The German grand coalition of 2005–09 and party system change: Catalyst or continuity?

Two times in the last fifty years grand coalitions have altered traditionally bi-polar patterns of German electoral competition, changing the electoral context by making it difficult for voters to endorse anti-incumbent alternatives. How have voters reacted under these circumstances, and were their responses different because of the weakening of partisan attachments in the forty years between the two grand coalitions? This study explores these questions by examining voter behavior in German state elections under the federal grand coalitions of 1966–69 and 2005–09, comparing voters’ responses with long-term trends in German party system development. The second grand coalition saw a continuation of trends in declining turnout and increasing electoral volatility, but in contrast to the first grand coalition there was no surge in support for far-right parties. Such a change may be the result of differences between the party systems in the two period, with voters in unified Germany having many more options for expressing discontent.     

Identifying Irregularities in Mexican Local Elections

A generalized distrust in Mexican local elections raises the question of whether electoral corruption has vanished or remains a prevalent practice in the country. To answer this question, I analyze the 2010 gubernatorial elections, exploiting a feature of the country's electoral system: within each electoral precinct, voters are assigned to polling stations according to their childhood surname. Consequently, the only difference between voters in contiguous polling stations should be their last names. Given that political preferences are seldom correlated with voters' names, I use suspicious differences in turnout levels across contiguous polling stations to identify fraudulent practices. The findings of this article indicate that nondemocratic enclaves that actively obstruct the completion of Mexico's democratic transition still remain today.     

Who should be chef? The dynamics of valence evaluations across income groups during economic crises

In this paper, we investigate partisan rationalization in valence politics by trying to better specify the direct and indirect effects of the economy on government support. To do so, we examine how income levels moderate the influence of objective economic conditions on perceptions of which party is the best manager of the economy during a period of economic crisis, 2004–2010, in the United Kingdom. We find that low-income voters are more responsive in their assessments of the incumbent Labour government based on unemployment, as are high-income voters in terms of inflation. In addition, high-income voters tend to behave in a manner consistent with partisan rationalization, while low-income voters do not. These conclusions offer important implications for the effectiveness of electoral control of government policy, as well as the quality of representation.     

The effect of the choices available on voting behaviour: the two Japanese elections of 1993

Voters make their choices based on an interaction between their preferences and the options available. One cannot vote for a candidate or a party that is not running in one's district. Voting research has heretofore focused almost exclusively upon voter preferences, assuming that all the relevant options are available to all voters. In this paper, we seek to redress the balance somewhat by focusing on variation in the options available to voters in the 1993 Japanese general election. In that election, three new parties ran and were themselves a major issue in the campaign. Voters were asked to express themselves on the question, “should we break the mold of postwar politics by voting for a new party?” We demonstrate that electoral results and voting behavior both varied significantly between those electoral districts with, and those without, a new party option. There were, in effect, two elections in 1993, one in which voters chose between new and established parties and another in which voters chose from among the established parties only. We argue that one cannot assume that an electoral outcome reflects the “will of the people” without adding the important caveat, “given the available alternatives”.     

Racial attitudes & political cross-pressures in nationalized elections: The case of the Republican coalition in the Trump era

While scholars have found that Trump was able to capitalize on the racial attitudes of white voters, it is less clear how these racial attitudes influenced vote-choice across partisan and ideological cleavages in the electorate. It is also unclear whether racial attitudes affected voting at the congressional level or electoral outcomes at the aggregate level. Using a novel measure of racial attitudes at the subnational level and survey data, we make three clear findings: (1) Trump and Republican congressional candidates benefited from conservative racial attitudes both at the aggregate level and among white voters, (2) this electoral benefit for Republicans persisted during the 2018 midterm elections, and (3) the effect of attitudes on vote-choice did not significantly vary across partisan and ideological cleavages in the white electorate. Our findings suggest that, even during the era of highly nationalized and partisan elections, racial attitudes are still a mechanism by which Republicans can win significant electoral support among Democrats and relatively liberal voters in the white electorate. These findings have implications for the growing salience of race in the Republican electoral coalition.     

Government Performance and Political Accountability at Subnational Level: The Electoral Fate of Local Incumbents in Norway

Under which circumstances do voters turn against governing parties for their performance in office? This question forms the basis of the considerable research field often referred to as the ‘VP‐literature’, which seeks to explain support for governments as a function of economic and political outcomes. After thirty years and more than 200 studies the economic part of the VP‐function still remains much better explored than the political part. In addition, focus has almost solely been on the national level so far. The present study therefore sets out to bridge the gap between the VP‐literature and the field of coalition studies to examine the relevance of the VP‐function for local elections. The ambition is to arrive at a more satisfactory understanding of the political part of the model. Results from the two most recent Norwegian local elections, in 1995 and 1999, reveal that the electoral liability associated with office is almost three percentage points. The multivariate analysis then tests systematically under which economic and political conditions local incumbents suffer the most electorally. The rate of unemployment plays an important role in how the voters evaluate the incumbents, since each extra percentage point of unemployment translates into additional loss for the incumbents. The levels of local fees and charges and service coverage are also significant. Political characteristics are furthermore highly relevant, since the numerical status of the government is in fact one of the most important predictors of electoral success, the advantage enjoyed by minority cabinets over majority coalitions amounting to more than three percentage points of the popular vote. Other important political determinants of local electoral performance are one‐party status, national support and ideological closeness.     

The costs of electoral fraud: establishing the link between electoral integrity,winning an election,and satisfaction with democracy

Previous research has shown that voters’ perception of electoral fairness has an impact on their attitudes and behaviors. However, less research has attempted to link objective measurements of electoral integrity on voters’ attitudes about the democratic process. Drawing on data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the Quality of Elections Data, we investigate whether cross-national differences in electoral integrity have significant influences on citizens’ level of satisfaction with democracy. We hypothesize that higher levels of observed electoral fraud will have a negative impact on evaluations of the democratic process, and that this effect will be mediated by a respondent’s status as a winner or loser of an election. The article’s main finding is that high levels of electoral fraud are indeed linked to less satisfaction with democracy. However, we show that winning only matters in elections that are conducted in an impartial way. The moment elections start to display the telltale signs of manipulation and malpractice, winning and losing no longer have different effects on voter’s levels of satisfaction with democracy.     

Sympathy for the ‘devil’? Voting for populists in the 2006 and 2010 Dutch general elections

What motivations do voters have to vote for populist parties? How do their motivations differ from those of voters for mainstream parties? Analyzing new empirical material – the Dutch elections of 2006 and 2010 – we demonstrate that policy preferences, protest attitudes and evaluations of party leaders are important reasons to vote for populist parties. Yet only protest attitudes distinguish voters for populist parties from voters for mainstream parties; evaluations of party leaders turn out to be equally important for both. We theorize how protest attitudes and party leader evaluations overlap and employ an exploratory simulation technique to test this. We find that populist parties differ strongly from each other with regard to the specific patchwork of motivations of their voters.     

The Political Consequences of External Economic Shocks: Evidence from Poland

How do external economic shocks influence domestic politics? We argue that those materially exposed to the shock will display systematic differences in policy preferences and voting behavior compared to the unexposed, and political parties can exploit these circumstances. Empirically, we take advantage of the 2015 surprise revaluation of the Swiss franc to identify the Polish citizens with direct economic exposure to this exogenous event. Using an original survey fielded prior to the 2015 elections and an embedded survey experiment, we show that exposed individuals were more likely to demand government support and more likely to desert the government and vote for the largest opposition party, which was able to use the shock to expand its electoral coalition without alienating its core voters. Our article clarifies the connection between international shocks, voters’ policy preferences, partisan policy responses, and, ultimately, voting decisions.     

Moderate,extreme, or both? How voters respond to ideologically unpredictable candidates

Candidates and parties often face a choice between endorsing policies that appeal to their core constituencies or generate support from more diverse groups of voters. While the latter strategy may make overtures to a wider set of citizens, existing literature says little about how the overall mix of issue positions affects electoral support. We argue that candidates who endorse diverse sets of policy positions appear unpredictable to voters and incur subsequent electoral penalties. Using data from the 2006 congressional elections, we find that ideological predictability substantially increases electoral support at both the individual and aggregate levels and that voters perceive greater ideological congruence from more predictable candidates. Our results have important implications for candidate and party strategies and suggest that voters are responsive to the mean and the variance of candidates’ policy stances.     

Revitalizing the United States‐Japanese alliance

Abstract

While the notion that subjective economic perceptions as well as objective economic conditions affect electoral outcomes has long been explored in advanced democracies and new democracies, evidence of the link between the economy and elections has been rarely found in East Asian countries. As economic issues have become salient since the 1997 financial crisis, political leaders’ capacity to manage the economy has become one of the most important criteria in electoral choice in East Asia. This paper examines how economic issues influenced the results of the 2007 presidential election in South Korea. By making use of the 2007 Presidential Election Panel Study, this study examines the continuity of and changes in the Korean voters’ electoral behavior. This study describes the political situation in the post-1997 financial crisis period under two liberal governments in Korea and introduces the processes and characteristics of electoral campaigns in the 2007 presidential election. This paper then explores the link between the economy and vote choice, focusing on whether economic issues were salient among the electorate, whether retrospective or prospective economic voting was prevalent among Koreans, and how the voters supported Lee Myung Bak across age groups, regions, and parties in the 2007 presidential election.     

International Constraints and Electoral Decisions: Does the Room to Maneuver Attenuate Economic Voting?

Prominent studies of electoral accountability and economic voting suggest that government constraints and international financial structures decrease the economic vote. The proposed mechanism is often labeled as the “room to maneuver,” and it posits that because elected officials have limited space to propose and implement economic policy, politicians can shirk responsibility, and thus voters are less likely to place voting weights on the economy. However, results from elections that took place in Europe during the Great Recession and scholarly research on economic voting in these elections cast serious doubts on the causal mechanism. This article directly tests this mechanism with a survey experiment using data from Greece (the country most affected by the debt crisis). The results suggest that although the economic vote is strong and substantive, its size does not vary across the room to maneuver treatments. This finding informs the literature on economic voting and carries out important implications for party strategies with respect to exogenous policy impositions and their electoral effects.     

European ruling parties’ electoral strategies and overseas enfranchisement policies

Emigrants’ ideologies and partisan attitudes may diverge from other voters’: overseas voters are ideologically self-selected, receive distinctive information about campaigns and have experiences abroad that are likely to shape their political views. Parties, anticipating these emigrant attitudes, can manipulate overseas voting availability to give the vote primarily to their own supporters. Alternatively, parties may expect newly enfranchised voters to provide electoral support in gratitude for the right to vote. To distinguish these separate processes, this project undertakes a case study of Turkey to trace a ruling party's strategic expectations as it makes overseas-enfranchisement decisions. To see how generalisable these results are, the study further extends to a statistical analysis of differences in vote choice between voters at home and abroad across all 23 European countries that report overseas votes separately, using an original dataset encompassing 121 elections. Both the case study and the statistical analysis suggest that emigrant-enfranchising parties tend to garner overseas voters’ support in a lasting way. This suggests that overseas enfranchisement most often appears to involve incumbent parties (correctly) expecting long-term ideological compatibility with their overseas nationals, not simply exchanging the franchise for short-term, transactional support.     

Distinguishing between the effects of swing ratio and bias on outcomes in the US Electoral College, 1900–1992

We review a number of different statistical techniques for creating seats-votes curves and apply the most reliable of these to estimate seats-votes relationships in the US electoral college 1900–1992. We consider the now rejected claim, once firmly established as part of the common journalistic and even academic wisdom, that the US Electoral College has recently been strongly biased in favor of Republicans, and show that this claim was based largely on a confusion between bias (asymmetry in the electoral college gains earned by the votes received by different parties or candidates) and swing ratio (responsiveness of change in electoral college seat share to change in popular vote). Although there has been substantial bias during this century in the way the electoral college translates Democratic and Republican votes into electoral college seats, and for the earlier party of this century (from 1900 to 1940) that bias has been in favor of Republicans, to explain why many recent electoral college majorities have been so lopsided we must look not at bias but at swing ratio.We show that the swing ratio in the electoral college has generally been increasing since 1900, rising from an average value (1900–1924) around three to an average value (1976–1992) ranging from about five to about eight, depending upon which of the various statistical estimation techniques we use. Thus, for every one point vote share gain above 50 per cent, a winning presidential candidate in a two-candidate competition can now expect to pick up somewhere between a 5 percentage point and an 8 percentage point increase in electoral college seats—giving the illusion of mandate even for relatively close contests and frequently creating apparent landslides. We show that this historical rise in swing ratio in presidential elections is due almost entirely to changes in the responsiveness of outcomes in the US South as the influence of the Civil War slowly (very slowly) erodes. Drawing on the analysis of the determinants of bias and of swing ratio in the House of Representatives in Brady and Grofman (1991b), we show that the increases in electoral college swing can be accounted for by the nationalization of presidential competition as signaled by the decrease over time in the standard deviation of Democratic share of the two-party vote across states, and that changes in bias can be linked to changes in the magnitude of differences between the mean and the median of that distribution.     

Elections and Activist Coalitions in the United States

Formal models of voting have emphasizd the mean voter theorem , that all parties should rationally adopt identical positions at the electoral mean. The lack of evidence for this assertion is a paradox or contradiction in need of resolution. This article attempts to resolve this paradox by considering an electoral model that includes "valence" or nonpolicy judgements by voters of party leaders. The theorem is used to suggest that Republican success depends on balancing the opposed demands of economic and social conservatives. Democrat success in future elections resides in overcoming the policy demands of economic liberals and gaining support from cosmopolitans—the socially liberal but economically conservative potential supporters of the party .     

Does fraud trump partisanship? The impact of contentious elections on voter confidence

Fraudulent elections can reduce citizen trust in elections and other political institutions. But what about the impact of contentious elections that resolve successfully, leading to democratizing change? Do national movements toward democracy trump individual experiences with electoral manipulation? Using public opinion survey data collected before and after the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, we evaluate changes in voter confidence in electoral practices, political institutions, and democracy. Although national trends show increased voter confidence overall, subnational variation suggests pervasive partisan differences in opinions about election quality and institutional confidence. Remarkably, we find that direct exposure to fraud matters far less than anticipated; voters who were personally exposed to fraud felt no more or less confident than their co-partisans. We show that partisanship and the national electoral context may interact in ways that complicate the effects of democratizing elections, suggesting important avenues for future research.     

Kinder an die Macht?

In order to illuminate the consequences of extra votes for parents, this article looks at the questions of whether parents differ in their party choice from younger people and of what the overall results would have been like for German Bundestag elections in 1994–2005. The results can be summarised as follows: (1) In simple comparisons, parents and childless people have not differed a lot in their party preferences since the first half of the 1990s. However, a more complex analysis of the 2005 elections brought to light systematic differences that are contingent on voters’ age and on their region. (2) The aggregate results of the 1994 to 2005 elections would have looked very much the same. Thus, no party would profit per se in electoral terms from the introduction of the proxy vote for children.     

Voting for extreme right parties in Israel: Evidence from the 2009 elections

In recent years, extreme right parties have received considerable electoral support in Europe. Accordingly, many scholars have examined the factors attracting voters in many Western democracies to extreme right parties. In this study, we sought to determine what factors are responsible for the support of extreme right parties in Israel. Using Israel National Election Studies micro-data for the 2009 elections, we found evidence that political dissatisfaction and security issues significantly contribute to support for extreme right parties. In contrast to other countries where economic issues are more salient, our results suggest that economic views do not significantly explain one's support for extreme right parties.     

Female representation and electoral clientelism: New insights from South African municipal electionss

Do citizens experience less electoral clientelism in polities with more elected female representatives? The current literature is remarkably silent on the role of gender and female political representation for electoral clientelism. Due to gender differences in issue priorities, targeted constituent groups, networks and resources, we argue that voters experience less clientelism in municipalities with a higher proportion of female politicians because either female politicians are likely to engage less in clientelism or women are less likely to be viable candidates in more clientelist settings. Through either mechanism, we expect all voters – and female voters in particular – to experience less exposure to clientelism in municipalities with higher female representation. We examine this idea using survey data from the 2016 municipal elections in South Africa – a country with high levels of female representation in politics but increasing problems of corruption and patronage in the political system. Our findings are consistent with the argument that municipalities with more elected female councilors have considerably lower rates of electoral clientelism and that this mostly affects whether female voters are targeted by clientelist distribution. These findings shed new light on how women's representation in elected political office shapes the incidence and use of clientelist distribution during elections.     

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.