Voters in a multi-member constituency: The 1977 Auckland election

Voters in multi-member constituencies typical of local government elections must decide how to allocate the votes at their disposal. The secrecy of the ballot has hitherto prevented study of how these preferences are distributed or of the composition of the vote received by individual candidates.Access was gained via a computer printout to the actual behaviour of voters in a five member constituency of the Auckland Regional Authority (New Zealand) in the 1977 local elections. It was contested by two full tickets and three distinctive independents.A computer programme which scanned over 12,000 combinations enabled the vote to be analysed for partisan and other forms of voting. It revealed that 80 per cent of voters were essentially partisan, 62 per cent being Citizens and 37 per cent Labour inclined. However, there was widespread refusal to vote the full ticket, but the ‘spare’ votes were given to independents rather than the opposition.There was little sign of feminist or alphabetical voting, but a weak local notables vote may have existed. The successful candidates depended less on their own partisan supporters.     

The turnout ‘gap’ and the costs of voting – a comparison of participation at the 2001 general and 2002 local elections in England

Evidence from both sample surveys and the marked electoral registers is used to compare the participation of individual electors at the 2001 general election and the 2002 local elections in England. In those cases where conventional electoral procedures have been retained, there is a continuing gap between local and general election turnout. Those who vote at both types of election tend to have a sharper sense of civic duty and/or an incentive to vote based on the benefits perceived to be likely to accrue from the outcome of the local contest. However, in those places where the costs of participation are reduced through the introduction of all-postal voting, the turnout gap disappears as does the distinctive character of those who vote in local elections. In each case the findings support a rational choice model of participation with respondents weighing the benefits and costs of voting in the context of their own sense of duty.     

Local campaign activity and voting

Two types of data are used to address separate but related questions about the 2011 referendum on the parliamentary voting system. First, a survey of individual candidates at the coincident local government elections examines the extent to which local campaigning was used by the parties (as surrogates for the 'Yes' and 'No' camps) to provide information and decision cues to electors. Second, aggregate data at local authority-level compares participation in and voting preferences at the two electoral events. The combination of evidence suggests that while having coincident local elections helped to boost turnout in the referendum, the impact of local-level campaigning on the referendum outcome was marginal at best.     

Research Note: Measuring the Level and Direction of Split-ticket Voting at the 1979 and 1997 British General and Local Elections: a Survey-based Analysis

Only in 1979 and 1997 have British general elections coincided with the annual local government electoral contests. This research note uses both survey and aggregate data to provide new estimates of the extent of split-ticket voting in England at those two elections, and to compare similarities and differences between them. It appears that no fewer than one in six of those electors who voted for one of the three major parties in both contests made a different choice at national as opposed to local level. The fact that the proportion of those splitting their vote in this way was so similar in 1979 and 1997 may surprise those expecting the phenomenon to have grown as part of a general process of partisan dealignment. Rather it appears that changing patterns of contestation between 1979 and 1997, especially at local level, may be better able to account for those variations observed.     

Electronic Voting in Belgium: A Legitimised Choice?

Computer voting was introduced in Belgium in 1994. Paradoxically, no action had been taken to ascertain the opinion of electors confronted with this original method of voting. This article verifies the social and empirical dimensions of legitimacy of this new method through several empirical indicators used in a survey conducted on the occasion of the federal elections of 18 May 2003: (a) how easy/difficult it was for electors to vote on a computer; (b) to what extent they trust voting on a computer; (c) if they have a philosophical/social opposition to voting on a computer.     

Feelings about party leaders as a voter's heuristic – what happens when the leaders change? A note

Recent analyses of voting at British general elections deploy a valence theory according to which electors evaluate each party's performance and policies and vote accordingly. Many voters, however, avoid at least some of the effort involved in assembling and assessing information about parties' policies and instead use heuristics such as their feelings about the party leaders as major determinants of their decisions. When party leaders are changed, therefore, differences in voters' feelings about predecessor and successor could lead to changes in party choice. That argument is tested for the 2015 and 2017 British general elections in England, between which all three largest parties changed their leader, with results entirely consistent with the argument. In addition, there were significant changes in feelings about the new party leaders during the six weeks of the 2017 campaign, and these too were linked to final voting choices in the expected directions.     

An integrated perspective on the three potential sources of partisan bias: Malapportionment, turnout differences, and the geographic distribution of party vote shares

Partisan bias refers to an asymmetry in the way party vote share is translated into seats, i.e., a situation where some parties are able to win a given share of seats with a lesser (share of the) vote than is true for other parties. Any districted system is potentially subject to partisan biases. We show that there are three potential sources of partisan bias: (1) differences in the nature of the vote shares of the winning candidates of different parties that give rise to differences in the proportion of each party's votes that come to be ‘wasted’—differences which arise because of the nature of the geographic distribution of partisan support; (2) turnout rate differences across districts that are linked to the partisan vote shares in those districts, such that certain parties are more likely to have ‘cheap seats’ vis-à-vis turnout; and (3) malapportionment. In the context of two-party competition over single-member districts we provide a simple formulation to calculate the independent effect of each of these three factors. We illustrate our analysis with a calculation of the magnitude and direction of effects of the three determinants of partisan bias in elections to the US House and the US Senate in 1984, 1986 and 1988; then we consider how to extend the approach to a system with a mix of single- and multi-member districts or to a weighted voting system such as the US electoral college. We then apply the method to calculate the nature and sources of partisan bias in the 1984 and 1988 US presidential elections.     

Electoral volatility: Issue effects and basic change in 23 post-war democracies

Growing differences between party votes in successive elections have raised the possibility that party systems are undergoing fundamental change. This cannot be settled until aggregate vote differences are separated into those normally produced by new issues and candidates, and those reflecting an erosion of core support. A saliency theory of party competition and electoral response is used to quantify net shifts in voting produced by issues identified on the basis of campaign reports. Estimates are validated by comparison with others produced on different assumptions and through their success in predicting election results in ten countries. By ‘controlling’ these issue effects we can estimate Basic Votes for each party and election and see whether they have changed.     

If you like the alternative vote (a.k.a. the instant runoff), then you ought to know about the Coombs rule

We consider four factors relevant to picking a voting rule to be used to select a single candidate from among a set of choices: (1) avoidance of Condorcet losers, (2) choice of Condorcet winners, (3) resistance to manipulability via strategic voting, (4) simplicity. However, we do not try to evaluate all voting rules that might be used to select a single alternative. Rather, our focus is restricted to a comparison between a rule which, under the name ‘instant runoff,’ has recently been pushed by electoral reformers in the US to replace plurality-based elections, and which has been advocated for use in plural societies as a means of mitigating ethnic conflict; and another similar rule, the ‘Coombs rule.’ In both rules, voters are required to rank order candidates. Using the instant runoff, the candidate with the fewest first place votes is eliminated; while under the Coombs rule, the candidate with the most last place votes is eliminated. The instant runoff is familiar to electoral system specialists under the name ‘alternative vote’ (i.e., the single transferable vote restricted to choice of a single candidate). The Coombs rule has gone virtually unmentioned in the electoral systems literature (see, however, Chamberlin et al., 1984). Rather than considering the properties of these two rules in the abstract, we evaluate them in the politically realistic situations where voters are posited to have (at least on balance) single-peaked preferences over alternatives. Evaluating the two rules under this assumption, we argue that the Coombs rule is directly comparable in that Coombs is always as good as AV with respect to two of our four criteria and it is clearly superior to AV with respect to one of the four criteria, namely criterion (2), and is potentially inferior only with respect to criterion (3). Key to this argument are two new propositions. The first new result shows that, under the posited assumption, for four alternatives or fewer, AV is always as likely or more likely to select the Condorcet winner than plurality. The second new result shows that, under the same assumptions, the Coombs rule will always select the Condorcet winner regardless of the number of alternatives.     

Presidential elections in Finland: A plea for approval voting

The Finnish President is elected by an indirect method-the people elect special electors who carry out the final election. A proposal for a reform aiming at direct elections is, however, presently being considered. This paper agrees with this proposal and suggests that approval voting is a proper method for direct elections. Several properties of the approval voting system are discussed and the method is demonstrated to be superior to the plurality runoff method in presidential elections. It is argued that the approval voting system chooses a candidate who has overall support in the electorate and that the system therefore promotes the position of the President as a neutral and moderating political force.     

Between first and second order: A comparison of voting behaviour in European and local elections in Britain

Abstract. In Britain, both local elections and European elections can be regarded as second–order. However, voters believe that even less is at stake in European elections than in local elections, and their behaviour is congruent with this: voters are more likely to turn out in local elections, they are more likely to 'split their ticket' they are more likely to report that they vote on issues specific to the second–order arena. Logistic regression of party choices in the local, European and national contexts confirms this. National considerations played less part in the local election and there was some evidence that voters were influenced by the record of the locally–incumbent party. It appears that voting in the European elections has more of an expressive character, and is less instrumental than that in either local or national elections.     

Party-related primacy effects in proportional representation systems: evidence from a natural experiment in Polish local elections

We study the primacy effects that occur when voters cast their votes because a candidate or party is listed first on a ballot. In the elections that we analyzed, there are three potential types of such effects that might occur when voters vote for (1) the first candidate listed on the ballot in single-member district (SMD) elections (candidate primacy); (2) the first party listed on the ballot in open-list proportional representation (OLPR) elections (party primacy); or (3) the first candidate on a party list in OLPR elections (list primacy). We estimated the party primacy effect (2) and established that there was no interaction between (2) and (3). A party primacy effect is especially difficult to estimate because parties’ positions on ballots are typically fixed in all multi-member districts (MMDs) and it is impossible to separate the first-position “bonus” from a party’s normal electoral performance. A rare natural experiment allowed us to estimate the primacy party bonus between 6.02 and 8.52% of all votes cast for the 2014 Polish local elections. We attribute the large size of such bonus to the great complexity of voting in the OLPR elections, especially the much longer ballots, voting in many simultaneous elections, and ballot design as a booklet rather than a sheet.

     

Explaining the ‘quiet earthquake’: voting behaviour in the first election to the National Assembly for Wales

This paper examines voting behaviour in the inaugural election to the National Assembly for Wales (NAW), held in May 1999. We address two questions: (i) why did the election produce a ‘quiet earthquake’ in Welsh electoral politics, with the nationalist Plaid Cymru denying the Labour party their expected majority in the Assembly?; and (ii) what broader lessons does this case-study offer for the study of elections in the UK under devolution? Drawing on data from the Welsh National Assembly Election Study, we find that while some features of second-order election theories, such as lower turnout and a lower vote share for the governing party were manifest, contrary to the predictions of such theories the surge in electoral support for Plaid was largely prompted by Welsh-specific factors rather than UK-wide ones. The findings are argued to indicate limits to the applicability of second-order approaches to the study of devolved elections in the UK.     

Non-competitive elections and national politics: The USSR Supreme Soviet elections of 1984

Elections to the ‘eleventh convocation’ of the USSR Supreme Soviet took place on 4 March 1984. The process by which the elections took place is examined in detail, from the calling of the election on 16 December 1983, through the nomination, approval and registration of the candidates, to the pre-election meetings with constituents and the poll itself. The level of turnout (99.99 per cent) and the vote in favour of the single list of candidates (99.94 and 99.95 per cent respectively for the two chambers) were in each case the highest in Soviet history; they must, however, be adjusted for the use of ‘absentee certificates’ and an apparent increase in the number of citizens not recorded on the electoral register. Elections without choice, as in the USSR. are not necessarily elections without political significance. Soviet elections appear in fact to perform at least three important functions: legitimation; political communication between regime and citizenry; and political mobilization and socialization. Given the increasing economic difficulties they are likely to face in the later 1980s and beyond, the Soviet authorities may be expected to make even more use of such mechanisms in the future in order to secure acceptance of their decisions without resort to overtly coercive means.     

A ‘whole system’ approach to the choice of electoral rules in democratizing countries:: Senegal in comparative perspective

Authoritarian incumbents in democratizing countries choose electoral rules to retain power while accommodating opposition demands for increased participation and representation. We clarify the political logic of this institutional choice and its consequences in Senegal by employing a ‘whole system’ approach that emphasizes the intricate but often hidden relationships between elections and the rules governing them at multiple levels — presidential, legislative and local. Success at one level depends on performance at all levels. In the short run, multiple-level electoral reforms preserve the ruling party in power while expanding opportunities for, but also fragmenting, the opposition. In the long run, they encourage splits within the ruling party and help the opposition develop increased ability to coalesce around a single opposition candidate, resulting in the defeat of the authoritarian incumbent and a democratic transfer of power through competitive elections.     

Deducing preferences and choices in the 1980 presidential election

A rational-choice model of voting behavior provides a framework for statistically estimating the numbers of voters who had each of twelve possible strict and nonstrict preference orders for the three major candidates in the 1980 presidential election. These estimates, based upon explicit assumptions about voting behavior, lead to a number of deductions not obtained in previous studies that have defined rationality in terms of ‘issue voting’. Among other results, John Anderson is found to have both first-place and residual support far in excess of his popular-vote showing, from which it is inferred that he would have seriously challenged the major-party candidates under approval voting. Yet, there is not strong evidence that voter's preferences were single-peaked, with Anderson perceived as the candidate in the middle on a left-right ideological scale.     

Random votes under compulsory voting: Evidence from Brazil

Compulsory voting is known for boosting electoral turnout, even when sanctions for abstaining are small or loosely enforced. Much less is known, however, about the consequences of compulsory voting on vote choice, and, in particular, about the quality of electoral decisions. In this paper, we explore the extent to which voters meaningfully engage in the electoral process or simply vote randomly because voting is required by law. We conducted a large online survey in Brazil during the 2018 national elections to assess if voters engage in random voting. We evaluate random voting for low-profile, low-information elected offices (state and federal legislators) and others that receive greater media coverage (governor and president) and evaluate the determinants of random voting for each of them. We find that: 1) random voting does not appear to be affected by social desirability bias; 2) there is substantial random voting under compulsory voting; 3) more voters tend to engage in random voting in low-profile, low-information elections, as compared to elections that receive greater media coverage; and, 4) interest in politics, education, and disposition to vote if voting were to be voluntary reduce random voting. Our findings carry important implications for the study of citizen participation and civic competence under compulsory voting and for democratic representation, more broadly.     

General election forecasting in Britain: A comparison of three simple models

The advent of three-party politics in Britain with the February 1974 general election has introduced an uncertainty into electoral and parliamentary politics unprecedented in the post-war period. In these circumstances, election forecasting has assumed a special interest and significance for academics, politicians, political commentators, and the like. This article presents and assesses the performance of three forecasting instruments, the ‘incremental’, ‘opinion polling’ and ‘economic’ models. They are estimated over the period 1951–1983 and are then used to predict the share of the vote won by the governing, opposition and Alliance parties in the 1987 general election. All are successful in the sense that they forecast the continuation of the Conservative party's electoral dominance. with Labour and the Alliance a poor second and third. Only the economic model, however, generates a reasonable forecast of the gap separating the major parties and it is used to predict the distribution of parliamentary seats between them. It is seen to be substantially more accurate for the government than for the opposition, which is itself a reflection of the uncertainty introduced into British politics by the emergence of a significant third party in recent elections.     

The December 1998 elections in Taiwan

The 5 December 1998 elections in Taiwan mark the first time that the national city mayoral elections and Legislative Yuan elections were held simultaneously. There was an increase in the number of candidates and seats for the Legislative Yuan election compared to the 1995 election; the Legislative Yuan sits for a three-year term. The mayoral elections in Taipei and Kaoshiung were the second direct popular elections featuring two well-known incumbents and two tough challengers vying for the four-year post. All Taiwanese elections in the 1990s were seen as referendums on the fate of the long-ruling Kuomintang, but many political commentators saw the 1999 elections as a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the presidential election in 2000.     

Electoral Competitiveness and the Voting Decision Evidence from the Pooled Senate Election Study

Scholarship on congressional elections holds that competitive elections are different from noncompetitive elections. Specifically, some scholars argue that the level of competitiveness determines the criteria or the weight of various criteria for the voting decision. Using the 1988–1990–1992 Pooled Senate Election Study, this research finds that enhanced electoral competitiveness increases the importance of assessments of presidential performance on the voting decision. These effects are particularly large for voters with high levels of educational attainment. Contrary to previous research, in highly competitive elections the role of ideological considerations is smaller than in less competitive elections.