Polarization and correct voting in U.S. presidential elections

Although some political pundits have expressed concern that political polarization has a deleterious effect on voter behavior, others have argued that polarization may actually benefit voters by presenting citizens with clear choices between the two major parties. We take up this question by examining the effects of polarization on the quality of voter decision making in U.S. presidential elections. We find that ideological polarization among elites, along with ideological sorting and affective polarization among voters, all contribute to the probability of citizens’ voting correctly. Furthermore, affective polarization among the citizenry if anything strengthens, not weakens, the influence of political knowledge on voter decision-making. We conclude that to the extent that normative democratic theory supposes that people vote for candidates who share their interests, polarization has had a positive effect on voter decision-making quality, and thus democratic representation, in the United States.     

Risk Attitudes and the Incumbency Advantage

Explanations for the incumbency advantage in American elections have typically pointed to the institutional advantages that incumbents enjoy over challengers but overlook the role of individual traits that reinforce this bias. The institutional advantages enjoyed by incumbents give voters more certainty about who incumbents are and what they might do when (and if) they assume office. We argue that these institutional advantages make incumbents particularly attractive to risk-averse individuals, who shy away from uncertainty and embrace choices that provide more certainty. Using data from 2008 and 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we show that citizens who are more risk averse are more likely to support incumbent candidates, while citizens who are more risk accepting are more likely to vote for challengers. The foundations of the incumbency advantage, we find, lie not only in the institutional perks of office but also in the individual minds of voters.     

Turning your back on the EU. The role of Eurosceptic parties in the 2014 European Parliament elections

This paper analyses how disaffection with the EU influenced individuals' likelihood of turning out to vote and of casting a vote for a Eurosceptic party in the 2014 EP elections, and how these relationships were moderated by the Eurosceptic partisan supply of each country. We argue that the degree to which political parties oppose European integration, as well as the ideological leaning of Eurosceptic parties, should influence both the likelihood of disaffected citizens turning out to vote, and their likelihood of voting for a Eurosceptic party. Our empirical findings show that, in the presence of a party that is strongly opposed to European integration, disaffected citizens are more likely to turn out to vote and to vote for a Eurosceptic party provided that this party also shares their ideological leaning in the left-right dimension. These results indicate that Eurosceptic parties are important actors for the politicization of the European integration conflict and for the Europeanization of EP elections, but, at the same time, they suggest that opposition to European integration is subordinate to the traditional left-right conflict.     

The Moderating Effect of Debates on Political Attitudes

In theory, candidate debates can influence voters by providing information about candidates' quality and policy positions. However, there is limited evidence about whether and why debates influence voters in new democracies. We use a field experiment on parliamentary debates during Ghana's 2016 elections to show that debates improve voters' evaluations of candidates. Debates have the strongest effect on partisan voters, who become more favorable toward and more likely to vote for opponent-party candidates and less likely to vote for co-partisans. Experimental and unique observational data capturing participants' second-by-second reactions to the debates show that policy information was the most important causal mechanism driving partisan moderation, especially among strong partisans. A follow-up survey shows that these effects persist in electorally competitive communities, whereas they dissipate in party strongholds. Policy-centered debates have the potential to reduce partisan polarization in new democracies, but the local political context conditions the persistence of these effects.     

Electoral Choice,Ideological Conflict,and Political Participation

Generations of democratic theorists argue that democratic systems should present citizens with clear and distinct electoral choices. Responsible party theorists further argued that political participation increases with greater ideological conflict between competing electoral options. Empirical evidence on this question, however, remains deeply ambiguous. This article introduces new joint estimates of citizen preferences and the campaign platforms chosen by pairs of candidates in U.S. House and Senate races. The results show that increasing levels of ideological conflict reduce voter turnout, and are robust across a wide range of empirical specifications. Furthermore, the findings provide no support for existing accounts that emphasize how ideology or partisanship explains the relationship between ideological conflict and turnout. Instead, I find that increasing levels of candidate divergence reduce turnout primarily among citizens with lower levels of political sophistication. These findings provide the strongest evidence to date for how mass political behavior is conditioned by electoral choice.     

Legislative budget cycles

Recent literature suggests that electoral budget cycles are a phenomenon of new rather than established democracies. What part of the democratization process explains the amelioration of the political budget cycle? We argue the answer lies (in part) in the development of a strong party system. We extend the classic Rogoff-Siebert model to show that political budget cycles are possible in a legislative context with rational voters. We then demonstrate that the development of a strong party system can restrain political budget cycles in a majoritarian electoral system. Finally, we follow prior work in using vote share volatility as a measure of the institutionalization of the party system. Using newly collected vote-share data for 433 elections for 90 democracies from 1980–2007, we calculate a measure of party institutionalization. We then use this data to demonstrate that institutionalized party systems are associated with mitigated political budget cycles, especially in majoritarian electoral systems.     

Political parties and the transnational mobilisation of the emigrant vote

The relationship between political parties and voters is usually analysed in a national framework. However, the majority of states worldwide allow their emigrant citizens to have an absentee vote. This article analyses how parties confront the challenge of mobilising voters across borders. It presents an analytical framework for comparing the scope of party transnational mobilisation strategies across different electoral systems. Drawing on a contextualised qualitative analysis, the article analyses transnational electoral mobilisation of the emigrant vote in recent elections in Spain, France, Italy and Romania. The analysis shows that a cost–benefit analysis of electoral incentives explains the scope of transnational campaign efforts of many of the political parties. Yet the article also suggests locating the analysis of party strategies in the particular context of the transnational electoral field, including the high dispersion, uncertainty and volatility of the emigrant vote and the overlap between the electoral arenas among emigrants and at home.     

How partisan affect shapes citizens' perception of the political world

We explore how partisan affect shapes citizens' views of party ideology and political competition. We argue that voters' affective ties to parties (both positive and negative) lead them to perceive the ideological positions of those parties as more extreme. Further, when voters are "affectively polarized," i.e., they strongly like some parties and dislike others, they are more likely to view politics as high stakes competition, where ideological polarization is rampant, participation is crucial, and electoral outcomes are highly consequential. Using cross-national survey data covering 43 elections in 34 countries, we show that partisan affect indeed impacts perceptions of party ideology and that affective polarization alters beliefs about the nature of political competition.     

Bridging the ideological space: A cross‐national analysis of the distance of party switching

Scholars have investigated the characteristics of volatile voters ever since the first voter surveys were carried out and they have paid specific attention to the role of political sophistication on vote switching. Nevertheless, the exact nature of this relationship is still unclear. With increasing volatility over the past decades this question has furthermore grown in relevance. Is the growing unpredictability of elections mostly driven by sophisticated voters making well‐considered choices or is the balance of power in the hands of unsophisticated ‘floating voters’? Several scholars have argued that even under conditions of increasing volatility switching is still mostly confined to changes to ideologically close parties. Most researchers, however, have used rather crude measures to investigate this ‘leap’ between parties. To advance research in this field, this article directly models the ideological distance bridged by volatile voters when investigating the link between political sophistication and volatility. This is done using Comparative Study of Electoral systems (CSES) data that encompass a broad sample of recent parliamentary elections worldwide. Results indicate that voters with an intermediate level of political knowledge are most likely to switch overall. When taking into account the ideological distance of party switching, however, the confining impact of political knowledge on the vote choices made is clearly dominant, resulting in a linear decrease of the distance bridged as voters become more knowledgeable.     

Misleading ballot position cue: Party voting in Korea's nonpartisan local elections

In this study, I present evidence that ballot order can provide a misleading cue to voters. In South Korea, nonpartisan municipal legislative elections were held concurrently with other partisan local elections until 2002. The ballot order of the candidates running in nonpartisan elections was randomly determined, whereas it was determined according to a party's number of seats in the national legislature for candidates running in partisan elections. Therefore, if voters are fully informed, the vote share for the candidate listed first in the nonpartisan ballot should not be correlated with the vote share for the party listed first on the partisan ballot. However, I find that the vote share for a first-listed candidate increases when the first-listed party's vote share increases. I also find that the presence of an incumbent does not significantly reduce the degree to which voters mistakenly use ballot position as a party cue.     

The Contextual Causes of Issue and Party Voting in American Presidential Elections

This paper analyzes the influence of the two most commonly examined causes of presidential vote choice, policy preferences and party identification. The focus is on change across elections in order to assess how the effects of issues and partisanship respond to the larger political context in which voters make their decisions. In contrast to party centric views of politics, I find little direct responsiveness to party issue contrast and substantial influence of candidate issue contrast. Further, I find that leading hypotheses for the “resurgence in partisanship” are not consistent with some important facts suggesting that the explanation remains elusive.     

Ideology and Vote Choice in U.S. Mayoral Elections: Evidence from Facebook Surveys

City elections in the U.S. are widely thought to be low-information contests decided by non-ideological factors. This consensus casts doubt on the possibility of electoral accountability in cities, and renders recent evidence of municipal responsiveness puzzling. However, our knowledge of how voters actually behave in local elections is severely limited by a lack of individual-level survey data collected from local contests. Using three such original surveys, I re-examine the role of ideology in mayoral elections, recruiting samples of local voters via geotargeted Facebook advertisements. In two large cities, I find ideology is a powerful and independent predictor of vote choice. Using a panel design, I find voters learn the relative ideological positions of candidates over the course of a campaign, and that learning causally impacts vote choice. The effect of ideology also replicates in a conjoint experiment fielded to a sample of small-city voters in another region. Electoral accountability is thus a plausible explanation for ideological responsiveness in U.S. cities, and the methodological tools introduced here can now be applied to a variety of questions about local voter behavior.     

The impact of compulsory voting on inequality and the quality of the vote

Abstract

Democratic elections imply that the electorate holds incumbents accountable for past performance, and that voters select the party that is closest to their own political preferences. Previous research shows that both elements require political sophistication. A number of countries throughout the world have a system of compulsory voting, and this legal obligation boosts levels of voter turnout. Under such rules, citizens with low levels of sophistication in particular are thought to turn out to vote in higher numbers. Is it the case that the quality of the vote is reduced when these less sophisticated voters are compelled to vote? This article investigates this claim by examining the effect of compulsory voting on accountability and proximity voting. The results show that compulsory voting reduces stratification based on knowledge and level of education, and proximity voting, but it does not have an effect on economic accountability. The article concludes with some suggestions on how systems of compulsory voting might mitigate the strength of political sophistication in determining the quality of the vote decision process.     

On the nature of voters’ coalition preferences

An expanding literature indicates that in multiparty systems with coalition governments, citizens consider the post-electoral bargaining process among parties when casting their vote. Yet, we know surprisingly little about the nature of voters’ coalition preferences. This paper uses data from the Austrian National Election Study to examine the determinants as well as the independence of preferences for coalitions as political object. We find that coalition preferences are strongly informed by spatial considerations; but additional non-ideological factors, such as party and leader preferences, also play a fundamental role. We also find that coalitions enjoy a certain degree of independence from other objects of vote choice and they do not always represent a simple average score on the feeling thermometer of the constituent parties. There are, however, substantial differences among voters, with party identifiers and those with extreme ideology being less likely to consider coalitions as separate entities from their component parties.     

Party convergence and vote switching: Explaining mainstream party decline across Europe

How can one explain the significant vote losses of mainstream parties across Europe in recent years? In this article, it is argued that mainstream party convergence is an important determinant of the recent political and electoral volatility in European party systems. More specifically, it is hypothesised that as mainstream parties converge on the left-right scale, voters will switch from supporting a mainstream party to a non-mainstream party in the next election as they look for an alternative that better represents their ideological views. To test these theoretical expectations, data is combined from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the Manifestos Project for nearly 15,000 vote choices of individual voters in 30 elections in 16 West and East European countries from 2001 until 2013. The findings have important implications for understanding the recent rise of non-mainstream parties, the changing nature of party systems and the increasing complexity of cabinet formation across Europe.     

Correct Voting in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Nominating Elections

Criticisms of the system by which the American political parties select their candidates focus on issues of representativeness—how choices are dominated by relatively small numbers of ideologically extreme primary voters, or how residents of small states voting early in the process have disproportionate influence. This paper adds a different concern, albeit one that still addresses representativeness. How well do primary and caucus voters represent their own values and interests with their vote choices? Lau and Redlawsk’s notion of “correct voting” is applied to the 2008 U.S. nominating contests. Four reasons to expect levels of correct voting to be lower in caucus and primary elections than in general election campaigns are discussed. Results suggest that voters in U.S. nominating contests do much worse than voters in general election campaigns, often barely doing better than chance in selecting the candidate who best represents their own values and priorities. Discussion focuses on institutional reforms that should improve citizens’ ability to make correct voting choices in caucuses and primaries.     

Momentum in the polls raises electoral expectations

Voters rely on opinion polls to help them predict who is going to win elections. But they are regularly exposed to different polling results over time. How do changes in the polls affect their expectations? I show that when the polls indicate that a party’s support has increased, voters’ expectations for that party’s performance will be higher than they would be at the same vote share but without such evidence of growth, because the party appears to have momentum. Across six survey experiments in Britain (total N > 14,000), I find that this effect persists even when changes in vote share are well within the margin of error, when comparing a small change in vote share to consistently polling at the larger vote share, when the change makes little difference to a party’s objective probability of victory, and when voters have strong preferences that might colour their interpretation of the polls. In short, the appearance of momentum in the polls robustly raises voters’ expectations that a party will win an election. This finding has major implications for any area of research in political science where expectations feature, for theoretical understandings of how people perceive the future, and for salient policy debates about the regulation of opinion polls.     

Fit for the Job: Candidate Qualifications and Vote Choice in Low Information Elections

Cues and heuristics—like party, gender, and race/ethnicity—help voters choose among a set of candidates. We consider candidate professional experience—signaled through occupation—as a cue that voters can use to evaluate candidates’ functional competence for office. We outline and test one condition under which citizens are most likely to use such cues: when there is a clear connection between candidate qualifications and the particular elected office. We further argue that voters in these contexts are likely to make subtle distinctions between candidates, and to vote accordingly. We test our account in the context of local school board elections, and show—through both observational analyses of California election results and a conjoint experiment—that (1) voters favor candidates who work in education; (2) that voters discriminate even among candidates associated with education by only favoring those with strong ties to students; and (3) that the effects are not muted by partisanship. Voters appear to value functional competence for office in and of itself, and use cues in the form of candidate occupation to assess who is and who is not fit for the job.

     

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.     

Representation,neighboring districts,and party loyalty in the U.S. Congress

Legislative scholars often assume that legislators are motivated by concerns over re-election. This assumption implies that legislators are forward-looking and are motivated by a concern over what their re-election constituency will look like during their next electoral cycle. In this research, we show how the forward-looking nature of legislators motivates members of the U.S. House of Representatives to represent both their home district and their neighboring districts in their choices regarding when to support their own party. Using survey responses to the 2006, 2008, and 2010 Cooperative Congressional Elections Study to construct measures of Congressional District ideology, empirical analysis is strongly supportive of our claims. Legislators’ choices are strongly influenced both by the ideology of their home district and that of the districts that neighbor their home district. Thus, the electoral connection between citizens and representatives extends beyond a legislator’s own constituents to include the constituents in neighboring districts.