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.     

Nail-biters and no-contests: The effect of electoral margins on satisfaction with democracy in winners and losers

Previous scholarship has found robust connections between winning an election and democratic system support. Building on this connection, our analysis theorizes an additional dimension of competitiveness existing in executive elections. We hypothesize a polarizing effect in close elections: that individuals feel the most satisfied after winning by a narrow margin, while losers will be most dissatisfied. Using survey data from eighteen national elections across eight countries, our findings support half of this expectation. Winner satisfaction with democratic systems is highest in close elections and erodes as margin increases. Losers' reported satisfaction is not affected by margin – those who lose by half a percent are indistinguishable in levels of system support from those who lose in landslides.     

The electoral consequences of racial fluidity

Brazilian politicians have seemingly adopted new racial identities en masse in recent years. What are the electoral consequences of asserting membership in a new racial group? In the Brazilian case, politicians who change how they racially identify themselves and secure greater access to campaign resources may become more electorally competitive. If voters learn a politician has changed their self-declared race, however, the politician’s reputation is likely to be tarnished and their chances of victory are likely to decline. Building on evidence that voters acquire greater information about election front-runners in high-profile contests than other types of politicians, I expect incumbents running for executive offices who change how they publicly identify themselves to suffer an electoral penalty. Drawing on data from local elections in Brazil, I find limited evidence that voters penalize city council candidates who adopt new racial identities. I show that incumbent mayors seeking reelection, however, receive significantly fewer votes after they assert membership in new racial groups.     

Coping with lengthy ballots

Given voters' limited cognitive abilities, the learning environments voters face may have implications for how voters learn and make decisions. One prominent feature of American elections is the variation in the length of the ballot across jurisdictions and elections. This paper explores the consequences of lengthy ballots on the ability of voters to learn about candidates. Using an experimental design and a dynamic information board (Lau and Redlawsk, 2006), subjects participate in a mock election where they are asked to gather information about a single election or multiple elections. The results indicate that while voters compare more information as ballot length increases, they spend significantly less time learning about individual pieces of candidate information.     

The effects of the electoral calendar on terrorist attacks

The goal of this paper is to study the linkages between the timing of terrorist events and elections. As strategic actors terrorists may respond to electoral environments by altering the frequency of their attacks around election times. Focusing on democracies, we examine variations in transnational and domestic terrorist incidents before elections over a 40 year span. We find distinct pre-electoral changes in the incidence of terrorist events. In the ITERATE data set, where only transnational terrorist events are included, terrorist activities decline in election months, while in the partitioned GTD data set, where only domestic terrorist events are kept, terrorist activities rise in election months. The findings suggest electoral calendars can dissuade and attract terrorist threats, depending on the origin of the threat, but these effects occur only very close to election time.     

Momentum in the polls raises electoral expectations

Voters rely on opinion polls to help them predict who is going to win elections. But they are regularly exposed to different polling results over time. How do changes in the polls affect their expectations? I show that when the polls indicate that a party’s support has increased, voters’ expectations for that party’s performance will be higher than they would be at the same vote share but without such evidence of growth, because the party appears to have momentum. Across six survey experiments in Britain (total N > 14,000), I find that this effect persists even when changes in vote share are well within the margin of error, when comparing a small change in vote share to consistently polling at the larger vote share, when the change makes little difference to a party’s objective probability of victory, and when voters have strong preferences that might colour their interpretation of the polls. In short, the appearance of momentum in the polls robustly raises voters’ expectations that a party will win an election. This finding has major implications for any area of research in political science where expectations feature, for theoretical understandings of how people perceive the future, and for salient policy debates about the regulation of opinion polls.     

The new research agenda studying electoral integrity

A rapidly-growing research agenda shared by scholars and applied policy analysts is beginning to explore three questions: when do elections meet standards of electoral integrity? When do they fail to do so? And what can be done to mitigate these problems?     

Economic development and democracy: An electoral connection

Scholars continue to debate whether economic development affects regime type. This article argues that a clear relationship exists between development and the electoral component of democracy, but not – or at least less so – between development and other components of broader understandings of democracy. This is so because development enhances the power resources of citizens and elections provide a focal point for collective action. The theory is tested with two new datasets – Varieties of Democracy and Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy – that allow us to disaggregate the concept of democracy into meso- and micro-level indicators. Results of these tests corroborate the theory: only election-centred indicators are robustly associated with economic development. This may help to account for apparent inconsistencies across extant studies and shed light on the mechanisms at work in a much-studied relationship. Further analysis shows that development affects electoral democracy by reducing electoral fraud, election violence and vote buying.     

Party expenditure and electoral prospects: a national level analysis of Britain

The effectiveness of campaign spending is a hotly contested issue. Much of that debate concentrates upon predetermined or assumed campaign periods. Yet, in a party and electoral system such as Britain, parties are continually campaigning. Party expenditure may therefore have a constant and cumulative effect. This article examines whether increased party spending at the national level is electorally significant. It analyses annual data from 1959 to 1994 and concludes that there is insufficient consistent evidence wholly to support this proposition.     

The electoral impact of the financial crisis: Evidence using district-level data

Do economic downturns increase voter support for left or right parties? In our empirical analysis, we combine fine-grained registry-data on the labor market impact of the crisis and how it varied across 5000 electoral districts, with district-level data on vote-shares for all major parties in Swedish parliamentary elections before and after the crisis. Because the impact was so diverse across districts, we can estimate the electoral impact of unemployment more efficiently than usual. Moreover, because the crisis was an external and unexpected shock to the Swedish economy, we argue that the selection bias that is usually inherent in estimating the electoral impact of unemployment is mitigated. We find that the electoral impact of crisis-induced unemployment was large, benefiting right parties.     

When long-distance relationships don't work out: Representational distance and satisfaction with democracy in Europe

We assess the impact of party representation on satisfaction with democracy. Our proposition is that such representation is not only about having a chosen party in government; citizens also derive satisfaction from having their views represented by a political party. We test this through an individual-level measure of policy (in)congruence: the ideological distance between a voter and his or her closest party. Via multi-level modelling of European Election Study data from 1989 to 2009, we find that perceived policy distance matters: the further away that voters see themselves from their nearest party – on either a left-right or a European unification policy dimension – the less satisfied they are with democracy. Notably, this effect is not moderated by party incumbency or size. Voters derive satisfaction from feeling represented by a nearby party even if it is small and out of office. Our results caution against a purely outcomes-driven understanding of democratic satisfaction.     

Electoral engineering in Chile: the electoral system and limited democracy

On the eve of Chile's transition from military to elected government, the outgoing regime enacted an electoral engineering project intended to conserve the constitutional order it encoded in 1980. An analysis of 1989 and 1993 general elections shows that the way votes are translated into seats favors, as intended, the second largest electoral block, the Chilean Right. This bias, along with the number of appointed senators and the special majorities required for constitutional amendments, gives the Right a minority veto power on any reform initiative. Moreover, the electoral system produces incentives for parties, candidates and voters that enhances this balance of power. The role that the electoral system plays in Chile therefore consolidates a limited form of democracy, rather than a liberal one.     

Female representation and electoral clientelism: New insights from South African municipal electionss

Do citizens experience less electoral clientelism in polities with more elected female representatives? The current literature is remarkably silent on the role of gender and female political representation for electoral clientelism. Due to gender differences in issue priorities, targeted constituent groups, networks and resources, we argue that voters experience less clientelism in municipalities with a higher proportion of female politicians because either female politicians are likely to engage less in clientelism or women are less likely to be viable candidates in more clientelist settings. Through either mechanism, we expect all voters – and female voters in particular – to experience less exposure to clientelism in municipalities with higher female representation. We examine this idea using survey data from the 2016 municipal elections in South Africa – a country with high levels of female representation in politics but increasing problems of corruption and patronage in the political system. Our findings are consistent with the argument that municipalities with more elected female councilors have considerably lower rates of electoral clientelism and that this mostly affects whether female voters are targeted by clientelist distribution. These findings shed new light on how women's representation in elected political office shapes the incidence and use of clientelist distribution during elections.     

The relative electoral impact of central party co-ordination and size of party membership at constituency level

Over the past decade, clear evidence has been produced showing that effective constituency campaigning in British general elections can lead to better electoral performance. This evidence has challenged the received wisdom that only national campaigning is significant and that efforts at local level are meaningless rituals. Denver et al. have focused on the role of the national parties in strengthening local campaigns in target seats; Seyd and Whiteley, by contrast, have stressed the importance of local party membership. This article attempts to assess the relative electoral impact of national party co-ordination and constituency party membership and suggests that the impact of these two factors varies by party.     

Information,perceptions, and electoral behaviour of young voters: A randomised controlled experiment

The way people absorb and process politically relevant information is central to their subsequent political behaviour (in terms of turnout and vote choice). Nonetheless, little is known about how young voters – who might be more impressionable than more experienced voters – respond to the provision of such information. In this article, we design a between-subject randomised controlled trial that exposes a sample of university students to positive, neutral or negative information about central government performance before the 2017 Portuguese local elections. We find that young voters update their perceptions more when exposed to negative news. This negativity bias is stronger for first-time voters. We also find that negative information significantly affects turnout of initially undecided young voters. Our results imply that sensitivity to information is heterogeneous and that some young voters may be prone to manipulation through the provision of negative news.     

Party system dynamics in post-war Japan: A quantitative content analysis of electoral pledges

Qualitative accounts of Japanese party politics allude to the standard left-right spectrum, but they invariably devote much more space to discussions of foreign policy differences than to socioeconomic conflict. Quantitative estimates of Japanese party positions treat short party responses to newspaper interviews as if they were true manifestos, and fail both to confirm the claims of the qualitative literature and to demonstrate any consistent basis for party differentiation at all. We address both puzzles by applying a text scaling algorithm to electoral pledges to estimate Japanese party positions on three major policy dimensions. Our analysis largely confirms the findings of the qualitative literature, but also offers new insights about party movement and polarization over time.     

Politics by denunciation: Political whistleblowing against members of parliament in Italy

Judicial investigations into politicians are a fundamental component of politics, with these investigations often leading to public scandals. Yet, empirical evidence of the strategic determinants of judicial investigations is intrinsically hard to gather, a problem that has significantly limited the study of this important phenomenon. This paper studies the politics behind judicial investigations by leveraging new data on prosecutors’ informants in 1125 episodes of misbehavior of Italian MPs involved in different crimes (1983–2019). Results provide evidence in favor of a political use of denunciations for corruption crimes: when a party weakens, the likelihood that political enemies denounce past misbehavior of members of the weakened party increases, suggesting that the political use of denunciation is elastic to changes in the electoral performance. Furthermore, weakened MPs are more likely to be accused of misbehavior that happened a long time before the accusation, which further supports the argument that accusations are politically motivated.     

Second-order effects plus pan-European political swings: An analysis of European Parliament elections across time

After seven waves of European Parliament elections and European Union enlargement to 27 states, the time is ripe to analyse the temporal robustness of the second-order model. We pool all the elections in a single evaluation and also look at election-by-election variations. We analyse changes in party performance over time in all EU states as well as in the ‘original 10’, to see whether any cross-time changes are driven by the changing composition of the EU. We also look for pan-European trends in each election, as a way identifying ‘European effects’ distinct from second-order effects. There are few consistent winners and losers, although socialist parties performed worse in the last three elections than their size and government status would predict.     

Electoral outcomes and satisfaction with democracy: A comparison of regional and national elections

Subnational governments have become more numerous and more powerful around the world, increasing the importance of subnational elections. However, we still know little about the impact of regional electoral outcomes on citizens' political support, and there is no systematic comparison of the impact of election outcomes on citizens' satisfaction with democracy. In this research note, we provide such a comparison by investigating how the winner-loser gap in citizens’ satisfaction with democracy differs across regional and national elections. Using data from Canada, Germany and Spain, we first show that there is a winner-loser gap in satisfaction with democracy following regional elections. The winner-loser gap at the regional level is, however, substantially smaller than the one generated by national election outcomes. Next, we find heterogeneous effects for voters who believe that the regional government strongly influences their quality of life. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings.