Political knowledge about electoral rules: Comparing mixed member proportional systems in Germany and New Zealand

Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral systems are considered by some to be “the best of both worlds” because they combine single member district representation with proportional outcomes. Critics, however, maintain that such systems cause voter confusion leading some voters to cast misinformed votes. Survey data from Germany and New Zealand are used to investigate voter's political knowledge of the electoral system and their voting behavior. The findings suggest that knowledge about the electoral system is similar in New Zealand and in Germany. Although some may very well find the system complex, there is no evidence to suggest that a lack of knowledge about the electoral system influences voting behavior. The results undermine the claims made by skeptics who fear that misunderstanding threatens the legitimacy of electoral outcomes.     

Trust in elections and the institutional design of electoral authorities: Evidence from Latin America

It is often assumed that the institutional organization of electoral management bodies (EMB) has an impact on the credibility of elections, but this proposition has been difficult to verify empirically. I examine whether the degree of autonomy from the political process of EMB administrators affects attitudes towards elections among citizens and legislators by analyzing mass and elite surveys across Latin America. I conclude that levels of confidence in the electoral process among political elites are higher in countries with politically autonomous EMBs, but this effect is muted in the analysis of citizen attitudes. This association holds after controlling for individual-level determinants of trust in elections and for other relevant country-level predictors in multilevel statistical models.     

From issues to goals: a novel conceptualisation,measurement and research design for comprehensive analysis of electoral competition

Abstract

The analysis of issue politics has long suffered from a fragmentation between valence and positional conceptualisations, preventing the effective development of a general model of issue-based party competition. Building on an overview of the evolution of party competition in the Western world in recent decades, this article offers a theoretical development that builds on ‘issue yield’ theory to provide a conceptualisation of political goals that generalises across positional and valence issues. This in turn allows a common measurement strategy, offering the possibility to comparatively assess various characteristics (including the electoral potential) of both positional and valence issues. Finally, it describes the specific research design derived from this framework and its implementation in comparative perspective in six West European countries during 2017–2018.     

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.     

Candidate Valence and Ideological Positions in U.S. House Elections

We examine the relationship between the valence qualities of candidates and the ideological positions they take in U.S. House elections based on a study of the 2006 midterm elections. Our design enables us to distinguish between campaign and character dimensions of candidate valence and to place candidates and districts on the same ideological scale. Incumbents with a personal‐character advantage are closer ideologically to their district preferences, while disadvantaged challengers take more extreme policy positions. Contrary to conventional wisdom, challengers can reap electoral rewards by taking more extreme positions relative to their districts. We explore a possible mechanism for this extremism effect by demonstrating that challengers closer to the extreme received greater financial contributions, which enhanced their chances of victory. Our results bear on theories of representation that include policy and valence, although the interactions between these two dimensions may be complex and counterintuitive.     

Federalism Outcomes and Ideological Preferences: The U.S. Supreme Court and Preemption Cases

The record of the U.S. Supreme Court in decisions affectingfederal-state relations has been one of inconsistency betweenstates' rights and national supremacy. This inconsistency hasperplexed both legal and political science scholars who havehad great difficulty placing decision-making regarding federalismoutcomes by the Court in any sort of theoretical context. Contraryto much conventional wisdom, ideological preferences do notautomatically translate into federalism outcomes. We extendmodels of judicial decision-making in political environmentsby including state policy. State policy outcomes may be eithermore liberal or more conservative than the policy would be underfederal control. Thus, the ideological preferences of the justicesmay contradict their preferences toward nationalism or statesrights. Testing the model using 94 preemption cases, we findthat individual justices and most Courts are willing to sacrificetheir federalism values in the pursuit of some other policygoal. This finding has implications for both the federalismliterature and strategic models of Court behavior, as well asfor cases the Court is currently reviewing.     

Candidates' Ideological Locations,Abstention, and Turnout in U.S. Midterm Senate Elections

Many spatial models of voting suggest that citizens are more likely to abstain when they feel indifferent toward the candidates or alienated from them. In presidential elections, previous research offers evidence that alienation and indifference affect individuals' probabilities of voting. We find evidence that indifference and alienation also affect the decision to vote in midterm Senate elections, a context not previously explored. These individual-level effects imply that candidates' ideological locations should influence aggregate turnout by affecting the proportions of citizens who feel indifferent toward or alienated from the candidates. Our aggregate-level analysis supports this (at least in contests featuring two previous and/or future members of Congress). Our findings underscore the importance of the electoral context for understanding citizen behavior and suggest that elections featuring at least one centrist candidate may be normatively appealing since they stimulate participation.     

提高企业思想政治工作者的心理疏导能力

<正>党的十七大报告提出:在加强和改进思想政治工作中注重人文关怀和心理疏导,用正确方式处理人际关系。明确把人文关怀和心理疏导作为思想政治工作的重要方式之一。在思想政治工作过程中既要重视思想政治教育,     

Ideological position,leaders' charisma,and voting preferences: Personal vs. partisan elections

The study compared the relationships between voting preferences and two predictors: voters' ideological position and the perceived charisma of political leaders, under two conditions: partisan elections and personal elections. It also examined whether these relationships are moderated by the ideological extremity of the parties standing for election and by voters' personal disposition to ascribe importance to leadership. The study was carried out a short time before the last general elections in Israel. Two comparable samples were used: one focused on relatively moderate parties and their leaders, and the other on more extreme parties and leaders. In both samples, voters' ideological position was strongly related to leaders' perceived charisma and to voting preferences, but leaders' perceived charisma added significantly to the prediction of voting preferences, especially under conditions of personal elections. In combination, voters' ideological position and leaders' charisma perceptions predicted voting preferences very accurately. These relationships were not affected by the two hypothesized moderators.The assistance of Amos Chividaly in data analysis is gratefully acknowledged.     

Ideological proximity and valence competition. Negative campaigning through allegation of corruption in the Italian legislative arena from 1946 to 1994

We consider the possibility for the parties to invest in negative campaigning – a behavior that, in our framework, involves blaming alleged insufficiencies of the rival concerning commonly shared values. Within a simple one-dimensional model, we deduce the hypothesis that the parties’ incentive to “attack” each other increases with the parties’ proximity on the left–right space. We test our hypothesis on an Italian case, focusing on the emphasis placed by the Communist Party on political corruption issues during the government investiture debates that spanned from the postwar period until 1994, when the traditional party system abruptly collapsed. The statistical results are largely consistent with our theoretical insights.     

抗美援朝精神对大学生思想政治教育的启示

伟大的抗美援朝精神是党和人民付出巨大代价、进行伟大斗争获得的宝贵精神财富,是民族风骨、民族力量、民族血性、民族智慧在战争中的结晶,是中华民族的爱国主义精神在抗美援朝战争中的锤炼与升华,是中国精神谱系中的重要标识,蕴含着丰富的精神内涵。抗美援朝精神对大学生思想政治教育具有重要引领作用,能够培育大学生的理想信念与爱国情怀、坚定政治立场、培育大学生国际主义精神,促进大学生健康成长成才,引导大学生成长为能担时代重任的栋梁之材。     

The dilemmas of incrementalism: logical and political constraints in the design of health insurance reforms.

Health care reform became a premier issue on the U.S. policy agenda in the 1990s. While the comprehensive proposal put forth by President Clinton failed, states and the federal government successfully pursued a variety of lesser initiatives. This article focuses on a set of reforms intended to make private health insurance more accessible and affordable to individuals and workers in small firms. It outlines the key arguments made by experts to justify stronger regulation of health insurance and the options and difficult tradeoffs that must be considered in policy design. It then examines the scope and strength of legislation adopted by 45 states and the federal government from 1990 to 1996. The substantial variation in state policies demonstrates that even though insurance market reform was the one issue that commanded nearly universal support in the health care debate, few design features were universally accepted by those who crafted the reforms. The article concludes by assessing the pattern of state and federal action. The reforms represent some progress on nominal access to insurance but little progress on the affordability of insurance for individuals and small groups. Few of the reforms present a serious challenge to existing practices and interests of the insurance industry. This pattern of policy design reflects the logical and political constraints of incrementalism. In a system where insurance coverage is voluntary, changes to increase access for one group tend to increase costs and thereby decrease access for another segment of the population. In addition, because incremental reforms will not attract sustained attention and support from the general public, it is politically difficult to impose substantial new regulation on a powerful industry.     

The effects of state policy design features on take-up and crowd-out rates for the State Children's Health Insurance Program.

We evaluate the effects of state policy design features on SCHIP take-up rates and on the degree to which SCHIP benefits crowd out private benefits. The results indicate overall program take-up rates of approximately 10 percent. However, there is considerable heterogeneity across states, suggesting a potential role of inter-state variation in policy design. We find that several design mechanisms have significant and substantial positive effects on take-up. For example, eliminating asset tests, offering continuous coverage, simplifying the application and renewal processes, and extending benefits to parents all have sizable and positive effects on take-up rates. Mandatory waiting periods, on the other hand, consistently reduce take-up rates. In all, inter-state differences in outreach and anti-crowd-out efforts explain roughly one-quarter of the cross-state variation in take-up rates. Concerning the crowding out of private health insurance benefits, we find that between one-quarter and one-third of the increase in public health insurance coverage for SCHIP-eligible children is offset by a decline in private health coverage. We find little evidence that the policy-induced variation in take-up is associated with a significant degree of crowd out, and no evidence that the negative effect on private coverage caused by state policy choices is any greater than the overall crowding-out effect. This suggests that states are not augmenting take-up rates by enrolling children that are relatively more likely to have private health insurance benefits.