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.     

The personal vote and economic reform

Do electoral rules affect the progress of economic reforms? The students of economic reform have examined the effects of inter-party competition, partly shaped by electoral rules, on economic reform, but have neglected the more direct effects of electoral rules, namely the extent to which they encourage the personal vote. More broadly, studies of the effect of electoral rules on economic policy have relied on the simplistic SMD/PR distinction and have neglected features of electoral institutions that affect the level of intra-party competition. Building on the personal vote literature, we argue that electoral institutions that encourage the personal vote are not conducive to reform progress. We provide the first systematic multivariate cross-country test of the implications of the personal vote literature for economic reform in the context of the post-communist countries from 1990 to 2006. We find that, in line with our theory, countries where electoral rules encourage the personal vote are less likely to reform.     

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.     

Big expectations, small outcomes: The impact of leaders' personal appeal in the 2004 Greek election

The 2004 Greek election provides an interesting case study for examining the impact of party leaders on the vote. A change in governing party leadership a few months before polling day had two important implications. First, it generated a highly favourable context for the emergence of decisive leadership effects. Second, it made it feasible to grasp empirically how voters form their evaluations of new leaders. Regarding the first question, the findings indicate that even in the most favourable environment the impact of leadership evaluations on the overall electoral outcome is only slight. Regarding the second, it seems that the change of leader at the start of an election campaign can be a mixed blessing. Whereas it can help a party to divert media and public focus from other less favourable issues, the party pays a corresponding price when its new leader has to learn the job in the full glare of an election campaign.     

Economic determinants and electoral outcomes: Some personal observations

This article reviews and criticizes some of the voting studies done in the United States and France in perhaps overemphasizing the economic factor to the exclusion of other variables influencing the electorate. It pleads for less emphasis on methodological refinement and more emphasis on politically or ideologically relevant interpretation. It recommends broad-gauged and multiple approaches to the subject matter and warns against confusing prediction and explanation.     

Politics and personal factors in retirement from the United States Supreme Court

A vacancy to be filled on the Supreme Court is a relatively rare event; continuity of service is the norm. In this paper I determine the circumstances under which justices decide to retire and, by extension, why they remain on the bench. Using a discrete-time method I find that political considerations do not appear to matter. Justices are more likely to retire when they are physically infirm and have qualified for pension benefits. But the more justices participate in the Court's activity, as evidenced by the number of opinions or dissents they write, the less likely they are to leave voluntarily.     

The role of personal parliamentary assistants in the European Parliament

The article scrutinises the behaviour of the personal staff of MEPs, using newly collected survey data. The personal staff known as accredited parliamentary assistants (APAs) have long been in the shadow of staff in parliamentary groups and staff in the European Parliament’s (EP) central Secretariat. In the 2010s, MEPs’ allowance for personal staff increased and a statute for APAs was adopted. Against the background of these reforms, this article hypothesises that APAs are a frequent source of assistance for MEPs in comparison to the other EP staff. It assumes that the significance of APAs’ involvement depends on their characteristics as direct employees of MEPs. Results show that APAs frequently assist MEPs in activities relevant for the internal life of the EP, but that they are less frequently involved in inter-institutional relations. The article shows that MEPs seek support which is political, but also that is tailored towards them personally.     

America's first voter identification laws: The effects of personal registration and declining political party competition on presidential election turnout, 1880–1916

Engaging a persistent puzzle on the decline in U.S turnout after 1896 from which the nation never recovered, this paper tests the impact of strict registration laws and declining electoral competition on turnout. This study uses an original dataset on nineteenth century voter registration laws for 1880–1916. I estimate a panel model with state and year fixed effects to test the hypothesis that the shift in electoral behavior was a function of registration reforms and competition. Findings show that turnout dropped by as much as 6 points because of personal registration laws, whereas competition increased turnout by up to 10 points. I also analyzed two case studies at the county level. The results indicate that when registration laws became increasingly stringent with stricter identification requirements, turnout dropped by as much as 19 points. Findings suggest that electoral competition could mitigate the suppressive effects of strict voting laws on turnout.     

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.     

Large scale public projects—The personal connection

The paper expands on an interesting phenomenon accompanying large-scale projects, namely, the parallel inflation in costs and deflation in benefits from initiation to implementation and final evaluation or elimination altogether. Historically, three explanations have been provided for the above phenomenon: the deterministic effects of uncertainty; self-interest evaluators; and the ‘vision’ factor. We claim that on face value one cannot accept as scientifically sound evidence the above three explanations of the constant decline in actual benefits. The ‘acceptance-avoidance’ model which we bring to bear predicts a constant deterioration in actual benefits as the project develops. This psychological factor results in the use of the three above-mentioned explanations as a ‘cover-up’ for real underlying human doubts regarding the chances of success of crucial decisions taken by individuals.     

Measuring the “personal vote” of members of Congress

This paper uses a pooled time series/cross sectional research design to measure the “personal vote” of three groups of members of Congress. The personal vote is defined here as that part of a candidate's vote share that is unique to him or her. It is measured using a legislator-specific intercept for each legislator in an equation predicting vote share. The other variables in the equation account for the effects of the election year environment and the tenure of the representative. Three cohorts of representatives are analyzed: 1) those whose careers ended before 1966, 2) those whose careers began after 1965, and 3) those whose careers began before 1966 but ended after. The mean legislator-specific intercept is nearly twice as large for the first group as for the second; it is 29 percentage points larger for the first than the third. A second stage regression explains these intercepts using legislator characteristics, party affiliation, region of origin, and number of terms served. The term effects increase at an increasing rate as tenure increases for all those whose careers end after 1966. Personal vote accumulates nearly twice as fast for those first elected after 1965 as for those first elected before 1966.     

Capturing vote-seeking incentives and the cultivation of a personal and party vote

Electoral rules establish incentives that encourage candidates to strike a particular balance between cultivating their own personal reputations and cultivating shared party reputations. Higher levels of intraparty competition stress the need for an individual reputation and minimize the usefulness of a shared, party reputation. We develop a new indicator of intraparty competition that addresses shortcomings pointed out in previously used indicators. We also identify new, particularly intuitive indicators of ”personal” and ”party” vote seeking. Using within-system and across-system variation in parliamentary elections in Japan, we find that candidate manifestos contain more frequent uses of first-person pronouns and candidate names and fewer references to political parties when intraparty competition is stiffest.     

Do the personal characteristics of finance ministers affect changes in public debt?

Using a unique dataset of the personal characteristics of national finance ministers in Western Europe (1980–2010), I show that a finance minister’s experience affects the national debt-to-GDP ratio. The increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio is smaller if the finance minister stays in office for an additional year. This result is robust to the inclusion of the personal characteristics of prime ministers and a measure of political stability. However, the magnitude of the effect is sensitive to how finance ministers are selected in the econometric model when more than one minister holds office during a particular year. The estimation of interaction terms further reveals that experience particularly matters in election years or in times of negative GDP growth because an experienced finance minister has the power to restrict the usual increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio. In contrast, a finance minister’s educational background and ideological leaning have no significant impact on the debt-to-GDP ratio.     

The political is personal: an analysis of crowd-sourced political ideas and images from a Massive Open Online Course

ABSTRACT

The analysis of ideology at the vernacular level requires access to peer-to-peer political discussions amongst non-specialists. It is in these discursive exchanges that political views are articulated, refined, and revised. Such exchanges are, however, difficult for the researcher to capture. Here we take c.25,000 learner comments (along with several hundred image uploads) from a Massive Open Online Course, co-produced by the University of Nottingham and the British Library, as a source of such peer-to-peer political discussions. From five topics we have selected ‘Freedom’, ‘Justice’, and ‘Community’ for close analysis. The idea of ‘freedom’ generated by far the most learner discourse, being both positively appraised and highly personalized. ‘Justice’ was generally seen as something to be delivered by political institutions, although accounts of injustice were frequently personalised. Accounts of ‘community’ often focused on the trappings of nationhood, but some comments, and many images in particular, highlighted moments of ephemeral and more personal, self-chosen communities. Overall, both comments and images show that, in their interpretation of the conceptual vocabulary of politics, people frequently frame their understanding through personal experience in a very direct manner. It is not only true that the ‘personal is political’, but also, for many, that the ‘political is personal’.     

Policy attribute framing: A comparison between three policy instruments for personal emissions reduction

A comparative experiment in the UK examined people's willingness to change energy consumption behavior under three different policy framings: energy tax, carbon tax, and personal carbon allowances (PCA). PCA is a downstream cap‐and‐trade policy proposed in the UK, in which emission rights are allocated to individuals. We hypothesized that due to economic, pro‐environmental and mental accounting drivers PCA would have greater potential to deliver emissions reduction than taxation. Participants (n = 1,096) received one version of a survey with the same energy‐behavior–related questions and identical incurred costs under one of the following framings: energy tax (where carbon was not mentioned), carbon tax, and PCA. Results suggest that policies that draw people's attention to carbon (PCA and carbon taxation) could have greater impact on their stated willingness to reduce energy consumption, and on the reduction amounts prompted, than would a non‐overt price signal (energy tax). There is mixed evidence, however, as to whether PCA or carbon taxation would produce the largest energy demand reductions. Some indication was found for a spillover toward wider carbon conservation under the PCA framing. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The importance of personal vote intentions for the responsiveness of legislators: A field experiment

Individual legislators can be important agents of political representation. However, this is contingent upon their responsiveness to constituency requests. To study this topic, an increasing number of studies use field experiments in which the researcher sends a standardized email to legislators on behalf of a constituent. In this paper, we report the results of an original field experiment of this genre with the members of the German Bundestag. Supplementing previous research, we explore whether constituency requests in which voters mention a personal vote intention (rather than a partisan vote intention) increase legislators’ responsiveness, and how this treatment relates to electoral system's incentives. We find that legislators treated with a personal vote intention were more likely to respond (67 per cent) and respond faster than those treated with a partisan vote intention (59 per cent). However, we also show that the treatment effect is moderated by electoral system incentives: it is larger for nominally-elected legislators than for those elected via a party list. Our results suggest that electoral system's incentives matter for legislators’ responsiveness only when constituents explicitly signals an intention to cast a personal vote.     

Comparing the role of personal and organisational support on the innovative behaviour of frontline healthcare workers in Australia and the United States

This paper empirically uses a street-level bureaucrat (SLB) lens to compare the impact of personal and organisational support on the innovative behaviour of frontline healthcare workers in Australia and the United States. Survey data came from the 260 U.S. and 220 Australian respondents. The structural equation model shows that organisational (i.e. manager–subordinate relationships) and personal supports (i.e. psychological capital [PsyCap]) significantly influence the innovative behaviour of frontline SLBs in health care. Further, the mediation results show that reciprocal social exchanges provide the foundations for facilitating the growth of healthcare workers’ PsyCap, which then gives them the resilience to be innovative in the workplace. The U.S. respondents perceived stronger organisational support and consequently had a better platform for building PsyCap – providing better work conditions for facilitating innovative behaviour to bourgeon. The paper adds to SLB theory concerning the influence of two variables on SLBs' innovative behaviour, in addition to a meaningful comparison of the U.S. and Australian healthcare workers. If governments and organisations want innovative workers, then the policies must be based on empirical evidence that shows the impact on all stakeholders, including SLBs, because otherwise, irrespective of policy directives, the outcome is low levels of employee wellbeing (which likely results in limited innovative activity).     

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.