Platforms,media and voters

Abstract The paper presents data on party platforms, political communication and public opinion in the 1996 Italian election campaign. It is shown that the electoral platforms of the two major coalitions were largely overlapping, except for some economic and social issues. The centre–right coalition seemed more inclined to adopt pro–market policies, while the platform of the Ulivo coalition was more oriented toward a social partnership approach. In the month before the elections, policy issues were discussed on television more extensively than political issues. Public and private networks covered the 1996 election campaign at the same level as in 1994 and to some extent with the same bias. Voting intentions seem to have remained stable prior to and during the electoral campaign.     

Outsourcing in US cities, ambulances and elderly voters

This paper develops a public choice model of city service provision, and uses empirical analysis to pin down some of the model’s key assumptions. Many of the largest cities in the United States outsource emergency medical services, and analysis of data from the 200 largest US cities finds that a number of variables are significant determinants of emergency ambulance outsourcing, including the fraction of a city’s voters over the age of 65. This finding provides evidence that elderly voters are important in policy determination, and suggests a particular shape for the model’s contracting cost curve.     

Chameleon voters and public choice

A model is presented of an open-voting public choice process that features pressure groups vying for society's support. Individuals choose what policy to advocate on the basis of their private preferences, which are those they would express in a secret ballot; endogenous social pressures; and the utility they gain from integrity. They falsify their preferences when the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs. An implication is that a policy advocated by few people in private might receive strong public support. The paper goes on to explore why secret voting, which eliminates this possibility, might not be adopted.     

Immigrants as future voters

Public Choice - Immigration policies in western democracies have often been contrary to the predictions of the mainstream theory of international economics. Political parties that are predicted to...     

Policy-Motivated Candidates,Noisy Platforms,and Non-Robustness

This paper develops a model of a two-candidate election inwhich the candidates are mainly office-motivated but also tosome (arbitrarily small) extent policy-motivated, and theirchosen platforms are to some (arbitrarily small) extent noisy.The platforms' being noisy means that if a candidate haschosen a particular platform, the voter's perception is thatshe has, with positive probability, actually chosen some otherplatform. It is shown that (i) an equilibrium in which thecandidates play pure exists whether or not there is aCondorcet winner among the policy alternatives, and (ii) inthis equilibrium the candidates choose their own favoriteplatforms, which means that the platforms do not converge.     

1 dictator = 2 voters

For the case of strict preferences, a measure of a voter’s average power in a dictatorial social welfare function is defined making the dictator never have more average power than three voters and, as the number of voters grows, making the dictator average power converge to the average power of two voters. This result suggests, as those in Tangian (2004), that dictatorial social welfare functions might not be as undesirable aggregation rules as traditionally held.     

Activating voters in congressional elections

This paper shows that one of the consequences of electoral campaigns is activation. Much research in the last decade has shown that campaign spending is related to electoral outcomes, but nearly all of this research has been conducted on district-level data, so we do not know how campaigns influence individual voters. This research returns to the theoretical framework offered inThe People's Choice and shows that at least part of the effect of campaigns is due to the increased likelihood of people voting when campaigns are more intense.     

Late-deciding voters in presidential elections

This article examines the behavior of voters who decide on their presidential candidate preferences within the final two weeks of the presidential campaigns. Relying on data from American National Election Studies (ANES) for elections, between 1972 and 1988, we demonstrate that late deciders are different from other voters in a variety of respects. They are less involved politically and far less predictable in their behavior than other voters. More significantly, we find that the candidate preferences of late deciders are not determined by the conventional political forces that motivate other voters. Rather, the choices that late deciders make appear to be nearly random in character. The implications of these findings for the analysis of electorates are discussed.     

Elite communication and affective polarization among voters

How does elite communication influence affective polarization between partisan groups? Drawing on the literature on partisan source cues, we expect that communication from in- or outgroup party representatives will increase affective polarization. We argue that polarized social identities are reinforced by partisan source cues, which bias perceptions of elite communication and result in increased intergroup differentiation. Further, we expect that the effect of such source cues is greater for voters with stronger partisan affinities. To evaluate our hypotheses, we performed a survey experiment among about 1300 voters in Sweden. Our analyses show that individuals who received a factual political message with a source cue from an in- or outgroup representative exhibited higher affective polarization, especially when they already held strong partisan affinities. This suggests that political elites can increase affective polarization by reinforcing existing group identities, and that this occurs in conjunction with biased interpretation of elite communication. The results improve our understanding of how political elites can influence affective polarization and add to previous research on party cues and attitude formation by demonstrating that such source cues can also increase intergroup differentiation.     

Median voters,political systems and public policies: An empirical test

This paper tests the median voter hypothesis that variations in policies across political systems are caused by variations in median voter preferences. The context of the empirical analysis is the tax policies of three groups of sub-national governments in England in three time periods. The results of a median voter model of tax policy variation are compared to the results of a mean voter model in different party systems and different electoral systems. The evidence provides little support for the median voter hypothesis.     

The political consequences of uninformed voters

Americans fail to meet the democratic ideal of an informed electorate, and the consequences of this political ignorance are a topic of significant scholarly debate. In two independent settings, we experimentally test the effect of political information on citizens' attitudes toward the major parties in the U.S. When uninformed citizens receive political information, they systematically shift their political preferences away from the Republican Party and toward the Democrats. A lack of knowledge on the policy positions of the parties significantly hinders the ability of low-socioeconomic-status citizens to translate their preferences into partisan opinions and vote choices. As a result, American public opinion—and potentially election results and public policy as a result—is significantly different from the counterfactual world in which all voters are informed.     

Leaders, voters and activists in the elections in Great Britain 2005 and 2010

Discussion of the relationship between parties and the electorate is often based on the notion of partisan constituencies, that parties adopt policy positions that correspond to the average position of the party supporters. In contrast, the Downsian “spatial model” assumes that parties are purely opportunistic and maneuver to gain as many votes as possible. A third, more empirical model, based on the early work of Stokes, assumes that voter choice is based on the evaluation of each of the party leader’s competence or ability to deliver policy success. Such an evaluation can be provided by individual voter overall assessment in terms of the leaders’ character traits.This paper attempts to relate these three classes of models by examining the elections in Great Britain in 2005 and 2010. Using the British Election Study, we construct spatial models of these elections in Great Britain as well as in the three regions of England, Scotland and Wales. The models incorporate the electoral perceptions of character traits. We compare the equilibrium vote maximizing positions with the partisan positions, estimated by taking the mean of each of the parties voters’ preferred positions. We define an equilibrium to be a stable attractor if the vote share at the equilibrium exceeds the share at the partisan position by a significant proportion (determined by the implicit error of the stochastic model). We infer that none of the equilibria are stable attractors, and suggest that the partisan positions are also preferred by the party activists, the key supporters of each party.     

Sincere and strategic voters: An Israeli study

The theoretical literature on voting behavior has shown that a rational voter may sometimes decide to vote for a candidate or party that does not constitute his or her first preference. Such voters are traditionally called strategic voters, in contrast to voters who act sincerely, i.e., those who always vote for their first preference regardless of how others are likely to vote. After discussing some of the problems associated with the definition of these two types of voters and suggesting a new operational definition, some attitudes and characteristics of these two types of voters are investigated. It was found that strategic voters constitute a very small percentage of the entire electorate, that their education level is significantly higher than that of sincere voters, that they tend more often to believe that polls influence voters' decisions and hence tend to delay their own final voting decision, that they tend more often than sincere voters to support small parties but do not tend more often than sincere voters to switch the party they decide to support from one election to the next, and that there is no significant difference between them and sincere voters regarding which governing coalition should/will form following an election.     

Who are the expressive voters?

Brennan and Hamlin (1998) predict that moderates are more likely to be expressive rather than instrumental voters, but do not test this hypothesis. Greene and Nelson (2002) claim to reject this, by finding that extremists are as likely to vote as moderates. We argue that Greene and Nelson's study was not a complete test of Brennan and Hamlin's hypothesis and we extend their analysis to provide a more thorough test. Our results imply that there is some evidence to suggest that extremist non-voters are less likely to be instrumentally motivated, providing some support for the predictions of Brennan and Hamlin.     

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.     

Politicians,voters and democracy: The 2011 UK referendum on the Alternative Vote

At the 2010 UK election, Labour proposed a referendum on changing the House of Commons electoral system from single member plurality to the Alternative Vote. Subsequently, a coalition was formed between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, yet it was Labour's policy on electoral reform that was implemented. The paper explains why this proved to be politically convenient for Labour's opponents. At the same time, however, holding the referendum reflected an emergent de facto convention that significant constitutional change should only be introduced after it has secured popular endorsement. The paper assesses whether the dynamics of public opinion during the AV referendum suggests that voters' eventual decisions about constitutional questions reflect their views about the merits of the relevant arguments.