Bring the party back in: Institutional design for ‘smart election fraud’

Autocrats face a dilemma. Continue with fraudulent electoral practices and risk revolt, or reduce fraud and risk losing elections. One solution is to structure electoral governance such that it allows for independence and professionalism at the center, lending credibility to the electoral process, and partisan local-level administration, enabling fraud at the micro level. Partisan poll workers can help deliver the vote by the use of ‘smart fraud’ – fraud that minimizes the risk of being caught and is used only when needed. In Armenia, the ruling party's vote share, as a proportion of all registered voters, increases with 2.5 percentage points in polling stations where the chairperson was randomly assigned to the ruling party. Fraud forensics suggests that one of the mechanisms behind this was falsification of the results protocol during the count. I conjecture that fraud is only used in high-stakes elections and that election observers are unable to detect it.     

Politics as usual? Assessing the extent and content of candidate-level online campaigning at the 2015 UK general election

There has been much work done investigating the adoption of online campaigns in UK general election campaigns. Although some research has focussed on the candidate-level (Gibson, R., W. Lusoli, and S. Ward. 2008. “Nationalizing and Normalizing the Local? A Comparative Analysis of Online Candidate Campaigning in Australia and Britain.” Journal of Information Technology and Politics 4: 15–30; Lee, B. 2014. “Window Dressing 2.0: Constituency-level Web Campaigns in the 2010 UK General Election.” Politics 34 (1): 45–57; Southern, R. 2015. “Is Web 2.0 Providing a Voice for Outsiders? A Comparison of Personal Web Site and Social Media Use by Candidates at the 2010 UK General Election.” Journal of Information Technology &; Politics 12 (1): 1–17), this is an under-researched area. This is despite early web-campaign scholars (Margolis, M., and D. Resnick. 2000. Politics as Usual: The Cyberspace Revolution. Sage) maintaining that e-campaigning could provide the most important advantages to campaigns at the candidate level. In light of this, the paper aims to provide the most comprehensive study of candidate-level online campaigning carried out in the UK to date. This paper employs original data, measuring website and social media use by candidates during the 2015 UK general election campaign. These data allow for a detailed explanation of the normalization thesis, one of the leading theories in the field of e-campaigns. The findings here are significant as there are several instances where normalization does not hold, suggesting that online tools are contributing to campaign change. Green Party candidates subverted normalization to a significant degree, particularly on social media. Assessing the campaign content, a quarter of candidates adopted more than one interactive feature on their website and furthermore, interactive use of Twitter was the most common type of Twitter use.     

Citizen forecasting: Can UK voters see the future?

The leading approaches to election forecasting have been statistical models, prediction markets, or vote intention polls. This paper explores a different, little used approach - citizen forecasting - a method never yet tried for the case of the United Kingdom. Citizen forecasting simply asks voters in a scientific pre-election survey who they think will win. This aggregated (averaged) result is then assessed for its accuracy in forecasting the overall election outcome. This assessment is carried out on UK general elections from 1951 to 2005, and then applied to 2010. We find, among other things, that generally speaking the majority of the electorate can foretell the winner in advance.     

Defeat of the People's Army? The 2015 British general election and the UK Independence Party (UKIP)

The 2015 general election in Britain saw a major attempt by a relatively new party - the UK Independence Party (UKIP)- to secure elected representation. While UKIP received nearly four million votes, the party left the 2015 general election with just one Member of Parliament. Our evidence, drawn from analysis of British Election survey data and in-depth qualitative interviews with activists, suggests that UKIP's campaign was a major factor in its inability to translate widespread support into elected representation. While the party pursued a targeted campaign, this had only a modest impact on its own vote. UKIP's lack of resources, inexperience and inability to operationalize highly effective, targeted local campaigns severely hamstrung the party and prevented it from converting support into MPs at Westminster.     

Forecasting the 2015 British general election: The 1992 debacle all over again?

This article introduces and reviews a set of twelve academic forecasts of the 2015 British general election. Along with the vast majority of others including journalists and betting markets, they failed by a big margin to predict that the Conservatives would emerge with an overall majority of seats. Several suffered from the 1992 scale inaccuracies of the vote-intention opinion polls. Forecasts based on other data sources typically did a bit better, but also fell short. Nonetheless, this was not 1992 all over again. The dramatic collapse of the Liberal Democrats and rise of the SNP, UKIP and Greens were successfully anticipated. Also this collection includes numerous methodological advancements, with several new methods and developments to established approaches.     

Was there a ‘Youthquake’ in the 2017 general election?

Studies using data from the British Election Study and the British Social Attitudes survey have concluded that the case for a significant rise in turnout amongst young people at the 2017 general election remains unproven. A limitation of these data sets for assessing the so-called Youthquake thesis is the small number of younger voters they contain. In this research note we use data from the UK Household Longitudinal Survey to produce more robust estimates of turnout amongst people aged under thirty between the 2010, 2015, and 2017 general elections. Our findings support the claim that turnout increased markedly among voters in this age group in 2017. They also demonstrate that the increase in youth turnout was not specific to 2017 but, rather, represented a continuation of a change between 2010 and 2015. Our analysis confirms the heightened importance of age as a predictor of vote choice in 2017, with younger voters significantly more likely to vote Labour compared to 2010 and 2015.     

Electoral bias at the 2015 general election: reducing Labour’s electoral advantage

Electoral bias results in an asymmetrical seat distribution between parties with similar vote shares. Over recent British general elections Labour held an advantage because it efficiently converted votes into seats. Following the 2015 election result this advantage has reduced considerably, principally because Labour’s vote distribution saw it accumulate more ineffective votes, particularly where electoral support was not converted into seats. By contrast, the vote distribution of the Conservative party is now superior to that of Labour because it acquired fewer wasted votes although Labour retains a modest advantage overall because it benefits from inequalities in electorate size and differences in voter turnout. Features of the 2015 election, however, raise general methodological challenges for decomposing electoral bias. The analysis, therefore, considers the effect of substituting the Liberal Democrats as the third party with the United Kingdom Independence Party. It also examines the outcome in Scotland separately from that in England and Wales. Following this analysis it becomes clear that the method for decomposing electoral bias requires clearer guidelines for its application in specific settings.     

The times they are a-changin’: party campaign strategies in the 2018 Italian election

Abstract

The 2018 Italian election produced striking results, with both a historic success for the two challenger parties (League and M5S) and massive defeats for the two mainstream parties (PD and FI). This article analyses party campaign strategies and their consistency with the opportunity structures provided by the configuration of Italian public opinion. Relying on issue-yield theory, original survey data were collected for both issue support and priority among Italian voters, and party emphases on issues in the electoral campaign – through Twitter data. The findings indicate a generalised ideological inconsistency of the constituencies of the main parties, while campaign strategies appear much more ideologically consistent. Moreover, it is found that parties focused mostly on conflict-mobilisation strategies, rather than on problem solving. Finally, the article shows that, in general, parties acted strategically, by aligning their campaign to the available opportunities, although with relevant variations across parties.     

In the eye of the beholder: voters’ perceptions of party policy shifts

It is normatively desirable that parties’ policy positions match the views of their supporters, as citizens in Western democracies are primarily represented by and through parties. Existing research suggests that parties shift their policy positions, but as of today, there is only weak and inconsistent empirical evidence that voters actually perceive these shifts. Using individual-level panel data from Germany, United Kingdom, Ireland and the Netherlands, this article tests the proposition that voters perceive parties’ policy shifts only on salient issues while remaining oblivious to parties’ changing positions on issues that they do not consider important. The results demonstrate that issue saliency plays a fundamental role in explaining voters’ perceptions of parties’ policy shifts: according to this logic, democratic discourse between the elites and the electorate appears to take place at the level of policy issues that voters care about.     

A chance for a breakthrough in Russo-Japanese relations: will the logic of great power relations prevail?

Under Mori Yoshiro the Japanese government energetically pursued Russia's new leader, Vladimir Putin. Progress was achieved, as Putin recognized the 1956 treaty in which Moscow pledged to return two islands. From the summer of 2000, however, a backlash could be detected. The architects of the initiative not only failed to make their case to Japanese politicians, but also became the object of two years of attacks, leading to Suzuki Muneo's ouster from the LDP and arrest and to Togo Kazuhiko being fired as ambasador to The Netherlands. Under Koizumi Junichiro Japan lost interest, while the media feasted on the image of foreign policy being hijacked. Lost in the media frenzy and setback to relations was the case for why Tokyo and Moscow need each other as great power partners in the face of rising Chinese power and overwhelming US power. Since both parties sided with the US war against terror, the logic of cooperation has become clearer. A general outline for an interim agreement is well understood on both sides, but a breakthrough is unlikely soon.     

Intergovernmental Relations in the UK: Time for a Radical Overhaul?

Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic have put relationships between the UK government and its devolved counterparts under growing strain. Tensions generated by both of these developments have exposed the inadequacies of the existing, under-developed system for bringing governments together in the UK. The limitations of the current system include the ad hoc nature of intergovernmental meetings, and their consultative rather than decision-making character. Drawing upon an analysis of how intergovernmental relationships are structured in five other countries, the authors offer a number of suggestions for the reconfiguration of the UK model. They explore different ways of enabling joint decision making by its governments, and argue against the assumption that England can be represented adequately by the UK administration. Without a serious attempt to address this dysfunctional part of the UK’s territorial constitution, there is every prospect that relations between these different governments will continue to deteriorate.     

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.      

Do local elections predict the outcome of the next general election? Forecasting British general elections from local election national vote share estimates

This article outlines a method for forecasting British general elections from national level vote shares at local elections. Although local elections are notionally ‘local’, the evidence suggests that they at least partly mirror national electoral fortunes. A simple general election vote share on local election vote share regression model that accounts for partisan differences and incumbency effects fits past data with reasonable accuracy. Based on the results of the 2013 and 2014 local elections, the model forecast a 56% probability of hung parliament, with a 78% probability of the Conservatives receiving the largest share of the vote.     

A mixed blessing for the left? Early voting,turnout and election outcomes in Norway

Is there a relationship between turnout and election outcomes? Although this is a classic topic in political science, most studies on multiparty systems have important theoretical and empirical shortcomings. First, we argue that the proper implication of the theoretical argument that underpins research on the turnout-vote nexus is that high levels of turnout should typically benefit both traditional social democratic parties and parties of the radical right relative to other types of parties, including not only those of the traditional right, but also ‘left-libertarian’ parties. Second, few have studied the relationship between turnout and election outcomes with a research design that is appropriate for causal inference. In our empirical study, our identification strategy is to exploit a Norwegian reform of early voting rules as an exogenous source of variation in turnout. Our theoretical expectations are largely borne out in our empirical results.     

So who really does the donkey work in ‘multi-speed membership parties’? Comparing the election campaign activity of party members and party supporters

One of the traditional functions of party members is to campaign on behalf of their party at general elections. However, they are not the only people who volunteer for the job. In the context of the growing literature on ‘multi-speed membership’ parties, it is important to ask what non-members do for parties they support. This paper examines how different actors contributed to the electoral campaigns of six parties at the 2015 UK General Election, using survey data covering not only members of the Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, United Kingdom Independence, Scottish Nationalist, and Green parties, but also voters who identified themselves as being close to one of those parties but did not formally belong to them. As well as exploring how much work they do during campaigns, we ask whether the two groups choose different activities and are differently motivated. We find that, at the individual level, party members do more than non-member supporters, and that this is especially true of more intensive forms of activity. We also find that constituency context and political attitudes influence levels of activity in similar ways for members and supporters. However, we find no consistent impact from demographic factors or ideological incongruence. At the aggregate level, we estimate that the campaign work done by supporters may match or even exceed that done by party members.