Explaining Split-Ticket Voting at the 1979 and 1997 General and Local Elections in England

Only in 1979, 1997 and 2001 have British general elections coincided with the annual local government elections. Uniquely, this study uses both survey and aggregate data to examine aspects of split-ticket voting at the simultaneous elections in 1979 and 1997. Through the use of bi- and multi-variate analysis, it suggests that ticket-splitting is a product of both voter attitudes and party strategies: although it is almost wholly confined to the less partisan, the electoral context in which those votes are being cast can play an additional and significant role in stimulating such behaviour.     

Region, Local Context, and Voting at the 1997 General Election in England

There has been considerable debate in recent work on voting patterns in Great Britain regarding the importance of regional effects: are these “real” or are they simply statistical artifacts of decision‐making processes at smaller spatial scales which are aggregated up to the regional scale if not incorporated directly into any modeling? Using a multilevel model design, this article reports on analyses of survey data for the 1997 general election in England which allows tests of whether regional variations are no more than aggregation effects. Individual voters are nested within households, neighborhoods, constituencies, and regions and when all of the smaller‐scale spatial levels are included in the model, the observed regional effects are statistically insignificant. At the 1997 general election, at least, regional variations within England in support for the three main parties—basically, a north‐south divide—are aggregation effects.     

Issues,the Spatial Theory of Voting,and British General Elections: A Comparison of Proximity and Directional Models

Competing spatial models of voter choiceare compared in the context ofparliamentary representatives selectedthrough single-member district, pluralityelections where party platforms areemphasized over individual candidates.Respondents of the 1987, 1992, and 1997British general election surveys ratepolitical parties on a series of issuescales. Ordered logistic regressions ofparty evaluations under proximity,directional, and mixed models reveal thatthe classic spatial model and thedirectional model perform equally well.Differences center on perceptions of thestatus quo, as voters appear to evaluatethe incumbent party (here, theConservatives) slightly differently thanminority parties (Labour and the LiberalDemocrats). The proximity model worksbetter for voter evaluations of governingparties while the directional model workswell for opposition parties.     

A Low Turnout Landslide: Abstention at the British General Election of 1997

Turnout at the 1997 British General Election fell to a post-war low of 71 percent, raising worried speculation about long term decline in political participation. On closer analysis, however, this judgement seems premature. Most of the post-war decline in British turnout occurred between 1950 and 1970, and there is no evidence of long term decline in general election turnout between 1974 and 1997. The closeness of the electoral competition is a better predictor of national turnout than a secular trend. Close elections produce high turnout, but widely anticipated landslides (as in 1997) produce low turnouts. The 1997 election was also notable for the small ideological gap between the main parties. Analysis of individual voter abstention in 1992 and 1997 reveals that changes from one year to the other in the perceived difference between Labour and the Conservatives is crucial to accounting for the fall in turnout between the two contests. Turnout in 1997 was low because the result was widely anticipated and because relatively few saw important policy differences between the parties, not because British democracy is in crisis.     

Context, Conversation and Conviction: Social Networks and Voting at the 1992 British General Election

After some initial interest, analyses of contextual effects in British voting behaviour have tended to downplay or ignore the role of face to face conversations between electors. However, evidence from the 1992 British Election Study shows that conversations with partisan discussants do act as a statistically significant influence on voting. Those who discuss politics with supporters of a particular party are more likely to switch their votes to that party, if they had not previously voted for it, and less likely to switch to other parties. Conversations with family members are particularly important, though talking to other discussants also plays a part.     

Local Context, Retrospective Economic Evaluations, and Voting: The 1997 General Election in England and Wales

Local context is widely believed to influence voting behavior with, for example, the voters' evaluation of the state of their local economy affecting whether they choose to reward or punish the incumbent government. Such reward-punish models apply in the United Kingdom at the national scale: those who believe that the government has delivered prosperity vote for its return, whereas those who believe that its policies have produced a worsening economic situation vote against it. This article shows that the operation of this calculus varies spatially, according to the level of unemployment in the voter's home area: the higher the local level of unemployment the lower the probability of someone who thought that government polices had delivered national prosperity voting for the incumbent government. It also shows that this is a consequence of cross-pressured situations. Those who thought that the government's policies had delivered both national and local prosperity were very likely to vote for it; those who thought that the policies had delivered national but not local prosperity were less likely to vote for it—especially in areas of high unemployment.     

Routes to party choice: Ideology,economic evaluations and voting at the 1997 British General Election

Abstract. Most conventional accounts of voting behaviour fit single models to the entire electorate, implicitly assuming that all voters respond to the same sets of influences, and do so in similar ways. However, a growing body of research suggests that this approach may be misleading, and that distinct groups of voters approach politics, and the electoral decision, from different perspectives. The paper takes a disaggregated look at voting in the 1997 British General Election, dividing voters into different groups according to their formal educational qualifications. Results suggest that different groups of voters respond to different stimuli, depending on their education, and on the party they are voting for.     

Party knowledge and candidate knowledge: constituency campaigning and voting and the 1997 British General Election

There has been a recent resurgence of interest in the electoral impact of constituency campaigns in British General Elections. Much is now known about the electoral consequences of local campaigns on parties’ constituency vote shares. Yet more remains to be discovered about the impacts of these local campaigns on voters’ knowledge of parties and candidates. Analysis of data from the 1997 British General Election demonstrates that the local campaign is associated with improved voter knowledge of who is standing for each party in a constituency, which is, in its turn, associated with an increased chance of voting for the party in the election, other things being equal. Campaign efforts at different scales, from the national to the local, have different impacts on voters’ knowledge.     

Women's Entry into Politics: The Experience of the Danish Local and General Elections 1908–20

The article studies how enfranchised women reacted to the established political system. Should they seek to introduce new conflict dimensions or simply adjust to a party system, established before women gained the right to participate? In order to answer these questions. the aims and actions of the Danish women's rights movement are investigated.
A number of women's lists were introduced in the first local elections, but they soon disappeared. Proposals for forming a Women's Party in parliamentary elections were made in Denmark, as in many other countries, after the enfranchisement, but the actual possibilities for a Women's Party were very small. Electoral statistics from this period are studied in order to determine the number of women nominated and elected. and to identify the structural barriers against women's access. The rural-urban dimension seems to be the most decisive factor. with sex itself constituting a resource in rural districts.     

The Elections of the Great Recession in Portugal: Performance Voting under a Blurred Responsibility for the Economy

Abstract

This article discusses the basic patterns of voting behaviour in the most recent elections in Portugal. These elections were fought under one of the most profound economic crises in the country's four decades of democracy, after a bailout agreement with the EU and the IMF, and under an unusually high level of campaign polarization around the issues of economic austerity and liberalization. First, the article examines whether this context ended up being favourable to “performance” voting or, instead, to an enhanced importance of position issues, particularly those related to the role of the state in the economy and welfare provision. Second, it examines how the context of the Great Recession and the European sovereign debt crisis created opportunities for incumbents to use blame-shifting and blame-sharing strategies, and the extent to which voters' ambivalence about who to hold responsible for the sorry state of the economy was consequential for vote choices, either by directly affecting them or by moderating the relationship between economic perceptions and the vote.     

Democracy in Practice: Muslims and the Labour Party at the Local Level

This article examines the nature of Muslim mobilisations in local party politics and the broader question of political representation in local democracy. Drawing on original qualitative and quantitative survey data, the Muslim presence in local politics in Britain is documented and the nature of some of the tensions concerning their membership of local Labour parties is examined.
It is clear that some concerns over whether the strategies used by Muslims to secure political presence in local politics are legitimate but there are also incumbent problems of discrimination, exclusion and stereotyping. This research suggests that there is a general feeling among Muslim councillors that Muslims have been unfairly accused of illegal practices of recruitment and have been treated unfairly within their local parties to an extent that goes beyond simple party and candidate competition. The article argues that while there is a need to ensure that all participation is democratic the concerns of Muslims themselves and the discrimination they have encountered should be addressed.     

Cognitive dissonance and the effects of Voting Advice Applications on voting behaviour: evidence from the European Elections 2014

ABSTRACT

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) – also known as Voting Engagement Applications – are online tools which inform users about their proximity to party positions before elections by indicating which parties are closest to the policy preferences of the individual voters. Referring to the theory of cognitive dissonance, this article examines the impact of using a VAA on voting behaviour by looking at the effect mechanisms. For the empirical analyses, we draw on data of a two-wave panel study we conducted before the European Elections 2014, thereby focusing on the German VAA – the Wahl-O-Mat. The findings show that irritation emerges if the preferred party is not positioned at the top of the VAA result list. In turn, a strong irritation can lead to a change in vote choice.     

Assessing the Impact of Alternative Voting Technologies on Multi-Party Elections: Design Features,Heuristic Processing and Voter Choice

This paper analyzes the influence of alternative voting technologies on electoral outcomes in multi-party systems. Using data from a field experiment conducted during the 2005 legislative election in Argentina, we examine the role of information effects associated with alternative voting devices on the support for the competing parties. We find that differences in the type of information displayed and how it was presented across devices favored some parties to the detriment of others. The impact of voting technologies was found to be larger than in two-party systems, and could lead to changes in election results. We conclude that authorities in countries moving to adopt new voting systems should carefully take the potential partisan advantages induced by different technologies into account when evaluating their implementation.     

Voting at 16: Turnout and the quality of vote choice

Critics of giving citizens under 18 the right to vote argue that such teenagers lack the ability and motivation to participate effectively in elections. If this argument is true, lowering the voting age would have negative consequences for the quality of democracy. We test the argument using survey data from Austria, the only European country with a voting age of 16 in nation-wide elections. While the turnout levels of young people under 18 are relatively low, their failure to vote cannot be explained by a lower ability or motivation to participate. In addition, the quality of these citizens' choices is similar to that of older voters, so they do cast votes in ways that enable their interests to be represented equally well. These results are encouraging for supporters of a lower voting age.     

Austerity Regimes at the Local Level: Examining Fiscal Effects of Austerity Commissioners Using a Time-Series Synthetic Control Method

Abstract

From a democratic perspective, the replacement of government or parliament by a public manager to enforce budget discipline marks a serious intervention. Transferred to the local level, the replacement of the mayor and the council in three German municipalities by a state official (a so-called state commissioner) in recent years has raised questions about the legitimacy and adequacy of such a strong interventionist instrument. One crucial answer to be given to this legitimacy issue concerns effectiveness, in other words whether the instrument can fulfill its designated task by improving the local fiscal situation since the fiscal success of the commissioner is a basic prerequisite for legitimacy. By using a time-series approach of the synthetic control method (SCM) and constructing a synthetic comparison case to the town of Altena, an answer regarding the commissioner’s potential to reduce the short-term debt can be given. The commissioner was successful in limiting the debt increase and seems to have reversed the debt trend. This finding supports the effectiveness of rather hierarchical instruments for ensuring fiscal discipline at the local level and thereby adds to broadening the international public management literature on municipal takeovers.     

Managing Performance at Local Government Level: The Cases of the City of Brisbane and the City of Melbourne

Local governments have been involved in a continuous reform process during recent decades. In many cases, this process has focused on the introduction of performance measurement and management. Reforms have evolved from the mere use of indicators to integrated management systems. In this article, the Balanced Scorecard, a system designed to answer the need for integrated management systems, is used as the framework to analyse how local governments have managed the use of performance management systems. The demands for better public performance, for greater customer focus, for enhanced decision-making and for increased responsiveness have an important role in the design of performance management systems. In addition, a perceived crisis in the area of management can act as catalyst for the implementation.     

Fiscal Slack and Counter‐Cyclical Expenditure Stabilization: A First Look at the Local Level

There is a rich literature on how state governments use slack fiscal resources—most often in the form of rainy day funds and budget stabilization funds—to minimize the effect of economic downturns. This paper presents the first known examination of whether slack resources have the same counter‐cyclical effects at the local level. It uses a panel data set to determine whether one particular form of local fiscal slack, general fund balance, stabilizes current annual expenditures among a sample of 103 Minnesota cities from 1990 to 2000. The findings suggest different fund balance portions have marginal but nonetheless important effects on expenditures.