Concurrent Elections and Voter Turnout: The Effect of the De-linking of State Elections on Electoral Participation in India's Parliamentary Polls, 1971–2004

This article examines the effect that the decoupling of state and national elections has had on voter turnout in India's national parliamentary polls since 1971. According to conventional wisdom in the comparative literature on electoral turnout, separate elections to multiple levels and/or branches of government should depress turnout relative to co-temporal polls, ceteris paribus . The evidence from Indian elections provides strong confirmation for this hypothesis. This suggests that political decentralization through separate national and local elections may actually weaken citizens' incentives to participate in the democratic electoral process.     

The contingent effect of institutions: Electoral formulas,ethnic polarization,and election quality

This paper builds on existing studies linking formal electoral institutions to democracy. It reveals that there is an interactive effect between the electoral formula and the levels of ethnic polarization that systematically influences the quality of elections and the probability of government turnover. Proportional representation is associated with better elections and more frequent government turnover than single-member district majority formulas in ethnically polarized countries. However, the opposite is true when ethno-cultural groups are not numerous or polarized. This study contributes to the existing literature on formal political institutions by presenting evidence that the electoral formula's impact on governance is contingent on the context in which such institutions operate.     

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.     

Do opportunistic snap elections affect political trust? Evidence from a natural experiment

Snap elections, those triggered by incumbents in advance of their original date in the electoral calendar, are a common feature of parliamentary democracies. In this paper, I ask: do snap elections influence citizens’ trust in the government? Theoretically, I argue that providing citizens with an additional means of endorsing or rejecting the incumbent – giving voters a chance to ‘have their say’ – can be interpreted by citizens as normatively desirable and demonstrative of the incumbent's desire to legitimise their agenda by (re)-invigorating their political mandate. Leveraging the quasi-experimental setting provided by the coincidental timing of the UK Prime Minister, Theresa May's, shock announcement of early elections in April 2017 with the fieldwork for the Eurobarometer survey, I demonstrate that the announcement of snap elections had a sizeable and significant positive effect on political trust. This trust-inducing effect is at odds with the observed electoral consequences of the 2017 snap elections. Whilst incumbent-triggered elections can facilitate net gains for the sitting government, May's 2017 gamble cost the Conservative Party their majority. Snap elections did increase political trust. These trust-inducing effects were not observed symmetrically for all citizens. Whilst Eurosceptics and voters on the right of the ideological spectrum – those most inclined to support the incumbent May-led Conservative government in 2017 – became more trusting, no such changes in trust were observed amongst left-wing or non-Eurosceptic respondents. This study advances the understanding of a relatively understudied yet not uncommon political phenomenon, providing causal evidence that snap elections have implications for political trust.     

Decentralization in the Czech Republic: The European Union, Political Parties, and the Creation of Regional Assemblies

This study begins with an exploration of the external (EuropeanUnion) and internal (Czech political parties) forces that shapedthe creation of regional assemblies in the Czech Republic. Theinstitutional and administrative requirements of EU regionalpolicy served as a catalyst for the creation of Czech regionalgovernments. Domestic struggles over decentralization, particularlyamong Czech political parties, are reflected in the number andboundaries of the regions as well as in the slow transfer ofpolicy competences from the national government to regionalgovernments. This study also examines the November 2000 regionalelections and places the results in the context of the 2002parliamentary elections. Party support clustered by region,but the position that parties took on the creation of regionalassemblies did not impact electoral success in the regionalelections, nor did party success or failure in the regionalelections forecast electoral fortunes in the parliamentary elections.The regional and national elections reflected low voter turnout,relatively strong support for the Communist party, and a dramaticrise and fall of party coalitions.     

Manufactured Responsiveness: The Impact of State Electoral Laws on Unified Party Control of the Presidency and House of Representatives, 1840–1940

The modern history of divided government in America suggests that the framers succeeded in creating a government unresponsive to popular passions. Yet in the nineteenth century the party winning the presidency almost always captured control of the House of Representatives. Why and how could nineteenth century national elections be so responsive that they resemble parliamentary outcomes? We identify electoral institutions present in the states that directly linked congressional elections to presidential coattails. Specifically, we estimate the impact of state ballot laws and the strategic design of congressional districts on presidential coattail voting from 1840 to 1940. We find that presidential elections, as mediated by state electoral laws, strongly account for unified party control of the House and the presidency throughout the nineteenth century.     

Are elections in autocracies a curse for incumbents? Evidence from Chinese villages

Are elections in autocracies a curse for incumbents? Using panel data from village elections in China, the OLS regression shows that introducing competitive elections has a relatively small effect on the removal of autocratic incumbents. However, the effect becomes much larger when the endogenous timing is instrumented with the passage of provincial election laws and village-specific election cycles. Additional evidence also suggests that removing incumbents through competitive elections enhances local governance. I interpret these results as suggesting that political selection matters in electoral autocracies.     

Coattails and spillover-effects: Quasi-experimental evidence from concurrent executive and legislative elections

Concurrent elections are widely used to increase turnout. We theorize and show empirically how concurrency affects electoral outcomes. First, concurrency increases turnout and thereby the participation of peripheral voters. Second, in combined elections, one electoral arena affects the other. In our case of majoritarian executive elections concurrent to proportional representation (PR) legislative elections, the centripetal tendency of majoritarian elections colors off to the concurrent PR race. Third, concurrency also entails spillovers of the incumbency advantage of executive officeholders to the concurrent legislative race. Drawing on quasi-random variation in local election timing in Germany, we show that concurrency increases turnout as well as council votes for the incumbent mayor's party and centrist parties more generally, with slightly more pronounced gains for the political left. As a consequence, concurrent elections consolidate party systems and political power by leading to less fragmented municipal councils and more unified local governments.     

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.     

Conflict and Identity: Explaining Turnout and Anti-integrationist Voting in the Danish 2004 Elections for the European Parliament

This article investigates electoral participation and the antecedents of anti-integrationist voting (AIV) in the Danish 2004 European parliamentary elections. First, it focuses on the effects of the campaign and assesses the importance of social demographics and political predispositions vis-à-vis mediated and interpersonal communication on turnout. Second, it investigates AIV, focusing on 'hard' utilitarian predictors and 'soft' cultural predictors. It draws on the European Election Study (EES) post-electoral voter survey and a media content analysis of the most important news media outlets. Its findings corroborate previous research on political participation and shows significant positive effects of interpersonal political discussion and exposure to news media that portrayed the European elections as a conflict-laden contest on turnout. The analysis of AIV highlights the importance of proxies (lack of trust and dissatisfaction with the incumbent government) and political ideology, but also feelings of identity. The latter provides evidence from the Danish context in support of an emerging body of literature emphasizing 'soft' explanations of euroscepticism.     

Explaining Split-Ticket Voting at the 1979 and 1997 General and Local Elections in England

Only in 1979, 1997 and 2001 have British general elections coincided with the annual local government elections. Uniquely, this study uses both survey and aggregate data to examine aspects of split-ticket voting at the simultaneous elections in 1979 and 1997. Through the use of bi- and multi-variate analysis, it suggests that ticket-splitting is a product of both voter attitudes and party strategies: although it is almost wholly confined to the less partisan, the electoral context in which those votes are being cast can play an additional and significant role in stimulating such behaviour.     

Electoral misgovernance cycles: evidence from wildfires and tax evasion in Greece

We present detailed empirical evidence from Greece that around elections, misgovernance results in significant increases in wildfires and tax evasion and has important economic implications: these effects have led to the destruction of property or loss of government revenue estimated at 8 % of GDP. There are two plausible reasons why misgovernance might intensify around elections: (i) attention and effort of elected officials is directed to campaigning instead of governing; and (ii) the misgovernance may benefit special interests and serve as a pork barrel transfer that is hard to monitor or control. Empirically, we find that redistributive politics are likely a dominant cause of electoral misgovernance. In the case of wildfires we also find evidence that political competition tends to increase electoral misgovernance; furthermore, electoral misgovernance helps incumbents get reelected. While misgovernance may manifest differently among countries, our analysis suggests that electoral cycles everywhere may be much more multifaceted and harmful than previous literature suggests.     

新中国选举制度六十年发展的回顾与思考

新中国共颁布了两部选举法。其中第二部选举法经历了四次修改、一次补充。建国60年来,我国的选举制度取得了重大进展：享有选举权的主体从有限发展到普遍;选举权的平等性从着眼于实质平等逐渐向统一实质与形式平等方向发展;从记名投票发展到无记名投票;直接选举范围从基层扩大到县级,并逐步向高层迈进;从等额选举发展到差额选举。但选举制度还存在一些问题,需要进一步进行完善,以有力地促进民主政治建设。     

Political budget cycles and election outcomes

This paper addresses two empirical questions. Is fiscal policy affected by upcoming elections? If so, do election-motivated fiscal policies enhance the probability of re-election of the incumbent? Employing data for 65 democratic countries over 1975–2005 in a semi-pooled panel model, we find that in most countries fiscal policy is hardly affected by elections. The countries for which we find a significant political budget cycle are very diverse. They include ‘young’ democracies but also ‘established’ democracies. In countries with a political budget cycle, election-motivated fiscal policies have a significant positive (but fairly small) effect on the electoral support for the political parties in government.     

An exploratory case study focusing on the creation,and development of a new political brand: The case of Aam Aadmi Party

In the backdrop of India's rising prominence in BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), understanding of its political environment, electoral competition, and constituent parties with their political ideologies contesting to form government attracts immense interest from the researchers in political science, political marketing, and public policy. Although literatures in political marketing are more than two decades mostly carried out in developed democratic systems like the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, India as a posttransition democracy received relatively less attention. The article has been conceptualized in the context of 2014 Indian general elections Lok Sabha 2014 as an attempt to study application of political marketing principles in a cross‐cultural democracy. The author has probed the emergence of new political party Aam Aadmi Party riding on the success of Janlokpal (civil society movement), the marketing approach used by Aam Aadmi Party, essentially positioning and branding strategies, during the national elections and party institutionalization. Research strategy followed secondary research of published data for examining the new party creation from a marketing perspective.     

The electoral benefits of environmental position-taking: Floods and electoral outcomes in England 2010–2019

The global increase in extreme weather events in recent years has spurred political scientists to examine the potential political effects of such phenomena. This paper explores effect of flooding on electoral outcomes and offers evidence that the impact of adverse events varies with changes in political context. Using a difference-in-differences identification strategy to analyse three consecutive general elections in the United Kingdom (2015, 2017 and 2019), the paper finds variability in partisan electoral benefit from one election to the next that calls into question the blind retrospection and rally-round-the-leader explanations which are often advanced to account for electoral reactions to natural disasters. Instead, changing party positions on environmental issues appear to account more convincingly for shifts in electoral support in response to flooding. This suggests that parties can derive benefit from, or be punished for, the positions they take on environmental issues when extreme weather events affect citizens.     

Federal Political Fragmentation in Mexico's 2015 Elections

The 2015 congressional, gubernatorial and mayoral elections in Mexico display the continuation of political changes that started 15 years ago. The most notorious change in 2015 is the electoral success of non-mainstream parties, which have increased their vote share vis-à-vis the mainstream parties, the Party of National Action (PAN), the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI), and the Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD). These mainstream parties lost important vote shares, although the PRI has shown itself to be more resilient to electoral volatility than the other parties. The increase of volatility in Mexico favours the alternation of the parties in power; however, it also increases political fragmentation. This article argues that in a context of growing electoral volatility and political fragmentation, presidential authority is weakened, giving rise to the dispersion of power to other levels of government. Furthermore, the article suggests that party volatility presents important territorial variation in Mexico.     

Economic voting: The effect of political context, volatility and turnout on voters' assignment of responsibility

Abstract.  This study analyses macroeconomic conditions and the electoral fortune of incumbents in 21 parliamentary Western countries between 1950 and 1997 in 266 national elections. Voters' assignment of responsibility for the state of the national economy is assumed to vary according to the context of the election. Building on previous research, the importance of the political context – clarity of responsibility and availability of alternatives – is analysed. The study also breaks new ground by introducing two new contexts of importance: volatility, seen from a systemic perspective, and the trend in turnout. The contextual hypothesis is confirmed. The universal economic effect as such is very weak indeed. However, given a favourable political and institutional environment (clear responsibility structure and availability of alternatives), an economic effect appears. Tests including the new contexts created on the basis of behavioural patterns in the electorate (system volatility and turnout trend) identify elections where the economic effects are even stronger.     

Electoral incentives and distributive politics in young democracies: Evidence from Chile

How do electoral incentives and institutional constraints vary as democracies consolidate? Are incumbents more inclined to behave opportunistically during transitions, or when the rules of the game are well established? Using Chile as a case study and exploiting panel data on public works investment at the municipal level, the article examines if the strategies to obtain electoral rewards have changed over time. From the first democratic elections and until the constitutional reforms of 2005, those municipalities where the coalition government won in national and local elections were systematically privileged before municipal polls. After the reforms, we find no sign of partisan preference but investment kept on rising during ballot years, indicative of the persistence of political budget cycles. Indeed, we identify stronger cycles as democracy was consolidated. The article concludes discussing the role played by institutional constraints and incentives shaping distributive politics.     

Neighborhood heterogeneity and electoral turnout

We perform an empirical analysis to investigate how neighborhood heterogeneity affects electoral turnout. To this end, we rely on a unique dataset on local elections in an Italian municipality, which merges information on socio-economic characteristics of about 370.000 individuals with turnout data for 434 electoral precincts in 2004 and 2009. Exploiting both across and within precincts variation, we are able to disentangle the contextual effects on precinct-level electoral turnout of two different dimensions of neighborhood heterogeneity: income inequality and ethnic composition. Our results support the idea that contextual heterogeneity negatively affects political participation.