Same Considerations,Different Decisions: Motivations for Split‐ticket Voting among Swedish Feminist Initiative Supporters

This article explores why supporters of small, non‐established parties choose to vote for different parties in the elections to the European Parliament (EP) and elections to the national parliament. It uses individual‐level data with open‐ended questions from an online survey on supporters of Feminist Initiative (Fi) – a comparatively small and new Swedish feminist party – to map voters’ own motivations for split‐ticket voting in the 2014 elections. Contrary to expectations based on second‐order election theory, it is found that voters ticket‐split in both directions: there are those voting for Fi in the EP election but not in the national election, and those voting for Fi in the national election but not in the EP election. These voters take the same types of considerations into account but nevertheless end up making opposite voting decisions. Voters clearly distinguish between the two levels – for example, by prioritizing different issues.     

Ethnic minority voters in the UK 2015 general election: A breakthrough for the Conservative party?

It was widely reported that the 2015 UK general election represented a breakthrough election for the Conservative party among ethnic minority voters – specifically that their vote share among minorities increased, and overtook that of Labour for the first time among some groups. I show that analysis using more representative data yields markedly different results. Looking at (i) party preference from 2010 to 2015, and (ii) reported vote shares from a nationally representative probability survey, I show that the Conservatives increased their support among Hindus - but the Labour party gained in support elsewhere. This is due to movement away from the Liberal Democrats, 2010 minority supporters of the Liberal Democrats moved to supporting Labour rather than the Conservatives in 2015 at a ratio of 2:1. There is also considerable individual-level volatility in party support among ethnic minorities, which is masked by a high level of stability at the aggregate level.     

The politics of disgruntlement: Nonvoting and defection among supporters of nomination losers, 1968–1984

This paper focuses on the effect of disgruntlement among those primary voters who supported U.S. presidential nomination losers. It analyzes the general election voting behavior of primary voters in the last five presidential elections in order to determine if differences exist between those supporters of the winning nominee in each party and backers of other candidates who also sought the nomination. A multivariate analysis of the determinants of voter turnout shows significant results only for the Democrats in 1972, when primary voters who supported candidates other than George McGovern were more likely to abstain in the general election. Taking into account the option of defecting to another party in November, both parties appear to have been plagued by a considerable amount of disloyalty on the part of supporters of candidates who failed to win the nomination, although for the Republicans this type of response is confined to the 1980 election. The existence of a third party or independent candidacy may be an important variable influencing the behavior of these disgruntled primary voters.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1984 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 30–September 2, 1984.     

Geographical redistribution with disproportional representation: a politico-economic model of Norwegian road projects

Politicians bias public policies to favor particular election districts. According to the traditional common pool model, districts facing low tax shares should receive relatively large government projects. We suggest a swing-voter model where the number of voters on the ideological cut point, lack of party identification and number of district representatives per voter determine project sizes. We analyze the allocation of state road investments in Norway from 1973–1997 exploiting unique data on characteristics of voters, legislative representation and tax prices in 19 election districts. Geographical representation to parliament is biased, mostly due to an ancient constitution. Shares of swing voters and legislative over-representation lead to higher levels of road investments, while high levels of party identification reduce investments.     

Why Is there So Little Strategic Voting in Canadian Plurality Rule Elections?

Using the 1988 Canadian Election Study I examine why there was only restricted strategic voting in single-member district plurality elections. In that election 19 percent of Canadian voters preferred the party that actually finished third in their constituency, but among these third party supporters only one in eight decided to vote strategically for one of the top two contenders. Strategic voting was relatively rare for two key reasons. First, many third party supporters had a strong preference for their party over all others and were therefore reluctant to rally to either of the top two contenders. Second, many overestimated their party's chance of winning and as a consequence did not feel that their vote would be wasted.     

Securing the base: electoral competition under variable turnout

I evaluate the ??Securing the Base?? strategy, which prescribes that candidates position themselves away from the political center in order to maximize turnout among their supporters and reduce defections of their supporters to third party candidates. My results support the notion that voters abstain due to indifference and imply that candidate positioning has a large effect on voter turnout and third party voting. Nonetheless, my results indicate that the candidates can best compete by adopting centrist positions. While a candidate can increase turnout among his supporters by moving away from the center, many moderate voters will defect to his opponent.     

‘Get Brexit Done’: The New Political Divides of England and Wales at the 2019 Election

This article analyses the successful Conservative election campaign of 2019 and how it took advantage of a fractured political and economic landscape. It reviews the unique circumstances around the 2019 election and the ‘surprising death’ of a no-deal Brexit. We then analyse the divergent political communication strategies in the 2017 and 2019 Conservative campaigns showing how the latter was much more coherent and politically unorthodox. Drawing on socioeconomic, demographic and British Election Study data, we argue that Boris Johnson’s messaging was carefully tailored towards the demands of voters in the ‘red wall’ seats. Conservative success was built around an appeal to voters in these economically depressed ‘geographies of discontent’. But while tremendously successful, the coalition this created is potentially fragile. An unconventional, ‘leftish’ Conservative campaign built a new, diverse bloc of voters. It includes a number of left-wingers expecting change alongside traditional Conservative supporters, and will be hard to keep together given the economic turbulence ahead.     

Strategic voting,information, and ethnicity in emerging democracies: Evidence from Kenya

This paper explores the conditions under which voters in emerging democracies support non-viable candidates. We argue that cognitive biases and the geographic clustering of minor-party supporters in ethno-political enclaves lead to misperceptions about the electoral prospects of minor-party candidates, weakening strategic defections both among co-ethnic and non-co-ethnic supporters. We explore these arguments using original survey data from Kenya's 2007 presidential election, a contest that featured a minor-party candidate, Kalonzo Musyoka, who stood little chance of electoral victory. Despite this, results show that most of his supporters chose to vote for the candidate, failing to perceive that he was not a viable contender. The findings suggest that theories of political behavior in multi-ethnic settings can be enriched by drawing upon insights from the political psychology literature on belief formation.     

Expressive and Strategic Behavior in Legislative Elections in Argentina

In this paper I study strategic voting behavior in the Argentine Senate election for the City of Buenos Aires in 2013. I estimate and analyze the voter transition matrix between the primary and general elections using a Bayesian hierarchical model for ecological inference, utilizing a rich data set of ballot box data. The results show that strategic behavior is not widespread among the electorate in Buenos Aires. In particular, at least 75 % of voters who had the opportunity to avoid vote wasting by behaving strategically did not. I also find high levels of vote wasting when analyzing other provinces during the same election cycle. These results suggest that these electorates might be composed of a mixture of voters with strategic and expressive motivations, where the expressive factions dominate.     

The normalization of intolerance: The 2019 presidential election in Indonesia

The perceived social acceptability of intolerance is believed to drive individual intolerance, a process we refer to as normalization. Social intolerance can be particularly high during election campaigns, when divisive candidates are likely to disparage minorities and outgroups in their rhetoric. Despite the electoral connection, it remains unclear how normalization interacts with partisanship. Does normalization only affect supporters of intolerant candidates, or does normalization spread across the population—even among supporters of the opposition? Relatedly, are the targets of intolerance group-specific, or are all minorities and outgroups at risk? To address these questions, this paper draws on results from a survey experiment conducted during the 2019 Indonesian presidential election. Our findings suggest that normalization affects all voters, albeit in ways that reflect partisan affiliation and rhetoric, which has implications for the study of identity politicization and the conditions under which intolerance is likely to propagate.     

A neo-Downsian model of group-oriented voting and racial backlash

We extend the standard Downsian framework to suppose that voters consider the identity of each candidate's supporters when deciding whom to support, rather than considering only the announced policy positions of the candidates. In particular we posit the existence of a class of voters whose support for a candidate reduces support by some other voters for that candidate. Our most important result concerns the conditions under which the addition to the electorate of new voters on one side of the policy spectrum shifts the equilibrium toward the opposite direction. The model can explain why enfranchisement of blacks did not immediately help the election of liberal candidates.     

Gender Differences in Assessments of Party Leaders

Is there a relationship between party leader gender and voters' assessments? The answer is ‘yes’ according to theses on gender identity and stereotyping. A voter survey during the 2011 Danish general election allows for a comprehensive analysis of a less likely case with four male and four female party leaders. Female party leaders are assessed more positively by female voters than male voters both in regard to general party leader sympathy and assessment of specific characteristics, whereas it is not the case that male party leaders are assessed more positively by male voters than female voters. The impact of gender does not increase with age; in fact, the opposite is the case among men since younger male voters have less sympathy for female party leaders. Furthermore, there is no support for the expectation that voters with more education or with higher levels of political interest and knowledge are more positive towards party leaders of their own gender than voters with less education. Also, the relationship between gender and voter assessment is not stronger prior to an election campaign than immediately after an election. Hence, in sum, gender identity does not seem to require a higher level of political sophistication, nor does it decrease with higher levels of information.     

Risk aversion and bandwagon effect in the pivotal voter model

The empirical literature on the effects of opinion polls on election outcomes has recently found substantial evidence of a bandwagon effect, defined as the phenomenon according to which the publication of opinion polls is advantageous to the candidate with the greatest support. This result is driven, in the lab experiments, by a higher turnout rate among the majority than among the minority. Such evidence is however in stark contrast with the main theoretical model of electoral participation in public choice, the pivotal voter model, which predicts that the supporters of an underdog candidate participate at a higher rate, given the higher probability of casting a pivotal vote. This paper tries to reconcile this discrepancy by showing that a bandwagon effect can be generated within the pivotal voter model by concavity in the voters’ utility function, which makes electoral participation more costly for the expected loser supporters. Given the strict relationship between concavity and risk aversion, the paper also establishes the role of risk aversion as a determinant of bandwagon.     

Blame,Responsibility, and the Tea Party in the 2010 Midterm Elections

There is a general consensus both in the news media and scholarly research that 2010 was a highly nationalized election year. Reports have indicated that anti-Obama sentiment, the Democrats’ legislative agenda, the economy, and the Tea Party were all factors contributing to Democratic losses in the congressional elections. In this paper, we use data from 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to examine the individual-level dynamics that contributed to the heightened nationalization of the 2010 congressional elections. Our analysis shows that Tea Party support and the attribution of blame and responsibility by voters are essential to understanding the 2010 election outcome, beyond what we would expect from a simple referendum model of midterm elections. Not surprisingly, Tea Party supporters blamed Democrats for the state of national affairs, disapproved of the Democrats’ policy agenda, and overwhelmingly supported Republican candidates in the congressional elections. However, our analysis shows that not all voters who supported Republican candidates were driven by high levels of opposition to President Obama and the Democrats. Another key group of voters blamed both Democrats and Republicans for the nation’s problems but ultimately held Democrats responsible in the voting booth by supporting Republican congressional candidates.     

Arye L. Hillman: Public finance and public policy: a political economy perspective on the responsibilities and limitations of government

Public Choice - I assume that voters mark ballots exclusively to express their true preferences among parties, leaving aside any considerations about an election’s possible outcome. The paper...     

Britain's Oddest Election?

Fringe political parties did well in the European Parliament elections in June 2005. The British National party won their first seats; altogether, four in ten British voters supported a party not represented in the House of Commons at Westminster. YouGov questioned more than 32,000 electors at the time of the election, in order to find out who voted for each party and why: the sample was big enough to enable robust analysis to be done on the BNP, UKIP and Green vote, as well as the supporters of Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. YouGov's findings show that there was disillusionment with the traditional main parties, and fears for the future, that were felt by voters across the political spectrum, and not just the supporters of the fringe parties.     

Credit Where it’s Due? Valence Politics,Attributions of Responsibility,and Multi-Level Elections

When considering elections in multi-level contexts, scholars have typically assumed—in line with second-order election theory—that the way voters approach an election depends on their attributions of responsibility, that is, on what they see as being at stake in that election. This assumption is questionable. The formal position is not always clear, and is further blurred by parties and the media. Moreover, many voters pay little attention to politics and have little incentive to trace constitutional responsibilities. In this paper I use data from election studies in two multi-level contexts, Ontario and Scotland, to explore the nature and impact of voters’ attributions of responsibility. The evidence suggests that, when called upon in surveys to do so, many voters can confidently and fairly accurately assign issues to different levels of government. Yet they do not seem to consider these attributions much at elections. There is very little indication that issues weighed heavier in the decision-making of those who regarded them as the responsibility of that electoral arena. A plausible explanation is that most voters sidestep the cognitive demands imposed by multi-level elections.     

Voter overrepresentation,vote misreporting,and turnout bias in postelection surveys

Figures from postelection surveys often grossly overestimate election turnout. Two distinct phenomena are responsible for this gap: overrepresentation of actual voters and vote misreporting by actual nonvoters among survey respondents. Previous accounts of turnout bias are inconclusive in that they either focus on a single component, or fail to separate between the two. In this paper, we formally decompose turnout bias in election surveys into its constituent parts, assess their empirical prevalence and heterogeneity using an extensive collection of 49 vote validation studies from six countries, and employ Bayesian meta regression techniques to account for cross-study differences. Our results indicate that both election and survey characteristics such as actual voter turnout and survey response rates differentially affect the components of turnout bias. We conclude with a discussion of the threats and potentials of our findings for survey-based comparative electoral research.     

Throwing the rascals out? Problems of accountability in two‐party systems

This article critically examines the concept of ‘accountability’ as it is understood in two‐party systems and majoritarian democracy – namely the ability of voters to remove governments that violate their mandates or otherwise perform poorly. Voters’ capacity to ‘throw the rascals out’ is one of the main normative appeals of two‐partism and the single‐member plurality (SMP) electoral system. However, this article uses a spatial model to show that in at least two types of situation voters are left in a bind when confronted with a mandate‐breaking governing party: (1) when both major parties undertake unexpected non‐centrist shifts in opposing directions after an election, leaving centrist voters with an unappealing choice; and (2) when a governing party that had won an election on a non‐centrist platform undertakes a post‐election shift to the centre, leaving its more radical supporters dissatisfied. In each case, voters have four imperfect options: punish the governing party by throwing the rascals out, but in doing so vote for a party that is ideologically more distant; abstain, and withdraw from the democratic process; vote for a minor party that has no hope of influencing government formation, but which might detach enough votes to allow the ideologically more distant major opposition party to win; and forgive the governing party its mandate‐breaking. All of these options represent accountability failures. The problems are illustrated with two case studies from two‐party systems: the United Kingdom in the mid‐1980s and New Zealand in the period 1984–1993. In both instances, many voters found it difficult to ‘throw the rascals out’ without harming their own interests in the process. The article concludes that accountability may sometimes be better achieved if voters can force a party to share power in coalition with another party in order to ‘keep it honest’ instead of removing it from government completely, as can happen in multi‐party systems based on proportional representation. Thus, although two‐partism based on plurality voting is normally regarded as superior to multi‐partism and proportional representation on the criterion of accountability, in some instances, the reverse can be true. The article therefore undermines a core normative argument advanced by supporters of majoritarian democracy and SMP.     

The distorting effects of racial animus on proximity voting in the 2016 elections

While the use of racial appeals by the 2016 Trump campaign is indisputable, researchers are actively debating their precise role in influencing voter behavior in the election. We seek to expand upon existing research which finds that racial animus electorally benefited the Trump campaign. We examine to what extent those benefits also materialized for GOP candidates down-ballot and whether racial animus distorted ideological proximity voting in the 2016 election. We find that racial animus among voters helped Republicans at multiple ballot levels and that higher levels of racial animus distorted spatial voting among voters ideologically closest to the Democratic candidate.