Voter information and power dilution: Evidence from Sicilian provincial elections

Public Choice - It is generally accepted that an increase in the amount of voter information is desirable. As Reisman (1990) points out, a well-informed and committed electorate is better able to...     

Voter perceptions of agenda power and attribution of responsibility for economic performance

In two recent experiments (one in the lab and one over the internet) concerning collective decision making we determined that individuals mainly assign responsibility to the decision maker with agenda power and with the largest vote share (Duch et al., 2012). We found rather weak evidence that responsibility is assigned to decision makers with veto power or allocated proportional to weighted voting power. Our conjecture then is that individuals in our online experiment who recognized the importance of proposal power in the embedded experiment will be those more likely to exercise an economic vote for the Conservative PM Party (since they are the agenda setter in the governing coalition) and for the opposition Labour Party. The conjecture is confirmed. Essentially, the data show that economic voting at the individual level is confined to individuals who understand the value of proposal power. This in turn suggests that the economic vote itself is motivated by a coherent attempt to punish or reward parties that actually deserve it in the specific sense that they were mostly responsible for choosing the policies that were implemented. Further, the strong reliance on proposal power as the workhorse of this mechanism of accountability, tells us that simple heuristics can do a lot of the work that cold rationality and complex calculation have done in much of the previous discussion of economic voting.     

Influenza and Voter Turnout

Disease makes performing civic obligations more difficult both for the afflicted and those around them. Elections held when infectious diseases are locally prevalent are therefore likely to see lower voter turnout than are those held in healthier times. This is especially notable given the strongly seasonal incidence of influenza, which coincides with election season in some countries. This article examines the relationship between regional turnout rates in Finland and the United States from 1995 to 2015 with measures of local influenza prevalence. In both countries, regression models suggest influenza outbreaks associate with lower voting rates. This may suggest another mechanism limiting the political representation of people and communities vulnerable to ill health.     

Voter sincerity and the time-of-voting-decision

This article explores the relationship between vote sincerity and the time at which vote decisions are finalized. It posits that a specific set of competitive circumstances are necessary for insincere voting to occur, and that voters' understanding of these circumstances can be influenced by exposure to information during a campaign. The article introduces a new method of operationalizing a commonly overlooked type of insincere voting: the protest voter. As defined here, protest voters express their political dissatisfaction by supporting an uncompetitive non-traditional party that is not their first preference. Canadian Election Study data reveal that protest voters make up a small, but noteworthy segment of the electorate and that insincere voters tend to make their vote decisions relatively late.     

Civic Duty and Voter Turnout

We argue that two different sets of considerations shape the decision to vote or abstain in an election–ethical and non-ethical. First the citizen may vote out of a sense of duty. Failing that, she may vote because she has strong preferences about the outcome of the election. Abstention occurs when neither duty nor a sufficiently strong preference is present. The implication is that while duty and preference each have strong positive effects on turnout, they also have a negative interaction effect, since the impact of preference is much weaker among those with a sense of duty. We present a wide array of empirical evidence that systematically supports our claim that the turnout decision is importantly shaped by this causal heterogeneity. Thus a turnout model misses something fundamental if it does not take into account the effect of civic duty.

     

Portable Voter Registration

I find that statewide registration portability—permitting registrants who move anywhere within a state to transfer their registration and vote on Election Day at their new polling place—increases turnout rates among movers by 2.4% points. The effect is similar among movers living in EDR states, suggesting that about a quarter of the beneficial turnout effect of EDR is realized by recent movers. Yet, movers are still less likely to vote even where these policies are present. These findings further challenge existing literature that finds that reregistering is the primary impediment of voting among movers.

Political Competition and Voter Mobility

The existing model of political competition is extended to allow voters to live in different regions and to migrate between regions in response to an inter-regional transfer policy. We then show that regions have a different ``weight'' in the expected vote function of political parties. This gives parties an incentive to bias the transfer policy in favour of relatively high weight regions, with potentially adverse efficiency and equity effects. However, we then show that parties always propose efficient and equitable regional transfers, regardless of whether regions have different weights, if there is some mobility of citizens across regions. Mobility constrains parties to act efficiently and equitably even though they face an incentive to act otherwise. However, when voters are immobile political competition leads to inequitable though efficient outcomes.     

Models of Voter Behavior

Abstract

This article reports on a test of a predictive model of voter behavior in Slovenia. The study is based on Slovenian parliamentary elections held on 15 October 2000. A survey was made in an electoral unit (“Vrhnika”). This is one of the tests that were simultaneously done in three countries-Poland, the US and Slovenia. The purpose of the test reported in this study was to test the model in a different cultural and political setting from the one in which it was designed, and also in a different electoral setting-in a proportional instead of majority system of voting. The model proved itself as working in Slovenia.     

Learning about Voter Rationality

An important empirical literature evaluates whether voters are rational by examining how electoral outcomes respond to events outside the control of politicians, such as natural disasters or economic shocks. The argument is that rational voters should not base electoral decisions on such events, so evidence that these events affect electoral outcomes is evidence of voter irrationality. We show that such events can affect electoral outcomes, even if voters are rational and have instrumental preferences. The reason is that these events change voters' opportunities to learn new information about incumbents. Thus, identifying voter (ir)rationality requires more than just identifying the impact of exogenous shocks on electoral fortunes. Our analysis highlights systematic ways in which electoral fortunes are expected to change in response to events outside incumbents' control. Such results can inform empirical work attempting to identify voter (ir)rationality.     

Voter participation and the redistributive state

The redistributive theory of the state implies that voter participation rates should be highest among those who have the most to gain or lose or a V-shaped relationship between income and voting participation should exist. We use a data set that contains nearly 21,000 observations on individual survey responses about voting behavior in the U.S. between 1972 and 1993 to show that the participation rate generally rises monotonically with income, perhaps except at very high income levels. It does report other findings consistent with an economic theory of voting based on returns to association and with the hypothesis that public employees vote more.     

Voter Disenfranchisement and Policy toward Election Reforms

How did poverty, race, population density, and other demographic characteristics affect disenfranchisement in the 2004 presidential election? I argue that there are two types of disenfranchisement: partisan disenfranchisement, which targets Democrats, and structural disenfranchisement, which targets members of low‐status groups. Drawing demographic data from the United States census in 2000, and voting data from the secretaries of state websites, I use a negative binomial regression to correlate these variables with the incidence of voter disenfranchisement as collected by the Election Incident Reporting System, for the three “swing” states of Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, with the “safe” states of California and Texas as controls. The results of this analysis indicate that disenfranchisement increases with population density, Black population, Democratic loyalty, and as the margin of victory decreases. Income and education also correlate with an increase in reported incidents of disenfranchisement, but that likely reflects the failings of self‐report data.     

Widowhood Effects in Voter Participation

Past research suggests that spouses influence one another to vote, but it relies almost exclusively on correlation in turnout. It is therefore difficult to establish whether spouses mobilize each other or tend to marry similar others. Here, we test the dependency hypothesis by examining voting behavior before and after the death of a spouse. We link nearly six million California voter records to Social Security death records and use both coarsened exact matching and multiple cohort comparison to estimate the effects of spousal loss. The results show that after turnout rates stabilize, widowed individuals vote nine percentage points fewer than they would had their spouse still been living; the results also suggest that this change may persist indefinitely. Variations in this “widowhood effect” on voting support a social‐isolation explanation for the drop in turnout.     

Voter turnout and the benefits of voting

A model of voting behavior is developed that predicts that individuals vote if the absolute value of voting for or against a referendum exceeds the cost of voting. The results obtained from examining voting on city-county consolidation referenda and in New York state (1) provide support for the relatively untested prediction that turnout rises as the absolute value of the mean gains resulting from an electoral outcome increase and (2) augment the evidence that turnout rises as the probability of altering an electoral outcome increases and falls as the cost of voting rises.     

Voter Confidence and the Election-Day Voting Experience

The scholarly literature provides mixed guidance on the question of whether DREs or optical scan systems inspire greater confidence. We bring new evidence to bear on the debate using a unique exit poll and a nationally representative survey, both of which examine a wide range of voting experiences. Having detailed information about voting experiences enables us to investigate both the direct effects of DRE/optical scan voting and the indirect effects through voting experiences. Doing so reveals new information about the relationships between voting technology, voting experiences, and voter confidence. Indeed, the type of machine one uses has very different direct and indirect effects on voter confidence—a finding that may help explain scholarly disagreement over voters’ reactions to different types of voting machines.     

Voter Turnout and the National Election Studies

Though the overreporting of voter turnout in the National ElectionStudy (NES) is widely known, this article shows that the problemhas become increasingly severe. The gap between NES and officialestimates of presidential election turnout has more than doubledin a nearly linear fashion, from 11 points in 1952 to 24 pointsin 1996. This occurred because official voter turnout fell steadilyfrom 1960 onward, while NES turnout did not. In contrast, thebias in House election turnout is always smaller and has increasedonly marginally. Using simple bivariate statistics, I find thatworsening presidential turnout estimates are the result mostlyof declining response rates rather than instrumentation, questionwording changes, or other factors. As more peripheral votershave eluded interviewers in recent years, the sample becamemore saturated with self-reported voters, thus inflating reportedturnout.     

Hunting the Elusive Young Voter

Abstract

It is generally assumed that mobilizing young voters is infeasible. This belief can be broken into two separate questions: (1) Are young people responsive to Get Out The Vote appeals? (2) Is it possible to deliver the message to the intended audience? By pooling together the results of six GOTV field experiments, this paper demonstrates that young voters are equally responsive to blandishments to vote as mature voters, but that they are roughly three times more difficult to contact.     

Candidate Cues and Voter Confidence in American Elections

A primary objective of election administration is ensuring voter confidence. Logically, this entails meeting two conditions: procedures should insure that elections are fair and accurate, and voters should be aware of the procedures. Yet American election procedures such as ballot access and design, post-election audits and recounts, voter registration, and polling place operations are complex and highly decentralized. Given the complexity of the information environment and the relatively limited information most voters have about politics, what (if any) connection is there between election administration and voter confidence? We consider whether candidates fill the gap between election administration and voter confidence in elections. We test several hypotheses using an experimental design with multiple measures of voter confidence. The results show that candidates have a significant effect on voter confidence.