The personal vote and voter turnout

The level of electoral turnout is arguably the most widely monitored form of electoral participation. Consequently, electoral systems have often been cited as having a significant effect on turnout levels even though scholars do not agree on the effects of these complex institutions. Since most previous studies have relied on categorical or dichotomous electoral system indicators, this study utilizes Carey and Shugart’s personal vote index to gain theoretical leverage on other electoral system components. In short, I find that where electoral competition is predicated on party, rather than candidates’, reputations, turnout levels rise. The results of a time-series cross-sectional analysis reveal that the personal vote index significantly influences turnout levels even when controlling for a host of other factors.     

Electoral Selection with Parties and Primaries

We develop a model of intraparty candidate selection under partisan electoral competition and voter uncertainty. Candidates for office belong to parties, which are factions of ideologically similar candidates. Each party’s candidate for a general election can be selected either by a “centralized” mechanism that effectively randomizes over possible candidates or by voters in a primary election. The electorate cares about ideology and valence, and both primary and general elections may reveal candidate valences. Our main theoretical result is that while primaries raise the expected quality of a party’s candidates, they may hurt the ex ante preferred party in a competitive electorate by increasing the chances of revealing the opposing party’s candidates as superior. Thus, primaries are adopted in relatively extreme districts where a clear favorite party exists. An empirical analysis of the adoption of direct primaries and the competitiveness of primary elections across U.S. states supports these predictions.     

Vote-earning strategies in flexible list systems: Seats at the price of unity

In theory, flexible list systems are a compromise between closed-list and open-list proportional representation. A party's list of candidates can be reordered by voters if the number of votes cast for an individual candidate exceeds some quota. Because these barriers to reordering are rarely overcome, these systems are often characterized as basically closed-list systems. Paradoxically, in many cases, candidates are increasingly earning individual-level preference votes. Using data from Slovakia, we show that incumbents cultivate personal reputations because parties reward preference vote earning candidates with better pre-election list positions in the future. Ironically, the party's vote-earning strategy comes at a price, as incumbents use voting against the party on the chamber floor to generate the reputations that garner preference votes.     

Is electoral intraparty competition more intense in urban areas?

This article investigates whether intraparty competition at the election stage – measured by the distribution of preference votes over candidates running under the same party label – is more intense in urban areas. Earlier research on preferential-list PR systems shows that urban voters are less inclined to cast preference votes. Yet we do not know how these differences at the individual voter level translate to the degree of intraparty competition at the aggregate list level. We hypothesize that urban areas provide a more open electoral market and lead to lower levels of vote concentration on party lists. We leverage a novel dataset on preference voting in three Belgian elections by aggregating 461,049 preference vote scores for candidates-in-cantons to a dataset of intraparty competition scores for 3214 lists-in-cantons. The hierarchical models show that intra-party competition is impacted by the interactive effects of both the urban character of electoral competition and the presence of prominent office-holders. While rural contexts lead to greater vote concentration in presence of a larger number of office-holders, urban contexts often result in lower vote concentration. Our study provides novel insights into the contextual determinants of intraparty competition and personalization.     

A deterrent to diversity: The conditional effect of electoral rules on the nomination of women candidates

Previous literature regarding the effects of electoral systems on candidate selection has implied a false dichotomy regarding proportional representation (PR) versus single member districts (SMD). This paper unpacks the category of proportional representation, and finds significant differences in the behavior of selectorates depending on their configuration of PR. Using both a natural experiment as well as an original data set comprised of 1095 party lists, I find that the type of proportional representation – i.e., whether or not the voters are allowed to pick a particular candidate from the party list – can have a significant effect on the number of women candidates selected to run for office. Further, I find that the strength of this effect depends on cultural gender norms; if a substantial segment of society believes that women are best in traditional roles, not as leaders, there is a significant, negative effect of the decisive intraparty preference vote on the nomination of women candidates.     

Local candidates and voter mobilization: Evidence from historical two-round elections in Norway

What effect do candidates with local ties have on voter turnout and party support? A considerable challenge within the existing literature on the personal vote, including that part which derives from local ties, is disentangling it from the party vote using observational data. We exploit the unique institutional context of Norway’s historical two-round system, and data measured at the municipality level, to evaluate the mobilizational impact of voter attachment to parties versus (local) candidates. Under this system, entry into the second round was unrestricted, with the number and identity of candidates determined by elite coordination decisions. In municipalities where coordination at the district level between rounds resulted in the withdrawal of a candidate with local ties, we document a strong negative effect on both turnout and party support, which highlights the value of the personal vote for mobilization, and the potential trade-offs that confront parties and coalitions in nomination decisions.     

Communicating Party Labels and Names on Twitter During the 2016 Presidential Invisible Primary and Primary Campaigns

This study investigated the use of party and ideological labels and candidate names in major party candidate tweets (N?=?94,310) during the 2016 presidential preprimary and primary campaigns to understand the extent to which candidates focused on intraparty and interparty themes as a part of their marketing strategies. The results show that the candidates and their campaigns did not engage in heavy partisan labeling to cultivate their social media identities. Outsider candidates were not more likely to use party or ideological labels in their tweets than insider candidates were. The candidates focused on self-advocacy in their tweets.     

Vote-seeking incentives and investment environments: The need for credit claiming and the provision of protectionism

Incentives to cultivate a personal reputation encourage legislators to generate policy outcomes for which they can claim credit. We show that these incentives make themselves felt in international agreements – a domain that might typically be considered within the purview of the executive branch. Through a cross-national analysis and brief case studies, we show that countries with electoral systems that encourage personal vote seeking are more likely to negotiate exceptions to treaties meant to liberalize their investment environments. Legislators benefit by being able to claim credit for having protected their constituents from the competition an unrestricted agreement would entail.     

The servant of two masters: Electoral incentives in the Scottish Parliament

Scholars have pointed out the potential impact of different electoral systems on the incentives for representatives to cultivate personal versus party reputations. The mixed-member proportional system (MMP) allows us to examine the effects of electoral systems on legislators’ incentives. Scholars have argued that MMP may be the ‘best of both worlds’; however, MMP may lead to competing demands on list representatives if they are also allowed to run as constituency candidates, as happens in the Scottish Parliament. I show that this leads to different levels of committee activity—which I use as a surrogate for party activity—from constituency Members of Scottish Parliament (MSPs), pure-list MSPs (who are elected via the party list and do not run in constituencies), and dual-candidate list MSPs (list MSPs who also run in constituencies), and that the proximity of elections also affects committee activity for those who run in constituencies.     

District magnitude and the personal vote

In spite of widespread interest in the effects of electoral institutions, research has largely missed, or misspecified, the ‘theoretical link’ tying legislators' behaviour to the rules' formal properties. District magnitude, in particular, can operate through the number of candidates running under the same party label and the number of votes required to win (re)election. Using data from the PARTIREP cross-national legislator survey in 15 European democracies, the article demonstrates that district magnitude is a proxy of different processes in closed-list and open-list systems. The findings contribute to a better understanding of how the mechanical effects of electoral institutions translate into incentives on the part of legislators to cultivate a personal reputation.     

Leader Influence and Reputation Formation in World Politics

The study of reputation is one of the foundational topics of modern international relations. However, fundamental questions remain, including the question of to whom reputations adhere: states, leaders, or both? We offer a theory of influence‐specific reputations (ISR) that unifies competing accounts of reputation formation. We theorize that reputations will adhere more to actors who are more influential in the relevant decision‐making process. We employ two survey experiments, one abstract and one richly detailed involving a U.S.‐Iran conflict, to evaluate ISR. We find evidence of large country‐specific reputations and moderately sized leader‐specific reputations. Consistent with the theory of influence‐specific reputations, leader‐specific reputations are more important when leaders are more influential.     

Disputed Ownership: Parties,Issues, and Traits in the Minds of Voters

Is party “ownership” of issues and traits manifest in the minds of voters in ways that could generate the oft-hypothesized implications for mass and elite electoral behavior? We specify two ways in which it may be: party reputations refer to the association of a trait or issue with a party; candidate stereotyping requires that party labels prompt differential assignment of attributes or competencies to candidates. We develop a quantitative measure of both ownership types, and apply it to issues and traits. New national survey data provide the first evidence that party reputation ownership exists for issues and traits. New experimental tests reveal evidence of candidate stereotyping for issues, but not traits. Voters associate some traits more with one party, but may not assign them to candidates based upon party label, demonstrating a key difference in the nature and likely implications of issue and trait ownership.     

In Defense of Factions

We model faction formation in a world where party politicians' objective is the development of an informed program of governance. Politicians' preferences reflect their own views and their information that, when aggregated via intraparty deliberations, influences the party manifesto. By joining a faction, a politician increases the influence of its leader on the manifesto, but foregoes his individual bargaining power. For broad model specifications, we find that a faction formation process allows power to be transferred to moderate politicians. This facilitates information sharing, increasing the capacity of the party to attain its objective. These positive welfare effects may hold even when factionalism restricts intraparty dialogue, and hold a fortiori when information is freely exchanged across factions. We conclude that the existence of ideological factions may benefit a party: It provides a means to tie uninformed or extremist politicians to more moderate and informed faction leaders.     

Competing Principals, Political Institutions, and Party Unity in Legislative Voting

Almost all legislators are subordinate to party leadership within their assemblies. Institutional factors shape whether, and to what degree, legislators are also subject to pressure from other principals whose demands may conflict with those of party leaders. This article presents a set of hypotheses on the nature of competing pressures driven by formal political institutions and tests the hypotheses against a new dataset of legislative votes from across 19 different countries. Voting unity is lower where legislators are elected under rules that provide for intraparty competition than where party lists are closed, marginally lower in federal than unitary systems, and the effects on party unity of being in government differ in parliamentary versus presidential systems. In the former, governing parties are more unified than the opposition, win more, and suffer fewer losses due to disunity. In systems with elected presidents, governing parties experience no such boosts in floor unity, and their legislative losses are more apt to result from cross-voting.     

Follow the Candidates,Not the Parties? Personal Vote in a Regional De-institutionalized Party System

This article analyses how personal vote shapes electoral competition and predicts electoral results in a regional de-institutionalized party system. After having analysed the connection between unpredictable political environment and personal vote, we build an original empirical model that explores preferential vote and patterns of re-candidacies and endorsements of the most voted candidates in the Calabrian regional elections. The analysis shows that leading candidates retain a more stable and predictable support over time with respect to parties and that candidates and their system of interactions are able to predict the electoral results better than parties and their alliances.     

The reputational basis of policy success in comparative perspective: Evidence from the education sector in Peru and Bolivia

This article, building on the emerging theoretical corpus of “reputation theory” provides an alternative explanation about how successful policies are obtained in contexts of bureaucratic weakness and volatile politics. The argument is that politicians choose to intervene in delivering successful policies based on how contributable such policies are to construct their political reputations. The findings suggest that in both countries, less tenured politicians face higher incentives to build their reputations, so they choose to deliver better policies to accumulate “successful experiences” as vitae for electoral purposes. Tenured politicians, in turn, opt for inaction or strategic delivery, to preserve their already won political reputations. The present article brings evidence from the education sector of Peru and Bolivia, a sector that has been at the core of these countries' priorities for decades. Through a mixed methods approach involving a panel regression and in-depth interviews, results obtained largely confirm this article's claims.     

Beyond personal vote incentives: Dividing the vote in preferential electoral systems

Comparative studies of preferential electoral systems have paid much attention to the incentives for personalized instead of party-centered campaigns, but they have largely ignored how some of these systems allow “allocation errors” and so create incentives for parties to “manage” the vote and intraparty campaigns. We discuss how the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) and single transferable vote (STV) systems create these incentives, and we illustrate the degree to which they affect actual electoral results across seven preferential electoral systems. The analysis reveals statistically significant differences in the vote inequality among incumbent cohorts (members of the same party and district), indicating the strong influence of vote division incentives over candidate-centered electoral environments. The results also have important implications for comparative research on legislative turnover and the incumbency advantage.     

The conditional effect of personal vote-seeking behaviors on MPs electoral performance: Evidence from an open-list PR system

Considerable research argues that voters reward personal vote-seeking behaviors. The expected electoral gain would be the primary driver of MPs' action. Nevertheless, empirical evidence is scarce, and the findings do not always match the theoretical expectations. This article examines the electoral impact of personal vote-seeking behaviors, arguing in favor of integrating party electoral performance into the models. I also propose a new measure of electoral performance based on the evolution of MPs electoral results. Drawing on data from Finland, the findings globally support the theoretical arguments. MPs benefit from personal vote-seeking behaviors, primarily when their party improves its results. The findings have important implications for our knowledge of the personal vote and, more generally, the personalization of politics.     

Incentives to cultivate a personal vote: A rank ordering of electoral formulas

Seat allocation formulas affect candidates' incentives to campaign on a personal rather than party reputation. Variables that enhance personal vote-seeking include: (1) lack of party leadership control over access to and rank on ballots, (2) degree to which candidates are elected on individual votes independent of co-partisans, and (3) whether voters cast a single intra-party vote instead of multiple votes or a party-level vote. District magnitude has the unusual feature that, as it increases, the value of a personal reputation rises if the electoral formula itself fosters personal vote-seeking, but falls if the electoral formula fosters party reputation-seeking.     

Two strategies for building a personal vote: Personalized representation in the UK and Denmark

Across parliamentary democracies, elected representatives constitute the link between citizens and government. MPs can connect with voters via the party label, or through personalized forms of representation, which is seen to be increasing in importance. However, scholars disagree on what explains variation in MPs' use of personalized representation strategies. In this article, we argue that politicians use different strategies to personalize the link between themselves and citizens: a constituency-oriented and a person-oriented strategy. To test our argument, we develop a new and novel dataset with behavioral measures of personalized representation. Using a content analyses of 698 British and Danish MPs’ personal websites, we demonstrate that the use of personalization strategies is conditional on the incentives MPs face in terms of electoral insecurity, candidate selection procedures, and the electoral context of the system. Our findings show that the level and type of personalized politics vary across political systems and may pose different types of challenges to party democracies.