Split ticket voting in the 1995 Russian Duma elections

High levels of split ticket voting in elections usually indicate either an instrumental electorate, or widespread disaffection from the major parties. Elections to the Russian lower house, the Duma, permit voters both party list options and single-member ballots; as a result, the 1993 and 1995 Duma elections recorded some of the highest levels of split ticket voting ever recorded. Using national survey data collected just after the 1995 Duma election, we test two major explanations for split ticket voting, one based on the activities of voters, the other on the strategic behaviour of parties. The results show that split ticket voting is caused by voters, and more specifically, by their weak attachments to parties. But party strategy also plays a modest role in promoting the phenomenon. In the absence of major reform of the Russian electoral system, split ticket voting is likely to remain at high levels.     

Assessing (and fixing?) Election Day lines: Evidence from a survey of local election officials

Despite recent studies that find few people face significant wait times when attempting to vote in U.S. elections, the 2012 election produced numerous anecdotal and journalistic accounts claiming otherwise. This study relies on a national survey of local election officials to systematically ascertain their views about the challenges and successes they had in administering the 2012 general election. Consistent with surveys of voters, most officials report that wait times and lines were minimal. Furthermore, the relative amount of money available to a jurisdiction for election administration was unrelated to the occurrence of these problems, while the presence of more poll workers—especially first-timers—may actually exacerbate them.     

Why Berlusconi’s landslide return? A comment on the 2008 Italian general election

At the Italian parliamentary election of April 2008 the centre-right coalition, led by media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, prevailed with 3.3 million votes over the centre-left coalition, led by Walter Veltroni, former mayor of Rome. This commentary analyzes the electoral results by looking at three factors which affected the vote: the institutional context, the electoral campaigns of both coalitions, and the voters’ behaviour. The article claims that the electoral outcome originated from an asymmetrical abstention of centre-left voters who did not turn out, and from a high-level of swing-voting which favoured the centre-right. It is argued that this election hardly signals a political realignment. Rather than value changes, valence politics and government performance are at the basis of the centre-right victory.      

Indigenous voters and party system fragmentation in Latin America

This article shows that ethnic cleavages have contributed to electoral fragmentation in Latin America, but not in the way that the social cleavages literature would expect. It finds that party system fragmentation in the region is not correlated with ethnic diversity, but rather with the proportion of the population that is indigenous. The failure of the main parties to adequately represent indigenous people, it argues, has led indigenous voters to shift their support to a variety of smaller populist and leftist parties, which has produced high levels of party system fragmentation in indigenous areas. Where a significant indigenous party has emerged, however, indigenous voters have flocked to that party, which has reduced party system fragmentation. Analyses of sub-national electoral data from Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Peru provide support for these arguments.     

Does public broadcasting increase voter turnout? Evidence from the roll out of BBC radio in the 1920s

There is reason to believe that exposure to public broadcasting can positively affect voter turnout, but these effects are hard to empirically disaggregate. This paper examines the geographically delimited roll out of BBC radio in England, which coincided with successive off-cycle general elections in the 1920s. Combining spatially interpolated census data with constituency-level electoral returns, a matched difference-in-differences design finds that turnout increases with radio exposure. This finding is supported by qualitative examination of the roll out alongside a range of robustness checks. The study makes a contribution to the literature on media and voting behaviour, while enhancing our understanding of how the BBC shapes electoral behaviour in Britain.     

The Presidential Election of 2008*

Senators Barack Obama and John McCain each has severe problems. McCain must take his distance from the very unpopular President Bush while keeping the support of the core Republican voters, but suffers from lack of rapport with the Fundamentalist Protestants and traditionalist Catholics. In foreign policy, he is more devoted to US global hegemony (in a world which stubbornly refuses it) than the incumbent. Senator Obama knows that this is a dangerous illusion but thinks that it is unwise to say so. He supports Israel in exaggerated terms and repeats the fabrications of the war party about Iran. Obama has the difficulty of being part black and entirely intellectual, and he needs the votes of the working class men and women who are very reserved about him. McCain seeks low taxes and less government expenditure and intervention, but tens of millions of economically hard‐pressed citizens are ready to return to the ethos and practices of the New Deal. Obama promises to revive the regulatory and redistributive role of government to help them, but his reluctance to criticise the arms budget may makes him seem unrealistic. Obama's vision of the United States puts the achievement of the American Revolution in the future whereas McCain thinks of the nation as already perfected. In many respects, we have a classical conflict between left and right.     

The politics of Mikhail M Bakhtin's Carni‐Phallic body

While many scholars attribute Barack Obama's success in the 2008 presidential election to his so-called deracialized campaign strategy, I argue that Obama constructed a persuasive message strategy that was fundamentally based on race. I argue that in pursuing what I call a racial distinction strategy, Obama mobilized race differently than previous Black candidates running in White-voter electoral majorities. Specifically, Obama's racial distinction strategy constructed a seamless racial narrative – deployed through constellations of subtle racial language and imagery – incorporating Obama's own personal biography within a broader narrative of the nation, specifically a narrative of American progress. The fact that Obama employed a racial distinction strategy, and the fact that he succeeded in doing so, sheds new light on, and leads us to reconsider the veracity of popular political theories such as post-Blackness, post-racialism and deracialization, along with the general ideology of colorblindness.     

Accountable or Untouchable? Electoral accountability in Romanian local elections

While retrospective models of voting posit that voters should “vote the rascals out”, a wave of recent research has found that this is rarely the case. We investigate this question in a context in which many sitting politicians have recently been indicted on corruption charges – the municipal level in Romania, a surprisingly under-researched case in this sub-field. Romania provides a good case for electoral accountability. Not only do Romanians deeply detest corruption, the party system also contains many parties that would make it easy for voters to switch from a corrupt to a cleaner alternative. We collected an original data register of electoral and socio-political data on roughly 3200 localities together with all cases of corruption charges published by the Romanian anti-corruption agency, the Direcţia Naţională Anticorupţie (DNA), accounting for magnitude and timing of the scandal as well as the judicial outcome for the indicted mayor. In all, we find that 81 sitting mayors elected in 2012 were charged with corruption prior to the 2016 election. We test the electoral impact of corruption on the incumbent mayors on four outcomes indicating electoral accountability commonly used in the literature – retirement, vote share compared to the previous election, voter turnout, and reelection using difference and difference and a pairwise matching designs, inter alia. The results show that Romanians do punish their corrupt incumbent mayors to a quite high extent compared to the clean mayors. However, due to the large vote margins, the punishment is not severe enough to make them lose more often than similar “clean‟ mayors, although they tend to not run for re-election at much higher rates. Turnout is unaffected by corruption at the municipal level. In line with previous results, we thus find a certain amount of electoral accountability, but not to the extent that the ‘rascals are thrown out’.     

American Progressivism and the Obama Presidency

US progressivism is half espoused, half rejected, by an ambivalent if talented President. The Republican image of the President as ‘socialist’ is one which the social democratic Democrats wish were true. The President's readiness to compromise has not tempered the extreme hostility of the Republicans. It has been exploited by the political agents of business and finance. It has used by the permanent war party: the campaign against ‘terror’ enables it to retain mastery of foreign and military policy. The New Deal's heirs, seeking more social democracy and less militarism, are bereft of new forms of political action. US democracy is threatened by an eruption of cultural and religious fundamentalism, racism, and xenophobia, as well as a compulsive refusal of social solidarity. Withal, the situation is open as well as complex, and the President in the long run may be much more successful than his angry detractors and disappointed supporters allow.     

US Presidential Elections: Two Centuries of Constitutional Continuity and Political Change—With an Analysis of the Political Geography of Barack Obama's Re‐election Campaign

The system for electing the President of the United States remains essentially as it was prescribed in the Federal Constitution drafted in 1787. The individual 50 states (plus the District of Columbia) are accorded a number of votes in the (so‐called) Electoral College; each state's Electoral College vote is then attributed to the candidate gaining a plurality (most) of the popular vote in that state; and the candidate with a majority (50% + 1) of these aggregated Electoral College votes is declared the incoming president. What has changed have been the methods of nominating the candidates, chief of which are the political parties from the nineteenth century with their stage‐managed quadrennial conventions and the primary/caucus campaigns from the twentieth century which precede and now determine the formal nomination. President Obama's 2012 re‐election campaign showed both the crucial importance of the much‐maligned Electoral College in winning the presidency and the demographic divisions hidden in the larger American political landscape.     

Magnitude and durability of electoral change: Identifying critical elections in the U.S. Congress 1854–2010

The two hallmarks of a critical election and, hence, of a critical realignment are the magnitude of the observed change and the durability of that change. In addition to offering a new approach to measuring durable change in national party dominance, and providing a non-parametric criterion to identify unusual changes in seat/vote shares, we provide fresh insights via a unifying statistical approach that reflects both of these factors simultaneously. Furthermore, we assess the robustness of critical election determinations in two ways. First, we compare the magnitude of inter-election shifts with both average volatility over the entire time period and volatility relative to a particular time period. Second, as an alternative to the usual perspective, we consider critical elections not as a one-time cataclysm, but rather as a pair (or perhaps even triple) of consecutive substantial shifts, generated by the same underlying factors. Overall, we distinguish six elections that marginally or provisionally meet our criteria to be critical elections. But focusing on pairs of elections, 1858–60 and 1930–32 stand out as critical among all elections since the 1850s.