Election type and the logic of pre-election violence: Evidence from Zimbabwe

Election violence is often conceptualized as a form of coercive campaigning, but the literature has not fully explored how electoral institutions shape incentives for competition and violence. We argue that the logic of subnational electoral competition – and with it incentives for violence – differs in presidential and legislative elections. In presidential elections, national-level considerations dominate incentives for violence. Presidential elections are usually decided by winning a majority of votes in a single, national district, incentivizing parties to demobilize voters with violence in strongholds. In contrast, election violence is subject to district-level incentives in legislative elections. District-level incentives imply that parties focus on winning the majority of districts, and therefore center violent campaigning on the most competitive districts. We test our argument with georeferenced, constituency-level data from Zimbabwe, a case that fits our scope conditions of holding competitive elections, violence by the incumbent, and majoritarian electoral rule. We find that most violence takes place in strongholds in presidential elections, especially in opposition strongholds. In contrast, competitive constituencies are targeted in legislative contests.     

The impact of candidate name order on election outcomes in North Dakota

A number of studies have explored the possibility that the ordering of candidates' names on the ballot might influence how those candidates perform on election day. Strong evidence of an order effect comes from investigations of election returns in states that implemented quasi-random assignment of candidate name orders to voters. Although most such studies have identified benefits for earlier-listed candidates, much of the evidence comes from a limited set of elections in only a handful of states. This paper expands our understanding of order effects to 31 general elections held in North Dakota between 2000 and 2006; these include all state-wide races involving 2 candidates. A primacy effect appeared in 80% of the contests. The first ballot position reaped the largest benefits in non-partisan contests and in presidential election years. These findings are consistent with earlier studies from other states and provide evidence in line with proposals that a lack of information and ambivalence underlie candidate name order effects.     

Presidential elections in Finland: A plea for approval voting

The Finnish President is elected by an indirect method-the people elect special electors who carry out the final election. A proposal for a reform aiming at direct elections is, however, presently being considered. This paper agrees with this proposal and suggests that approval voting is a proper method for direct elections. Several properties of the approval voting system are discussed and the method is demonstrated to be superior to the plurality runoff method in presidential elections. It is argued that the approval voting system chooses a candidate who has overall support in the electorate and that the system therefore promotes the position of the President as a neutral and moderating political force.     

Fundamental models for forecasting elections at the state level

This paper develops new fundamental models for forecasting presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial elections at the state level using fundamental data. Despite the fact that our models can be used to make forecasts of elections earlier than existing models and they do not use data from polls on voting intentions, our models have lower out-of-sample forecasting errors than existing models. Our models also provide early and accurate probabilities of victory. We obtain this accuracy by constructing new methods of incorporating various economic and political indicators into forecasting models. We also obtain new results about the relative importance of approval ratings, economic indicators, and midterm effects in the different types of races, how economic data can be most meaningfully incorporated in forecasting models, the effects of different types of candidate experience on election outcomes, and that second quarter data is as predictive of election outcomes as third quarter data.     

The nationalization of presidential elections in the Americas

This article examines the nationalization of electoral change in presidential elections. It presents a technique to measure the national electoral swing and the subnational deviation in the electoral swing for each major presidential contender, for each consecutive pair of elections. The national swing indicates the uniform shift across electoral districts, whereas the subnational deviation indicates the extent of new district-level variation for any particular election. In addition, the nationalization score reveals the relative magnitude of the national and subnational components of district-level electoral change, which has the advantage of allowing comparisons across countries, parties, and elections. The article analyzes relative nationalization scores for all major candidates in 74 presidential elections from 14 countries in the Americas, and for electoral change that occurs between first and second round contests in majority run-off presidential elections.     

Do White In-group Processes Matter,Too? White Racial Identity and Support for Black Political Candidates

Scholars find that negative evaluations of Blacks lead Whites to vote against Black political candidates. However, can an in-group psychological process have the same effect? We consider White racial identity to be a strong candidate for such a process. We argue that the mere presence of a Black candidate cues the identity, reducing support for these candidates among Whites. We test this hypothesis on vote choice in seven instances. Five of them involve simple vote choice models: the 2008 and 2012 Presidential elections, and three elections in 2010: The Massachusetts Gubernatorial election, Black candidates for the US House, and Black candidates for the US Senate. The other two are tests of the notion that White racial identity reduced President Obama’s approval, thus reducing support for all Democratic Congressional candidates in the 2010 Midterm and 2012 Congressional elections. We find support for these notions in all seven cases, across these seven elections, using four different survey research datasets, and four different measures of White identity. Comparisons with other presidential elections show that White identity did not significantly affect mono-racial elections. Furthermore, we find the White identity and racial resentment results to be very similar in terms of their robustness and apparent effect sizes. This indicates in-group evaluations, and those that focus on out-groups, operate independently of one another.     

The December 1998 elections in Taiwan

The 5 December 1998 elections in Taiwan mark the first time that the national city mayoral elections and Legislative Yuan elections were held simultaneously. There was an increase in the number of candidates and seats for the Legislative Yuan election compared to the 1995 election; the Legislative Yuan sits for a three-year term. The mayoral elections in Taipei and Kaoshiung were the second direct popular elections featuring two well-known incumbents and two tough challengers vying for the four-year post. All Taiwanese elections in the 1990s were seen as referendums on the fate of the long-ruling Kuomintang, but many political commentators saw the 1999 elections as a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the presidential election in 2000.     

How campaigns promote the legitimacy of elections

Why do people see elections as fair or unfair? In prior accounts, evaluations of the election depend on people's candidate preferences, where supporters of the winning candidate tend to call the election fair while those on the losing side feel it was unfair. I argue that perceptions of election fairness reflect not just the election outcome, but also the campaign process. Using a set of multilevel models and data from the 1996–2004 American National Election Studies, I explore the consequences of campaign experiences in shaping people's evaluations of the fairness of a presidential election. I find that as campaign competition increases, people are less likely to translate their feelings about the candidates into their evaluations of the election. Rather than alienating citizens, competitive campaigns mitigate the effects of prior preferences in a way that promotes the legitimacy of elections.     

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.     

The relationship between bias and swing ratio in the Electoral College and the outcome of presidential elections

In this paper, I assess how the outcomes of presidential elections are affected by the presence (or lack) of partisan bias in the Electoral College. There have been three instances (1876, 1888 and 2000) since the end of the Civil War where the party that lost the popular vote won the Electoral College. These instances raise the question of whether partisan bias consistently influences presidential election outcomes? I answer this question by first measuring partisan bias and then using these estimates to assess how partisan bias affects a party's odds of winning a presidential election. I find that the presence of partisan bias provides a sizable, but not insurmountable, obstacle for the disadvantaged party.     

Truman defeats Dewey: The effect of campaign visits on election outcomes

Political science research suggests that campaign visits by presidential candidates produce small and short-lived effects, consistent with mixed findings of their influence on election returns. We argue that existing studies are constrained by two issues: most studies rely on state-level data, rather than more localized data, and do not incorporate differentiation in the quality of campaign appearances in their assessment of visit effects. To incorporate these concerns in a study of campaign visit effects on election outcomes, we study the 1948 presidential election, during which Harry Truman engaged in a major whistle-stop train tour and won a surprise victory over his opponent, Thomas Dewey. Using data on campaign stops gathered from archival sources, we estimate the effect of campaign appearances on candidate vote share at the county level. We find that Truman, on average, gained 3.06 percentage points of the overall vote share in counties that he visited. Consistent with contemporary judgments of the “quality” of the two candidates' campaign stops, we find no effect of Dewey's appearances on his performance. Our results provide strong evidence that candidate visits can influence electoral returns, rather than merely affect short-term public opinion. In counterfactual simulations, we show that Truman's extensive campaign tour likely won him the state of Ohio, highlighting the importance of strategic campaign decisions and campaign effects in close elections.     

Campaign Persuasion and Nascent Partisanship in Mexico's New Democracy

Despite ample evidence of preelection volatility in vote intentions in new democracies, scholars of comparative politics remain skeptical that campaigns affect election outcomes. Research on the United States provides a theoretical rationale for campaign effects, but shows little of it in practice in presidential elections because candidates’ media investments are about equal and voters’ accumulated political knowledge and partisan attachments make them resistant to persuasive messages. I vary these parameters by examining a new democracy where voters’ weaker partisan attachments and lower levels of political information magnify the effects of candidates’ asymmetric media investments to create large persuasion effects. The findings have implications for the generalizability of campaign effects theory to new democracies, the development of mass partisanship, candidate advertising strategies, and the specific outcome of Mexico's hotly contested 2006 presidential election. Data come primarily from the Mexico 2006 Panel Study.     

Yes we can! Valence politics and electoral choice in America, 2008

The claim that the 2008 presidential election was a transformative one is fast becoming part of the conventional wisdom of American politics. Despite the election’s undoubted significance, this paper argues that factors affecting voting decisions were strikingly similar to those operating in many previous presidential elections. Using data from the CCAP six-wave national election survey, we demonstrate that a valence politics model provides a powerful, parsimonious explanation of the ballot decisions Americans made in 2008. As is typical in presidential elections, candidate images had major effects on electoral choice. Controlling for several other relevant factors, racial attitudes were strongly associated with how voters reacted to the candidates. Other models of electoral choice, such as a Downsian issue-proximity model, are also relevant, but their explanatory power is considerably less than that provided by the valence politics model.     

The social desirability bias in autocrat's electoral ratings: evidence from the 2012 Russian presidential elections

In authoritarian regimes, election polls can be vastly polluted by measurement error, namely the social desirability bias, which can contribute to substantial inflation in the publicized estimates of an autocrat's electoral support and voter turnout, seeming to validate falsified election outcomes that match the inflated estimates. This study provides an in-depth analysis of the magnitude of social desirability bias in polling estimates released before and after the 2012 Russian presidential elections by focusing on the implications of Noelle-Neumann's “spiral of silence” theory. The empirical data analysis is based on list experiments from four data samples collected during the Russian presidential campaign. The estimated magnitude of the social desirability bias in Putin's electoral support is statistically significant and reaches approximately 15%. For voter turnout, however, I find social desirability bias of the same order as in Western democracies. My main conclusions are further validated by an alternative urns experiment conducted by one of the national pollsters. The detection of significant social desirability bias in the Russian presidential campaign raises the issue of survey research quality in authoritarian regimes and its effect on election outcomes.     

Evidence on the importance of spatial voting models in presidential nominations and elections

ADA scores and Nominate scores are used for the first time to examine the influence of spatial voting records on which candidate wins the party’s presidential nomination and on which nominee wins the general election. We find that the most conservative Republican candidate and moderately liberal Democrats were most likely to win their party’s nomination. For general elections we find that the candidate’s spatial record has nearly as much impact on the outcome as economic growth, which has been the focus of most past empirical research. The nominee whose voting record is more moderate is more likely to be elected.     

Anticandidate voting in the 1984 presidential election

Data from a national survey conducted in 1984 form the basis for a new analysis of anticandidate voting in presidential elections, i.e., voting focused more on a candidate one opposes than on a candidate one prefers. Anticandidate voting is viewed as the end product of a process whereby voters attempt to reduce discomfort that cross-pressures generate within their decision frameworks. In 1984, nearly a third of all likely voters said they were primarily motivated by a desire to voteagainst one of the two presidential candidates, a rate of anticandidate voting similar to that observed in the Johnson-Goldwater election of 1964 but well below that of the 1980 Reagan-Carter election. However, factors related to anticandidate voting in the past were not consistently linked to anticandidate voting in 1984. We conclude that the presence of Ronald Reagan exerted such a strong influence on the 1984 campaign that processes that would normally be observable, such as anticandidate voting, were overridden.     

Elections and the Development of Civil War: An Empirical Study of Sri Lanka

Present empirical research on the connection between elections and civil war often treats causality as a one-way effect because it focuses exclusively on either the onset or the consequence of civil war. What is omitted in the literature is the endogenous nature of the election–conflict nexus throughout a civil war. This article dedicates itself to filling that gap. Treating administrative units in conflict as part of a rebellion network, we apply a stochastic actor-oriented model (SAOM) to the case of Sri Lanka. We find that, on the one hand, rebellion is less likely to occur in Tamil regions if national winners in presidential elections enjoy high local approval ratings (selection effect). On the other hand, regions involved in the rebellion network converge in terms of their local support for the national winner of the presidency (influence effect). Overall, our model-based simulation analysis shows that the influence effect has a larger impact on the endogenous relationship than the selection effect.     

Economic voting and welfare programmes: Evidence from the American states

While scholars have hypothesised that a strong welfare state should reduce voters' incentives to base their votes on economic outcomes, evidence for this proposition remains mixed. This article tests whether differences in welfare protections across American states affect the relationship between economic performance and support for the president's party in 430 state legislative elections from 1970 to 1989. Analysing the results of over 42,000 contests in which an incumbent was running for re‐election, it finds that while unemployment insurance programmes do not affect the importance of economic performance, the electoral fortunes of presidential co‐partisans are less strongly tied to the national economy in states with generous anti‐poverty programmes. Thus by reducing vulnerability to poverty, economic safety‐nets lower the salience of the economy and provide electoral cover for politicians during economic slowdowns.     

Manufactured Responsiveness: The Impact of State Electoral Laws on Unified Party Control of the Presidency and House of Representatives, 1840–1940

The modern history of divided government in America suggests that the framers succeeded in creating a government unresponsive to popular passions. Yet in the nineteenth century the party winning the presidency almost always captured control of the House of Representatives. Why and how could nineteenth century national elections be so responsive that they resemble parliamentary outcomes? We identify electoral institutions present in the states that directly linked congressional elections to presidential coattails. Specifically, we estimate the impact of state ballot laws and the strategic design of congressional districts on presidential coattail voting from 1840 to 1940. We find that presidential elections, as mediated by state electoral laws, strongly account for unified party control of the House and the presidency throughout the nineteenth century.     

Markets vs. polls as election predictors: An historical assessment

Prediction markets have drawn considerable attention in recent years as a tool for forecasting elections. But how accurate are they? Do they outperform the polls, as some scholars argue? Do prices in election markets carry information beyond the horserace in the latest polls? This paper assesses the accuracy of US presidential election betting markets in years before and after opinion polling was introduced. Our results are provocative. First, we find that market prices are far better predictors in the period without polls than when polls were available. Second, we find that market prices of the pre-poll era predicted elections almost on par with polls following the introduction of scientific polling. Finally, when we have both market prices and polls, prices add nothing to election prediction beyond polls. To be sure, early election markets were (surprisingly) good at extracting campaign information without scientific polling to guide them. For more recent markets, candidate prices largely follow the polls.