite high, MPs from opposition parties (SYRIZA, Golden Dawn) place themselves in more exposed positions in comparison with their voters. The observed substantial variation in the intensity and direction of congruence, across parties and issue preferences in Greece, reinforces the view that the dimensionality of political contestation is not reducible to a single ideological dimension.     

Voter confusion in German federal elections: the Baden-Württemberg electoral system as a possible alternative

Despite its performance and popularity, the German electoral system is partly still subject to critique. However, most critics focus on mechanics and results, thereby largely neglecting the perspective of the voter. This article argues that certain ways of split-ticket voting in German Bundestag elections point to the fact that a considerable part of the electorate is ignorant of the functions of the two votes. It analyses whether this flaw could be corrected by shifting to a very similar system, but one which only provides a single vote ballot, such as the Baden-Württemberg state electoral system. For this purpose, the Baden-Württemberg system is scrutinised in regard to possible misunderstandings on the side of the voters. Although a close examination of this globally unique system does not show symptoms that would indicate such a problem, the article cautions against a rash adoption of the Baden-Württemberg system at the federal level. On the one hand, this is due to limitations of the methods used in analysing voting behaviour. On the other hand, the state system suffers from shortcomings which make it unsuitable for use as a model. Finally, the article assesses the possible benefits of reform at the federal level and how far-reaching it should be.     

Invalid Voting in German Constituencies

This article studies invalid voting, which has received very little attention so far, given the broad interest and substantial relevance of voting behaviour research. Existing evidence is mostly limited to rather specific and hardly representative countries. Yet, the extent of invalid ballots is not negligible. Despite undemanding electoral rules, more invalid votes are cast in German general elections than votes for niche parties. Against this backdrop, the article describes prevalence of invalid voting in the mixed electoral system of Germany and tests explanations of its variation between constituencies. Analysing data from the most recent Bundestag Election, results give clear support to politico-institutional explanations: voters are more willing to waste their vote if second-order elections are held concurrently. Specifically under the plurality rule, more (first) votes are wasted if there are large shares for parties without direct candidates and many competing candidates.     

Voters and Voting in Multilevel Systems – An Introduction

This Special Issue, ‘Voters and Voting in Multilevel Systems', is a contribution to a better understanding of the functioning and logics of the present-day German electoral system, but its findings and consequences stretch beyond the German case. After all, Germany is ideally suited for studying multilevel voting and the interdependences and mutual repercussions of multilayer electoral systems. The Special Issue takes the challenges and changes in voting behaviour as a starting point and searches for links and causal relationships between levels. Overall, it has two major goals: first, to examine how (increasing) volatility in voting behaviour and declining participation rates manifest themselves at all layers of the multilevel system, possibly amplifying each other; second, to turn the usual perspective on its head by examining the impact of second-order elections and vote choices on parties' fortunes and electoral outcomes at the national level.     

Electoral coordination in Anglophone Africa

Electoral coordination has been a primary concern for scholars of African politics, interested in topics such as ethnic conflict mitigation and democratisation, for decades. However, understanding of micro-level electoral coordination in Sub-Saharan Africa is generally still very limited. This study is the first to investigate voter coordination in Sub-Saharan Africa using constituency-level election results. Studying 20 single-member district elections during the period 1990–2010 in five Anglophone African countries (Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi and Zambia) demonstrates that many African elections continue to show low levels of electoral coordination. Using a multi-level regression analysis, the study shows that the most important explanation for low levels of coordination across Africa is high voter volatility. It is argued that insufficient information makes it hard for voters and candidates to act strategically. However, the level of democracy, which has been emphasised in earlier aggregate level research, does not significantly affect the level of coordination.