The effect of electoral rules on voting behavior: the electoral college and shift voting

The Electoral College has a measurable effect on the propensity of the rational voter to vote for the candidate he most prefers. The ‘slippage’ between the individual's articulated preference ordering and his actual vote is analyzed (using 1968 data) with respect to the strategic position of the voter in his state. The direction of the findings support the theoretically-derived propositions. Nevertheless, the low overall incidence of shifts and the reluctance of voters to shift from nationally-viable candidates demonstrates the overwhelming influence of the national electoral environment.     

Income-based voting and polarization over redistribution under alternative electoral systems

Democracies that have proportional electoral systems spend substantively more on welfare policies than those that have majoritarian systems. Theoretical accounts of this empirical regularity are generally tested using macro-level data, leaving micro-level implications untested. In this paper, I take an alternative approach, leveraging the fact that the theories in question make predictions about the electoral coordination between parties and voters around broad-based redistribution under alternative institutional arrangements. To test the theories, I create a novel measure of income-based voting, which captures the sensitivity of vote choice to changes in income and forms the dependent variable in a second stage model. Overall, I find robust support for more proportionality leading to more income-based voting.     

Ticket-splitting and strategic voting under mixed electoral rules: Evidence from Germany

Abstract.  There is more to strategic voting than simply avoiding wasting one's vote if one is liberated from the corset of studying voting behavior in plurality systems. Mixed electoral systems provide different voters with diverse incentives to cast a strategic vote. They not only determine the degree of strategic voting, but also the kind of strategies voters employ. Strategic voters employ either a wasted-vote or a coalition insurance strategy , but do not automatically cast their vote for large parties as the current literature suggest. This has important implications for the consolidation of party systems. Moreover, even when facing the same institutional incentives, voters vary in their proclivity to vote strategically.     

On the mismeasurement of sincere and strategic voting in mixed-member electoral systems

Under mixed systems, voters cast two votes to elect the same legislative body: one vote for parties using proportional rules and one for candidates using majoritarian rules. Voters are said to cast straight-tickets if the candidate they vote for is of the same party as their proportional vote; otherwise, they are said to cast split-tickets. Split-ticket voting is commonly used as a measure of strategic voting as splitters are usually assumed to express their true preference in one vote but vote strategically in the other. This study challenges this practice showing that split-ticket voting does not necessarily indicate strategic voting, just as straight-ticket voting does not necessarily indicate a sincere vote. This result has wider consequences as it indicates that measuring strategic voting from observed behaviour can result in incorrect conclusions about vote choice.     

Economic voting in provincial elections: Revisiting electoral accountability in the Canadian provinces

ABSTRACT

We examine the outcomes of the provincial elections having been held in Canada since the Great Recession and compare them with outcomes from past decades. Given the severity of the 2008 financial crisis, we test for whether provincial governments’ electoral fortunes over the recent period have been negatively impacted by this important economic shock. Our analyses of aggregate-level provincial electoral outcomes: (1) confirm that provincial incumbent parties are held accountable for provincial economic conditions; (2) show that this provincial economic voting pattern has been heightened during the financial crisis; and (3) demonstrate that provincial incumbents also incur vote share losses when national economic conditions worsen and their respective family party is in power at the federal level, although this referendum voting pattern appears to have been unaffected by the financial crisis.     

Voter satisfaction and electoral systems: Does preferential voting in candidate-centred systems make a difference?

Abstract.  Over the years, many scholars have examined the relationship between electoral systems and measures of voter satisfaction with democracy. The tendency in these studies has been to explore the traditional Proportional Representation/non-Proportional-Representation dichotomy, assessing whether more proportional systems produce higher levels of satisfaction. This article examines another dimension of electoral system variation – namely the degree to which the ballot structure incorporates ordinal, or preferential features. Given that proponents of such systems extol their virtues as offering voters 'greater choice', it is interesting to explore how this actually plays with the voters. The article makes use of cross-national data from the comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project to examine the relationship between preferential voting and levels of satisfaction with democracy.     

Mexicans react to electoral fraud and political corruption: an assessment of public opinion and voting behavior

Despite various electoral reforms enacted in Mexico between 1988 and 1994, large numbers of Mexicans doubted the honesty of elections and the general integrity of their country's policy making process. Such doubts did not automatically lead, however, to support for opposition parties that called for greater democratization. Rather, voter preferences were largely dependent on judgments about the opposition's viability and competence. Widespread suspicions about fraud and corruption in Mexico did affect electoral outcomes by making it less likely that potential opposition supporters turned out to vote. Data are drawn from seven national public opinion surveys conducted in Mexico in 1986, 1988, 1991, 1994 (3 polls), and 1995.     

The electoral consequences of austerity: economic policy voting in Europe in times of crisis

Abstract

Voters typically observe macroeconomic outcomes in order to evaluate government performance. However, during crises, when the clarity of economic responsibility is poor and the economy is in recession, citizens need additional sources of information in order to form a reasoned opinion. Government policy response is one such source. This study shows on a sample of 24 European nations from 2004, 2009 and 2014 that in the post-crisis period, economic policies have emerged as one of the key predictors of vote choice, with government decisions to pursue fiscal austerity leading to significantly lower levels of incumbent support. Furthermore, the paper tests the possibility that the effect of austerity is conditioned by the clarity of responsibility. In multilevel systems, where policies are externally imposed, voters could be expected to hold incumbents less accountable for unpopular measures. The analysis, however, provides no evidence that policy effects depend on the extent to which national governments share policy responsibilities with supranational and intergovernmental institutions. Accountability for policy actions is primarily attributed at the domestic level as voters are able to identify the decisional role of national governments.     

Attitudes to voting rules and electoral system preferences: Evidence from the 1999 and 2003 Scottish Parliament elections

Researchers have paid little attention to the way citizens evaluate different electoral systems. This reflects the limited knowledge citizens are presumed to have about alternative electoral arrangements. However, the establishment of a legislature under new electoral rules creates conditions in which citizens can make more informed judgements. Such a situation occurred with the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, elected under the Additional Member system. Using data collected in 1999 and 2003, we consider Scottish voters’ reactions to the new electoral rules. We examine how voters evaluated various features and outcomes of the rules, the structure of voters’ attitudes, and which features and outcomes of the rules were decisive in shaping overall support for plurality and proportional voting systems.     

Voter preferences and party loyalty under cumulative voting: Political behaviour after electoral reform in Bremen and Hamburg

Many electoral systems constrain voters to one or two votes at election time. Reformers often see this as a failing because voters' preferences are both broader and more varied than the number of choices allowed. New electoral systems therefore often permit more preferences to be expressed. In this paper we examine what happens when cumulative voting is introduced in two German states. Even when we allow for tactical considerations, we find that the principle of unconstrained choice is not widely embraced by voters, although in practice, too, many seem to have preferences for more than just one party. This finding has implications for arguments relating to electoral reform as well as how to conceive of party affiliations in multi-party systems.     

Behavioral consequences of mixed electoral systems: Deviating voting behavior of district and list MPs in the German Bundestag

Electoral rules should affect parliamentary behavior. In particular, deputies elected from single-member districts should be more likely to deviate from the party line than deputies elected under proportional representation. This paper suggests a framework for conceptualizing and modeling the effect of the type of mandate on deputies’ propensity to cast deviating votes in mixed electoral systems. The proposed modeling strategy uses disaggregated voting data and integrates dependencies among observations in a multi-level design. Empirically, the paper analyses voting behavior in the 16th German Bundestag (2005–2009) and shows that the odds of district MPs to deviate are significantly higher despite frequent claims that the two types of MPs behave alike. However, the behavioral differences cannot be attributed to attempts by district MPs to follow their local constituents as competing principals.     

The electoral roots of unequal representation. A spatial modelling approach to party systems and voting in Western Europe

For a number of Western democracies, it has been observed that the preferences of poor and rich citizens are unequally represented in political institutions and outcomes. Yet, the causes of this phenomenon are still under debate. We focus on the role of elections in this process, by disentangling biases towards different income groups that stem from the party system and from voters’ behaviour. Our aim is to uncover whether elections as selection mechanisms contribute to unequal representation by analysing factors of the supply and demand sides of the electoral process. On the supply side, we focus on the congruence of parties’ policy offers and voters’ preference distributions. This shapes citizens’ possibilities to express their policy preferences. On the demand side, we are interested in the extent to which citizens from different income groups base their vote decisions on their policy preferences. The empirical analysis relies on the European Social Survey and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and covers 13 Western European countries. Our results indicate, first, that the economic and cultural preferences of poor and rich citizens differ significantly, and second, that party systems in the countries under investigation represent the lowest income groups the worst, and the middle income groups the best. This makes it difficult for citizens at both the lower and the higher end of the income distribution to voice their preferences in elections. Additionally, we show that low income citizens tend to take policy less into consideration when making an electoral choice than richer citizens. Thus, while the rich make up for their representation bias by taking policy more into account in their voting behaviour, the electoral stage poses another obstacle for the poor to overcome the representation bias. In summary it can be said that already on the supply side there is an unbalanced disadvantage in terms of representation for the very poor and the very rich, but the pattern leads to an even more asymmetrical misrepresentation of the poor due to the election act.     

Campaigning and split-ticket voting in new electoral systems: the first MMP elections in New Zealand, Scotland and Wales

New electoral systems create learning problems for parties and electors: the parties have to learn how to focus their campaigns and the electors how best to use their votes. This was the case in three countries in the late 1990s where MMP was used for the first time rather than first-past-the-post: New Zealand in 1996 and Scotland and Wales in 1999. MMP involves each elector voting twice — for a candidate in a single-member constituency contest and for a party in a regional/national list contest. Survey and (in New Zealand) official data show that substantial proportions of the three electorates voted a split ticket — the candidate they supported was from a different party to that they voted for in the list contest. (Approximately one-in-five did this in Scotland and Wales and two-in-five in New Zealand.) We argue that split-ticket voting will be influenced by the amount of information received by electors regarding the candidates for the constituency seats. Using the amount of campaign expenditure by each candidate as a measure of the volume of information provided, we find strong supporting evidence for this responsive voter model in each of the three countries.     

Expressive voting and identity: evidence from a case study of a group of U.S. voters

The source of evidence on expressive voting has been experiments, in general conducted with students. In Why are Jews Liberals? Norman Podhoretz describes behavior that substantiates the hypothesis that people vote expressively to confirm identity. He does not use the terminology of expressive voting but his study is readily interpretable in an expressive-behavior context. Podhoretz describes liberal Jews in the U.S. as expressively voting contrary to self-interest to confirm allegiance to liberalism, which he terms a ??new religion??. Traditional Jews do not require the identity of the new religion and vote in accord with their self-interest. I propose another interpretation of voting by liberal Jews in which expressive utility is not contrary to self-interest.     

Existence of a ‘structurally stable’ equilibrium for a non-collegial voting rule

This essay shows that, for any non-collegial voting rule, σ, there exists an integer, s(σ), with this property: if the policy space, W, has dimension no greater than s(σ), then there exists a profile of smooth utilities on W, such that the core for σ at this profile is non-empty and ‘structurally stable’ under sufficiently small perturbation. We also show how we may compute s(σ) for an arbitrary rule. This material is based upon work supported by NSF grant SES-84-18296, to the School of Social Sciences, University of California at Irvine. An early draft was written while the author was Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology. Thanks are due to Kenneth Shepsle, Dick McKelvey and Gary Cox for helpful comments, to Michael Chwe and Shaun Bowler for research assistance, and to Derek Hearl and Ian Budge for permission to make use of unpublished data.