Information and party voting in “semipartisan” judicial elections

Research on the relationship between the quantity of information that voters possess and their party voting behavior in partisan elections has produced mixed and confusing empirical results. In an effort to provide a broader perspective, this paper explores that relationship in nonpartisan elections contested by candidates of opposing parties. The paper analyzes survey data on two 1984 contests for seats on the Ohio Supreme Court, using the presidential race for comparison. Despite a highly partisan campaign, party defections by voters were far more common in the supreme court races than in the presidential race, reflecting the importance of party designations on the ballot as a source of information on candidates' party affiliations. At the individual level, levels of information had differing effects in the two supreme court races and for Democratic and Republican voters; this finding suggests that the impact of imformation levels on voters' choices is conditioned by the content of information in particular campaigns.     

Third party voting and the rational voter model: Empirical evidence from recent presidential elections

This paper attempted to demonstrate that a rational voter model as derived by Barzel and Silberberg (1973) can be used (with modifications) to explain third party voting in presidential elections. The empirical findings strongly suggest that the rational voter model is applicable in explaining third party voting. This conclusion likewise suggests that people who vote for third parties do so under similar motivations as people who vote for the major parties. Thus, people do not appear to regard votes for third parties as wasted votes or engage in the voting process in an irrational fashion. Lastly, votes for third parties represent the transmission of individual preferences by people who believe that their vote is important and that in the aggregate their signal may be interpreted as a signal to alter the direction of current policies as run by the major parties. Therefore, it does not appear from the evidence presented here that we should distinguish between or treat differently voting participation for the major parties versus the minor or third parties in presidential elections.The author expresses appreciation to Charles Campbell, Gary Pecquet, Paul W. Grimes, and James E. McClure for comments and criticisms. The usual caveat applies.     

Perceptions and reality: Economic voting at the 2004 European Parliament elections

Abstract.  One of the most influential explanations of voting behaviour is based on economic factors: when the economy is doing well, voters reward the incumbent government and when the economy is doing badly, voters punish the incumbent. This reward-punishment model is thought to be particularly appropriate at second order contests such as European Parliament elections. Yet operationalising this economic voting model using citizens' perceptions of economic performance may suffer from endogeneity problems if citizens' perceptions are in fact a function of their party preferences rather than being a cause of their party preferences. Thus, this article models a 'strict' version of economic voting in which they purge citizens' economic perceptions of partisan effects and only use as a predictor of voting that portion of citizens' economic perceptions that is caused by the real world economy. Using data on voting at the 2004 European Parliament elections for 23 European Union electorates, the article finds some, but limited, evidence for economic voting that is dependent on both voter sophistication and clarity of responsibility for the economy within any country. First, only politically sophisticated voters' subjective economic assessments are in fact grounded in economic reality. Second, the portion of subjective economic assessments that is a function of the real world economy is a significant predictor of voting only in single party government contexts where there can be a clear attribution of responsibility. For coalition government contexts, the article finds essentially no impact of the real economy via economic perceptions on vote choice, at least at European Parliament elections.     

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.     

Retrospective voting: An experimental study

This essay reports on some experiments designed to study two candidate electoral competition when voters are ‘retrospective’ voters. The experiments consist of a sequence of elections in which subjects play the part of both voters and candidates. In each election the incumbent adopts a policy position in a one-dimensional policy space, and voters are paid (on the basis of single peaked utility function over that space) for the position adopted by the incumbent. Neither voters nor candidates are informed of the voter utility functions, and the only information received by the voter is the payoff he has received from the present and previous incumbent administrations. Despite the severely limited information of candidates and voters, we find that, generally, candidates converge toward the median voter ideal point.     

Issues and voting in the European elections 1989

Abstract: After a discussion of the role of 'issues' in models of voting behaviour, this article focuses on the degree of homogeneity of issue evaluations on the one hand and the match between issue evaluations and vote choice on the other. Three major conclusions emerge from cross-national comparative analyses. First, and quite generally, a large segment of the national electorates does not perceive any particular party as best able to handle any of the problems they personally feel most important. Second, when particular parties are considered as best able to handle the problems seen as most important, then uniform - or homogeneous - evaluations outnumber more varied choices by far. And third, overall vote intention matches the competence evaluation much more often than not. These results give little support for the cognitive, rational choice approach to issue voting, but, still issue competence evaluations may be more than merely a reflection of affective ties.     

Voters and roll call voting: The effect on congressional elections

The subject of this research is whether ideological preferences play a major role in explaining voters' refusal to reelect some members of the U.S. House of Representatives. If ideological control is important, one would expect to find a large difference between the voting record of a rejected incumbent and his or her replacement. In distinction, whenever voters must replace a congressman or congresswoman because that person had died in office or chose to run for higher office, the hypothesis of ideological tracking implies that the newly elected member of Congress will resemble his or her predecessor. The data confirm these hypotheses and show, as well, that ideological control exists within parties and not only between them; that the degree of voters' ideological control is as great over senior congressmen and congresswomen as over junior ones; and that voters' concern about ideology has increased over the last two decades.     

Approval voting,Condorcet's principle,and runoff elections

Approval voting allows each voter to vote for as many candidates as he wishes in an election but not cast more than one vote for each candidate of whom he approves. If there is a strict Condorcet candidate — a candidate who defeats all others in pairwise contests — approval voting is shown to be the only nonranked voting system that is always able to elect the strict Condorcet candidate when voters use sincere admissible strategies. Moreover, if a strict Condorcet candidate must be elected under ordinary plurality voting when voters use admissible strategies, then he must also be elected under approval voting when voters use admissible strategies, but the converse does not hold. The widely used plurality runoff method can also elect a strict Condorcet candidate when voters use admissible strategies on the first ballot, but some of these may have to be insincere to get the strict Condorcet candidate onto the runoff ballot. Furthermore, there is no case in which the strict Condorcet candidate is invariably elected under the plurality runoff method when voters use admissible first-ballot strategies. Thus, approval voting is superior to the plurality runoff method with respect to the Condorcet principle in its ability to elect the strict Condorcet candidate by sincere voting and in its ability to guarantee the election of the strict Condorcet candidate when voters use admissible strategies. In addition, approval voting is more efficient since it requires only one election and is probably less subject to strategic manipulation.     

Cycles in senatorial voting behavior: implications for the optimal frequency of elections

The effect that the length of electoral periods has on the behavior of elected officials is examined. The hypothesis is that the longer the period between elections the less responsible or the more independent representatives will behave relative to the desires of their polity. The hypothesis is tested by examining the behavior of U.S. Senators. It is found that their independence follows a cyclical behavior which conforms to the electoral period. As a result it is by no means clear that decreasing the frequency of elections reduces the cost of elections. The effect of this independence cost on the optimal frequency of elections is discussed.     

The discursive micro-politics of blame avoidance: unpacking the language of government blame games

Policymakers often engage in blame avoidance behaviour that affects the ways in which they structure their organisations, adopt policies and operating routines, and present their work to the public. The linguistic aspects of such behaviour have received relatively little academic attention. In this paper, I seek to advance blame avoidance scholarship by introducing to its analytical toolbox useful conceptual instruments from linguistically informed discourse studies. Based on a multidisciplinary literature review, I show how the discursive study of policy-related blame games is situated within the wider scholarship dealing with a variety of blame phenomena. I provide an inventory of the micro-level building blocks of blame games: discursive strategies of persuasion, and narratives of cause, failure, and scandal. I suggest that by treating government blame games as mediated ‘language games’, policy scholars can complement the analysis of various political variables traditionally discussed in policy literature with detailed understanding of the micro-politics of presentational blame avoidance.     

Compelled without direction: Compulsory voting and party system spreading

Much of the current literature on compulsory voting (CV) examines its effects by simulating complete turnout. We argue that these studies do not capture the full effects of CV, as there is something qualitatively different about compulsory voting rules as compared to only increasing turnout. Furthermore, CV and turnout have important, yet unexplored, interactive effects. To test this argument, we look at governments in 43 countries over the 1990–2006 period. Nine of these countries have some form of CV. We examine the effect of CV on the ideological position and range of governments, left party seat share, and the effective number of parties. We find that high turnout in the presence of CV laws spreads out the distribution of voters and leads to an increase in the effective number of parliamentary parties and a larger ideological range of governments. These results have important implications for how we study CV and its consequences for party strategy.     

Protest voting in plurality elections: a theory of voter signaling

This paper develops a model of protest voting in which unsatisfied voters may abandon their most-preferred candidate even though he or she has a good chance of winning, in the hope that this signal of disaffection will lead to downstream improvements in that candidate??s performance. We use a spatial model to identify voters whose ideological profile makes protest voting an option, and an expected utility model to identify the conditions under which potential protest voters will in fact use their vote as a signaling device. Aggregate-level data provide suggestive evidence in the argument??s favor.     

Linking coalition attitudes and split-ticket voting: The Scottish Parliament elections of 2007

The Scottish Parliament elections of 2007 were the third to be held under the country’s mixed-member proportional system. As voters continue to adapt to the new system, we explore two aspects of its use: i) preferences for coalitions as opposed to single-party government, and ii) ticket-splitting. The two are considered together for two reasons. First, both can be seen as manifestations of a preference for multiple parties, and as a result they share a number of likely predictors in common. In empirical practice, however, we find that rather different factors predict the two variables: ticket-splitting looks to be based on strategic partisan or ideological calculation, whereas coalition attitudes are less about partisan interests and more about an overall view of the kind of policies and politics delivered by coalitions. Second, there is potential for a causal connection between our two dependent variables, and indeed we do find clear evidence of such an attitude–behaviour link: some voters appear to split their ticket precisely because they would prefer a coalition.     

Strategic voting and effective representation thresholds: Evidence from three Spanish general elections

The extent of strategic voting in the Spanish general elections of 2000, 2004 and 2008 is estimated using a new measure of strategic incentives suitable for proportional representation systems that avoids some of the problems associated with lagged variables. Strategic behaviour increased from 12 to 33 per cent of the electoral base of the United Left Party, the major victim of strategic defection. This estimate is a conservative one as elite mobilisation is controlled for in the constituencies, which is unusual in the literature on strategic voting that uses regression‐based methods.     

Left-right party ideology and government policies: A meta-analysis

Abstract. This paper summarizes how the partisan influence literature assesses the relationship between the left–right party composition of government and policy outputs through a meta–analysis of 693 parameter estimates of the party–policy relationship published in 43 empirical studies. Based on a simplified 'combined tests' meta–analytic technique, we show that the average correlation between the party composition of government and policy outputs is not significantly different from zero. A mutivariate logistic regression analysis examines how support for partisan theory is affected by a subset of mediating factors that can be applied to all the estimates under review. The analysis demonstrates that there are clearly identifiable conditions under which the probability of support for partisan theory can be substantially increased. We conclude that further research is needed on institutional and socio–economic determinants of public policy.     

Trading party preferences: the Australian experience of preferential voting

Political parties respond to electoral rules in ways which gain them partisan advantage and enable them to make strategic choices about the use of their electoral support. The alternative vote (AV) and proportional representation by the single transferable vote (STV) provide considerable opportunity for this kind of partisan activity. The ability of the voter under such electoral systems to rank candidates in order of the voter's preference creates a kind of property which can be used by parties, especially minor parties, to influence the behaviour of both candidates and other parties. The paper investigates this aspect of preferential voting systems and the extent to which the context of electoral rules can encourage or discourage a trade in partisan preferences. Elections for the Australian House of Representatives and Senate are used to show how political actors can respond to electoral rules which permit the control and trading of preferences to be developed into a series of sophisticated transactions.     

Routes to party choice: Ideology,economic evaluations and voting at the 1997 British General Election

Abstract. Most conventional accounts of voting behaviour fit single models to the entire electorate, implicitly assuming that all voters respond to the same sets of influences, and do so in similar ways. However, a growing body of research suggests that this approach may be misleading, and that distinct groups of voters approach politics, and the electoral decision, from different perspectives. The paper takes a disaggregated look at voting in the 1997 British General Election, dividing voters into different groups according to their formal educational qualifications. Results suggest that different groups of voters respond to different stimuli, depending on their education, and on the party they are voting for.     

Social structure and voting in the Austrian party system

An analysis of electoral behaviour in the Austrian party system shows that the cleavages, social class and religion, are still playing a major role—their total impact seems higher than in most Western democracies. In the seventies a declining influence of both dimensions can be registered; but after closer inspection, most of it seems to be due to structural changes.Particularly the expansion of intermediate and higher education can be hypothesized to dissolve the traditional Lager-structure, which made for a very stable vote throughout the electoral history of the Second Austrian Republic. But the question remains, whether the increase in floating vote really supersedes the class and religious cleavages, or only produces more oscillating election outcomes.The analysis also makes clear why regional cleavages are of minor general impact in Austria: on the one hand, historical West-East differentiations prevail over urban-rural cleavages, on the other hand, Austria seems to be too small to give way to major cultural drifting between regions. None the less, the impact of social structure upon voting behaviour seems to be significantly higher than in most Western nations.