Partisan turnout bias and district magnitude

This article examines how the partisan turnout bias (i.e. turnout rate differences across districts that are linked to the partisan vote shares in those districts) changes over time in PR districted electoral systems. We argue that the bias after the founding election is the unintended consequence of parties and voters' strategic behaviors when they respond to the incentives provided by the electoral system. By looking at the case of Portugal, one of the countries with the largest variation in district magnitude, we find that the increasing asymmetry in turnout rates across districts makes the bias more severe as time goes by.     

Structural constraints on partisan bias under the efficient gerrymander

Partisan bias occurs when the translation of the popular vote into legislative seats differs between competing parties. This paper contains a theoretical and empirical analysis of the consequences of an efficient gerrymander for the partisan bias of an electoral system. Under partisan apportionment, bias is shown to depend on some structural features of the electoral environment; namely, the size of the voting population and the number of single-member districts within a political jurisdiction. A statistical analysis reveals the predicted relationships in data on Congressional elections across states in the 1950–1984 period. This paper highlights the importance of some measurable features of the electoral environment for determining bias and provides an indirect test of partisan gerrymandering in congressional apportionment processes.     

Partisan consequences of low turnout at elections to the European Parliament

Low turnout and potential differences in party preferences between voters and non-voters may affect party vote shares at European Parliament (EP) elections. Of particular concern is the rise of Eurosceptic and populist parties, but scholars do not know whether these would benefit from increased voter mobilization. To address this gap, we simulate the party choices of non-voters at the 2009 and 2014 EP elections. Contrary to analyses of turnout effects at general elections in multiparty systems, our simulations suggest that left-leaning and ideologically moderate parties would gain if turnout went up to levels observed at first-order national elections. And while there is some evidence that populist parties might have benefitted from higher turnout at the 2014 elections (but not in 2009), our findings do not support expectations that either Eurosceptic or Europhile parties’ vote share would be affected by higher turnout.     

Exploring uniformity and variability in local electoral outcomes: Some evidence from English local elections 1985–1991

A detailed analysis of English local elections between 1985 and 1991 seems to support the propositions that a proportion of electors hold contradictory local and national voting preferences at one and the same time; and that there is significant variation in party performance both between and within local authorities. The paper concludes that the stimuli to which electors respond in local elections are often those most relevant to the ‘context’ in which their vote is cast. If partisan dealignment has led to a greater willingness on the part of the electorate to regard voting as a matter of ‘horses for courses’, there may not only be a further fragmentation in the results of elections of all kinds but the parties may experience different degrees of success depending on the nature of the contest.     

Electoral bias at the 2015 general election: reducing Labour’s electoral advantage

Electoral bias results in an asymmetrical seat distribution between parties with similar vote shares. Over recent British general elections Labour held an advantage because it efficiently converted votes into seats. Following the 2015 election result this advantage has reduced considerably, principally because Labour’s vote distribution saw it accumulate more ineffective votes, particularly where electoral support was not converted into seats. By contrast, the vote distribution of the Conservative party is now superior to that of Labour because it acquired fewer wasted votes although Labour retains a modest advantage overall because it benefits from inequalities in electorate size and differences in voter turnout. Features of the 2015 election, however, raise general methodological challenges for decomposing electoral bias. The analysis, therefore, considers the effect of substituting the Liberal Democrats as the third party with the United Kingdom Independence Party. It also examines the outcome in Scotland separately from that in England and Wales. Following this analysis it becomes clear that the method for decomposing electoral bias requires clearer guidelines for its application in specific settings.     

High turnout in the Low Countries: Partisan effects of the abolition of compulsory voting in the Netherlands

We use a quasi-experimental framework to test the conventional wisdom that left-of-center parties benefit from higher turnout by analyzing the partisan effects of the abolition of compulsory voting in the Netherlands. Fixed effects, multilevel, and matching models of party family vote shares in the Netherlands before and after the reform–and in reference to a control group of Belgian party families–show consistent evidence the voting reform led to an increase in the vote share of Dutch social democratic parties and a decrease in the vote share won by minor and extreme parties. We find some evidence that Christian democratic and liberal parties also benefited from the voting reform, but argue this finding is not causally related to the reform itself.     

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.     

Do local elections predict the outcome of the next general election? Forecasting British general elections from local election national vote share estimates

This article outlines a method for forecasting British general elections from national level vote shares at local elections. Although local elections are notionally ‘local’, the evidence suggests that they at least partly mirror national electoral fortunes. A simple general election vote share on local election vote share regression model that accounts for partisan differences and incumbency effects fits past data with reasonable accuracy. Based on the results of the 2013 and 2014 local elections, the model forecast a 56% probability of hung parliament, with a 78% probability of the Conservatives receiving the largest share of the vote.     

A behavioral measure of the enthusiasm gap in American elections

What are the effects of a mobilized party base on elections? I present a new behavioral measure of the enthusiasm gap in a set of American elections to identify how the turnout rate of the party faithful varies across different contexts. I find that the advantaged party can see its registrants turn out by four percentage points more than the disadvantaged party in some elections, and that this effect can be even larger in competitive House districts. I estimate the net benefit to party vote share of the mobilized base, which is around one percentage point statewide, and up to one and one half points in competitive House contests. These results suggest that the partisan characteristics of an election have consequences not just for vote choice, but for the composition of the electorate.     

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.     

Leaders, voters and activists in the elections in Great Britain 2005 and 2010

Discussion of the relationship between parties and the electorate is often based on the notion of partisan constituencies, that parties adopt policy positions that correspond to the average position of the party supporters. In contrast, the Downsian “spatial model” assumes that parties are purely opportunistic and maneuver to gain as many votes as possible. A third, more empirical model, based on the early work of Stokes, assumes that voter choice is based on the evaluation of each of the party leader’s competence or ability to deliver policy success. Such an evaluation can be provided by individual voter overall assessment in terms of the leaders’ character traits.This paper attempts to relate these three classes of models by examining the elections in Great Britain in 2005 and 2010. Using the British Election Study, we construct spatial models of these elections in Great Britain as well as in the three regions of England, Scotland and Wales. The models incorporate the electoral perceptions of character traits. We compare the equilibrium vote maximizing positions with the partisan positions, estimated by taking the mean of each of the parties voters’ preferred positions. We define an equilibrium to be a stable attractor if the vote share at the equilibrium exceeds the share at the partisan position by a significant proportion (determined by the implicit error of the stochastic model). We infer that none of the equilibria are stable attractors, and suggest that the partisan positions are also preferred by the party activists, the key supporters of each party.     

Electoral reform and the mirror image of inter-party and intra-party competition: The adoption of party lists in Colombia

The Colombian case offers a rare opportunity to observe effects of electoral reform where districting remains constant. Only the formula changed, from extremely ‘personalized’ (seats allocated solely on candidate votes) to ‘listized’: seats are allocated to party lists, which may be either open or closed. Electoral reform has effects on both the inter-party dimension (the number of parties competing) and the intra-party dimension (the extent of competition within parties). Consistent with theoretical expectations, the inter-party dimension features an increased number of parties in the low-magnitude districts and a decrease in the high-magnitude districts. On the intra-party dimension, the impact “mirrors” the inter-party: less competition in smaller districts, yet more in larger districts.     

Die politischen Konsequenzen der niedrigen Wahlbeteiligung bei der Europawahl 2009

If electoral abstention is linked to party preferences, low turnout—as witnessed in European Parliament elections—may hurt some parties and benefit others. In order to assess this possibility, we compare, in the member states of the EU, parties’ vote shares in the 2009 European Parliament elections with the results that would have been obtained had turnout reached the level of national general elections. We find that the effects of low turnout are minimal, and that—except for a single seat—higher turnout would not have resulted in a different composition of the European Parliament.     

The Cube Rule in a Mixed Electoral System: Disproportionality in German Bundestag Elections

In the German mixed electoral system the PR tier is generally perceived as fully compensating for any disproportionality in the vote–seat translation generated by the plurality tier. However, as this article shows, the PR tier can itself increase disproportionality. In a mixed electoral system, small parties enter (hopeless) district races with the hope of boosting their PR vote share. But with a high number of district parties, parties may win districts at levels way below the usual 50 per cent vote share threshold. Looking at all 16 Bundestag elections from 1953 to 2009, the article identifies the effective number of district parties as a very strong predictor for the disproportional translation of votes into seats in the plurality tier of Germany's mixed electoral system. The article points to consequences for the internal composition of parliamentary parties, for parties' nomination strategies and for the occurrence of so-called overhang mandates.     

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.     

The 2015 National Elections in Switzerland: Renewed Polarization and Shift to the Right

The 2015 election to the Swiss Parliament marks a return to an already observed trend that was only interrupted in 2011: a shift to the right and an increase in polarization. The vote share of the nationalist-conservative Swiss People's Party (SVP) has now reached a historical height of 29.4% (+2.8). This note discusses why cantons matter in the Swiss national elections, and to what degree elections have become nationalized. Institutionally, the 26 cantons serve as electoral districts. This leads to a highly disproportional electoral system and has magnified the minor vote shifts to a slightly more pronounced shift in seats, with the right now holding a tiny majority of 101 of 200 seats in the first chamber. The two winners, the SVP and the Liberals, also had most campaign funds at their disposal. They were able to guide an extensive nationwide campaign in which they advocated their core issues instead of candidates. Other parties only advertised at the cantonal level.     

Incumbency advantage in multi-member districts: Evidence from congressional elections in Chile

Do parties enjoy an advantage to incumbency in multi-member districts? In this paper we answer this question by adapting a regression-discontinuity design to multi-member districts in congressional elections in Chile. The electoral system in place generates discontinuities in the number of elected representatives from each coalition at the 1/3 and 2/3 thresholds of the two-party vote share. Regression-discontinuity estimates indicate that, by holding two seats as opposed to holding only one, the left-leaning coalition obtains an extra 4.5% vote share in the next election and increases by 28 percentage points the probability of electing two candidates again. These results are in line with those obtained in previous studies in the U.S. but contrast with results obtained in developing countries which find a negative advantage to incumbency.     

Two political worlds?: The influence of provincial party loyalty federal voting in Canada

Scholars have known for years that many Canadian voters hold different partisan loyalties at the federal and provincial level. In this paper, I address the question of whether provincial party loyalty has an effect on federal level vote choice above and beyond the effects of federal level party loyalty. I also examine whether provincial party loyalty is enough to explain the persistence of the ‘two-party-plus’ system in Canada. In order to address these questions I construct a series of multinomial logit models of federal vote choice in the 1993 and 2000 Canadian elections. I conclude that provincial party loyalty does have an effect on federal level vote choice, but that this influence is not enough to explain the persistence of the ‘two-party-plus’ system.     

The Electoral Costs of Party Loyalty in Congress

To what extent is party loyalty a liability for incumbent legislators? Past research on legislative voting and elections suggests that voters punish members who are ideologically “out of step” with their districts. In seeking to move beyond the emphasis in the literature on the effects of ideological extremity on legislative vote share, we examine how partisan loyalty can adversely affect legislators' electoral fortunes. Specifically, we estimate the effects of each legislator's party unity—the tendency of a member to vote with his or her party on salient issues that divide the two major parties—on vote margin when running for reelection. Our results suggest that party loyalty on divisive votes can indeed be a liability for incumbent House members. In fact, we find that voters are not punishing elected representatives for being too ideological; they are punishing them for being too partisan.     

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.