Differential Influences on Latino Electoral Participation

Relying on the Voter Supplement File of the November 2000 Current Population Survey (CPS), this study assesses sociodemographic influences on the registration status and turnout of Latino citizens in the United States. Latinos' deficits on socioeconomic status and social-connectedness largely account for their lower levels of participation. This study also provides a thorough assessment of whether and of how the influences on electoral participation differ between Anglos and Latinos. Noteworthy findings emerge. Whereas formal education and marriage demonstrate greater influence on the participation of Anglos, Latinos reap greater participatory benefits from age.     

Generations and Socialization into Electoral Participation in Finland

This article examines the extent to which political socialization accounts for generational differences in electoral participation found in recent studies. Political socialization is defined as the learning process in which an individual adopts various political attitudes, values and patterns of actions from his or her environment. The analysis is based on the Finnish National Elections Study 2003. The results show that even though politics has had the smallest role during the formative years of the youngest generation and they most often do not know their parents' partisanship, this generation has received the most encouragement for voting and the attitudinal change towards voting within an individual's life span has been the most positive. Consequently, the study shows that if there were no differences in the socialization between the youngest and the older generations, the difference in turnout would be larger if only sex and socioeconomic factors were taken into account. Based on these results, the author draws the conclusion that, rather than political socialization, the factors behind the low turnout among the young generation have to be searched for elsewhere.     

Electoral Competition, Participation, and Government Responsiveness in Mexico

In this article I test two competing visions about how democracy produces responsive government. Electoral theories of democracy posit that elected governments are responsive to public demands because citizens are able to sanction bad politicians and select good ones. Participatory theories attribute responsiveness to a citizenry's ability to articulate demands and pressure government through a wider range of political action. I test hypotheses derived from these two approaches, using an original dataset that combines electoral, socioeconomic, and public-financial indicators for Mexico's 2,400 municipalities, from 1989 to 2000. The data show that electoral competition has no effect on municipal government performance. But the results are consistent with the hypothesis that nonelectoral participation causes improved performance. Thus, I suggest that the quality of municipal government in Mexico depends on an engaged citizenry and cooperation between political leaders and their constituents, rather than the threat of electoral punishment. I recommend that scholars broaden the study of government responsiveness to account for participatory strategies of political influence and critically assess the claims of those who would promote elections as a cure-all for poor democratic performance.     

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.     

Residential Mobility, Community Mobility, and Electoral Participation

This article investigates why Americans who move have lower voter turnout than those who stay put. Two hypotheses are drawn from the political science literature. One emphasizes the need to register at one's new address in order to vote. The other locates the cause of lower turnout in the disruption of social connections that results from moving. By distinguishing those who change residences within their communities from those who move outside of their communities, I test the hypotheses. The findings show that both types of moves affect turnout. However, changing residences appears to be more important than changing communitites. Thus it appears that the explanation for the relationship between moving and turnout derives more from the need to register after moving than the disruption of social ties.     

It's Only Made Things Worse: A Critique of Electoral Reform in Britain

Since it came to power, New Labour has introduced a range of new electoral system into the British political system, implicitly accepting the argument that Britain's traditional electoral system - first-past-the-post (FPTP) - has been a cause of voter disenchantment with Britain's representative democracy. In this article, it is asserted that Labour's reforms have merely compounded this problem, while demonstrating that all electoral systems have significant flaws. Indeed, it is argued that the flaws of the new systems are more serious than those of FPTP and threaten an even greater disconnection between UK politicians and the people they represent."     

The Electoral Impact of Constituency Campaigning in Britain, 1992–2001

Political parties maintain local organisations and recruit members mainly to fight elections. For most of the post-war period, however, the dominant view among analysts has been that constituency campaigning in British general elections has little or no effect on election outcomes. This view has been challenged over the last ten years or so. Evidence derived from post-election surveys of constituency election agents following the 1992, 1997 and 2001 general elections is used here to show that the intensity of constituency campaigning significantly affects turnout levels and, for Labour and the Liberal Democrats, levels of party support. There is also some evidence that Conservative campaigning affected constituency variations in the party's performance in 2001. The conclusions reached on the basis of aggregate-level analysis are supported by analysis of individual-level data derived from British Election Study surveys. The effects of campaigning are not large, but they are clear and significant – and sufficient to affect the numbers of seats won by the major parties. In the light of this, parties have good reasons to maintain healthy local organisations.     

Does Economic Inequality Depress Electoral Participation? Testing the Schattschneider Hypothesis

Nearly a half-century ago, E.E. Schattschneider wrote that the high abstention and large differences between the rates of electoral participation of richer and poorer citizens found in the United States were caused by high levels of economic inequality. Despite increasing inequality and stagnant or declining voting rates since then, Schattschneider’s hypothesis remains largely untested. This article takes advantage of the variation in inequality across states and over time to remedy this oversight. Using a multilevel analysis that combines aspects of state context with individual survey responses in 144 gubernatorial elections, it finds that citizens of states with greater income inequality are less likely to vote and that income inequality increases income bias in the electorate, lending empirical support to Schattschneider’s argument.     

Differential Responsiveness in Europe: The Effects of Preference Difference and Electoral Participation

As a core principle of contemporary democracy, political representation has been the subject of numerous studies. In particular, responsiveness has been thoroughly examined and research suggests that policies tend to reflect citizens’ preferences. However, it has also been argued that, in some instances, responsiveness systematically reflects the preferences of the rich better than those of the poor, hence violating a second democratic principle, that of political equality. While much research has focused on the United States, this study tests whether differential responsiveness also occurs in European democracies and enquires about the structural factors that may cause such inequality. The article examines to what extent the preference gap between the rich and the poor as well as the level of electoral participation can account for variation in differential responsiveness. To do this, a dataset including information on 25 European countries from 2002 to 2010 is constructed and analysed using time-series cross-sectional methods. The findings suggest that European democracies experience differential responsiveness and that the preference gap and level of turnout partly account for this.     

Electoral Participation in Pursuit of Policy Representation: Ideological Congruence and Voter Turnout

In this article, we examine whether lack of ideological congruence with the viable party options discourages turnout, and under which conditions. We conceive congruence from the perspective of the individual citizen, and, drawing on policy-based arguments for non-voting, we hypothesize that: having no party in the political menu sharing similar views should especially reduce turnout of citizens holding extremist views and that this effect would be greatest in proportional electoral systems. Relying on data collected by the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), we show that lack of congruence with the electoral menu reduces extremists’ turnout and does so particularly in PR systems.     

Citizen Participation Models in the Local Government

This research pretends to propose and test a new explanatory model relating to citizen participation, which will help us to implement participatory public policies in the local government scheme, comparing with the models of citizen participation derivatives of structural theories and choice theories. The author refers to the case of Spain and he tests five hypotheses derived from these theories, using structural equations. This study used an open and cross-sectional design. He uses ＂Citizenship, Participation and Democracy Survey＂ from Sociological Research Center of Spain. The model proposed in this study has taken into account both structural variables from the macro context of participation （political opportunity structure） and individual variables （individual resources）, thus considering that the most recent literature on citizen participation tells us that it is necessary to overcome the reductionist perspectives limited to individual factors. Based on the above, we saw the importance of structural variables and individual variables for the participation of people. In line with that, we find that a citizen is involved in participatory policy when they have individual resources such as education, interest in politics, non-political disaffection, civic social norms, personal effectiveness, and community pride. Another find from this research, according to the empirical results, is that structural variables are predictive of citizen participation： resources, mobilization, membership of deprived group, economic deprivation, interpersonal trust, membership of associations, ties to the local community, and membership of an informal network.     

Participation in the Budgetary Process in Local Government

Direct democracy is seen as a means of reengaging citizens in the political process. However, it is a contested concept that requires further development by being grounded in a specific context. This article reports on research undertaken in Victorian local government where the New Public Management (NPM) has been in evidence for a number of decades which according to the literature has impacted on accountability to the broader community. The possibility of consultation and citizen participation in the local government budgetary process was examined. The results reported suggest that participation in the budgetary decisions in local government is possible.     

To Participate or Not to Participate: The Link Between Survey Participation, Electoral Participation, and Political Interest

Survey participation, electoral participation, and politicalinterest have been given wide attention in the research literature,but no one so far has combined these three variables in onemodel. Taking the social isolation-hypothesis as our startingpoint, we developed a model with one factor, social involvement,as the common factor underlying these three types of participation.We reviewed the literature and concluded that we had to includea second underlying factor: attachment to society. Using a newdata set, gathered on the occasion of the 1998 Dutch nationalelections and including validated voter turnout measures, wewere able to test the model. After making some adaptions, wefound a model with a satisfactory fit. The results show that,by including social involvement and attachment to society asmediating variables, we can reach much higher levels of explainedvariances of survey and electoral participation than we canwith traditional models. The results also add to our understandingof the relationship between survey and electoral participationand political interest.     

Interdependence Effects in Mixed-Superposition Electoral Systems: An Empirical Test on Women's Participation in Sub-national Elections

Mixed-superposition electoral systems, while devoid of compensatory mechanisms interconnecting their proportional and non-proportional sections, may create effective linkages that exert some impact upon the behaviour of political parties. This article examines the resulting interdependence effects with respect to women's electoral participation and legislative representation. It is hypothesized that if political parties embrace the logic of ticket-balancing when forming their candidate lists in the proportional representation sections of elections, they become more willing to nominate female candidates in majoritarian districts, which creates an important interdependence effect that ultimately contributes to the increased levels of women's representation. This hypothesis is empirically tested on a sample of 139 sub-national elections held in Russia in 2003–2011, with some additional information derived from the results of 81 previously held elections. The statistical analysis confirms the presence of interdependence effects with respect to women's political participation. The principal contextual factor that intermediates the observed effects is political regime. It is shown that electoral authoritarianism mitigates the interdependence effects of mixed-superposition electoral systems.     

The New Racial Calculus: Electoral Institutions and Black Representation in Local Legislatures

In this study we revisit the question of black representation on city councils and school boards using a novel substantive and methodological approach and longitudinal data for a sample of over 300 boards and councils. Conceptualizing black representation as a two-stage process, we fit Mullahy's hurdle Poisson models to explain whether and to what extent blacks achieve representation in local legislatures. We find that while the size of the black population and electoral arrangements matter more than ever, especially for overcoming the representational hurdle, the extent to which the black population is concentrated is also strongly associated with black council representation. Further, whereas black resources and opportunities to build "rainbow" coalitions with Latinos or liberal whites are marginally if at all related to black legislative representation, we find that legislative size is an underappreciated mechanism by which to increase representation, particularly in at-large systems, and is perhaps the best predictor of moving towards additional representation.     

Electoral Cycles and Turnout in Multilevel Electoral Systems

This article differentiates between three ways in which electoral cycles may impact on participation in elections. First, it identifies a simultaneity effect – turnout increases to the extent that elections are held on the same date. A second effect is voter fatigue – turnout declines when another election has just been held before. Poll voting is a third effect. It suggests that turnout increases when another election is to be held shortly after. On the basis of a novel dataset that includes 2,915 regional elections held in 317 regions and 18 countries from 1945 to 2009, evidence is found for all three effects. The results point towards a basic dilemma in multilevel electoral systems: increase turnout by holding elections on the same date but accept high vote congruence across elections or decouple election cycles, which decreases vote congruence but lowers participation rates.     

Revenue Source and Electoral Accountability: Experimental Evidence from Local US Policymakers

Political Behavior - Existing research suggests that tax-reliant governments are more accountable to citizens. This pattern is consistent with micro-level evidence that citizens who are taxed are...