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.     

Partisanship & nationalization in American elections: Evidence from presidential,senatorial, & gubernatorial elections in the U.S. counties, 1872–2020

Scholars argue that contemporary American elections are pronounced in their degree of partisanship and nationalization. While much of this work largely uncovers a heightened degree of nationalization in contemporary elections, little is known about how far back these patterns generalize. Given the limited availability of American electoral data, this work also generally focuses on a single office or during a certain segment of the post-war period since 1946. Moreover, this work largely focuses on states as salient units of analysis, masking potential variation found in U.S. counties, the smallest geographical unit constituting panel observations over time and across elections. In this note, we leverage a novel dataset of county-level election returns for President, U.S. Senate, and Governor, to specify a model assessing whether American elections are more nationalized and partisan than during any other period since the Civil War. We find evidence that presidential and Senate elections are more partisan today than any period since the Civil War, while gubernatorial elections are as partisan today as they were during the late 1800s. Our findings have implications for contemporary-based theories explaining the rise of partisanship in American elections and demonstrates the utility of county-level data in assessing electoral changes in America.     

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.     

Distinguishing between the effects of swing ratio and bias on outcomes in the US Electoral College, 1900–1992

We review a number of different statistical techniques for creating seats-votes curves and apply the most reliable of these to estimate seats-votes relationships in the US electoral college 1900–1992. We consider the now rejected claim, once firmly established as part of the common journalistic and even academic wisdom, that the US Electoral College has recently been strongly biased in favor of Republicans, and show that this claim was based largely on a confusion between bias (asymmetry in the electoral college gains earned by the votes received by different parties or candidates) and swing ratio (responsiveness of change in electoral college seat share to change in popular vote). Although there has been substantial bias during this century in the way the electoral college translates Democratic and Republican votes into electoral college seats, and for the earlier party of this century (from 1900 to 1940) that bias has been in favor of Republicans, to explain why many recent electoral college majorities have been so lopsided we must look not at bias but at swing ratio.We show that the swing ratio in the electoral college has generally been increasing since 1900, rising from an average value (1900–1924) around three to an average value (1976–1992) ranging from about five to about eight, depending upon which of the various statistical estimation techniques we use. Thus, for every one point vote share gain above 50 per cent, a winning presidential candidate in a two-candidate competition can now expect to pick up somewhere between a 5 percentage point and an 8 percentage point increase in electoral college seats—giving the illusion of mandate even for relatively close contests and frequently creating apparent landslides. We show that this historical rise in swing ratio in presidential elections is due almost entirely to changes in the responsiveness of outcomes in the US South as the influence of the Civil War slowly (very slowly) erodes. Drawing on the analysis of the determinants of bias and of swing ratio in the House of Representatives in Brady and Grofman (1991b), we show that the increases in electoral college swing can be accounted for by the nationalization of presidential competition as signaled by the decrease over time in the standard deviation of Democratic share of the two-party vote across states, and that changes in bias can be linked to changes in the magnitude of differences between the mean and the median of that distribution.     

The Nationalization of Special Elections for the U.S. House of Representatives

Scholars and political commentators have argued that special elections to the U.S. House of Representatives are national contests, serving as a referendum on the president's party and a predictor of future election outcomes (Sigelman 1981; Smith and Burnnell 2010). But the empirical record is mixed, with one leading study demonstrating that candidate and district characteristics alone explain special election outcomes (Gaddie, Bullock, and Buchanan 1999). We investigate this disagreement by comparing special election and open-seat results using new data for the period 1995–2014. We find that while candidate characteristics affect special election outcomes, presidential approval is predictive of special election outcomes as well. Furthermore, we find that the effect of presidential approval on special election outcomes has increased in magnitude from 1995 to 2014, with the 2002 midterm representing an important juncture in the nationalization of special elections. We conclude that special elections have developed into national contests since the 1970s and situate this development within broader electoral trends.     

Presidential coattails and electoral coordination in multilevel elections: Comparative lessons from Brazil

This article seeks to understand how concurrent presidential and gubernatorial elections in strong federal systems affect electoral coordination and coattails voting between national and subnational levels of government. We seek to determine whether the nationalizing effect of presidential elections can overcome the strong incentives for regionalization that can arise in federal systems. We use individual-level survey data and time-series cross-sectional electoral data from Brazil, a federal country with decentralized electoral institutions that has recently adopted concurrent presidential and gubernatorial elections. We find that the congruence between national and subnational elections increases when elections are temporally proximate and the effective number of presidential candidates is low. In short, the coattails effect can not only operate “horizontally,” by shaping national legislative elections, but also “vertically,” by shaping subnational elections.     

The Mobilization of Core Supporters: Campaigns, Turnout, and Electoral Composition in United States Presidential Elections

Our objective is to investigate the relationship between presidential campaign activities and political mobilization in the states, with specific focus on the mobilization of core constituents. Using data on presidential campaign visits, presidential campaign media purchases, and party transfers to the states, we highlight some interesting mobilization patterns. First, voter turnout is positively influenced by presidential campaigns, though not by all campaign activities. Second, there is some evidence that campaigns have direct effects on the participation of core partisan groups. Finally, the ability of parties to mobilize their core groups has a strong effect on state electoral success that exists over and above the direct effect of campaign activity on electoral outcomes. All in all, we see the results as strong evidence that political mobilization in general and party transfers to the states in particular are an important component for understanding campaign effects in presidential elections.     

Party registration and party self-identification: Exploring the role of electoral institutions in attitudes and behaviors

How do electoral institutions affect self-identified partisanship? I hypothesize that party registration acts to anchor a person's party identification, tying a person to a political party even when their underlying preferences may align them with the other party. Estimating a random effects multinomial logit model, I find individuals registered with a party are more likely to self-identify with that party and away from the other party. Party registration also affects voting in presidential elections but not in House elections, leading to greater defection in the former where voters have more information about the candidates. These insights illuminate varying rates of electoral realignment, particularly among southern states, and the makeup of primary electorates in states with and without party registration.     

Democratic Electoral Systems around the world, 1946–2011

This research note describes an update to Golder's (2005)Democratic Electoral Systems (DES) dataset. We extend the temporal scope of the original dataset by including all legislative and presidential elections that took place in democratic states from 2001 to 2011. In addition to significantly expanding the size of the DES dataset, we offer a simplified classification scheme for electoral systems. We also provide more detailed information about all democratic elections since 1946, including the dates for each round of elections as well as the rules used in different electoral tiers. A brief temporal and geographic overview of the data is presented.     

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.     

Voter turnout in presidential primaries: A cross-sectional examination

Decades of individual and aggregate level research suggest that three sets of factors influence voter turnout: the socioeconomic makeup of the potential voter; legal restrictions on voting; and the political context of each election. In this brief study, we use state-level data to test whether these factors combine to account for variations in turnout rates in the electoral arena of presidential primaries. As expected, high turnout is associated with states which have high median levels of education, lenient legal restrictions on voting, and a history of competitive two-party elections. Also congruent with our expectations, but at odds with research of other electoral arenas, high turnout in presidential primaries is unrelated to high campaign spending or close elections. We contend that spending in presidential primaries may be simply too low to stimulate turnout and that close primaries do not enhance turnout because voters are often unaware that the pending election will be close.The names of the authors appear in alphabetical order and imply that this study is in every way a collaborative enterprise.     

Direct presidential elections: a world summary

This paper first examines the frequency of direct presidential elections among the 170 countries of the world with a working, directly elected parliament. We find that there is a directly elected president in more than half of the countries and in about two-thirds of the republics. Former British colonies are less likely to hold direct presidential elections, which are otherwise very popular in North and South America and Africa. We then examine the kind of electoral formula that is used for the election of presidents. Most elections are held under the majority rule, most of the time under the majority runoff procedure. The majority rule is clearly predominant in Europe and Africa, and is unpopular in North America. Finally, no relationship is observed between the level of economic development or of democracy and the use of direct presidential elections or the choice of an electoral formula.     

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.     

Forecasting the Presidential Vote in the States, 1948-2004

SUMMARY

This research updates, revises, and extends a forecasting equation of the presidential vote in the states. The original equation was composed of sixteen predictors available well before the election and estimated with data from 531 state elections from 1948 to 1988. The equation was empirically strong, based on objective predictors, and more parsimonious than previous equations. Reexamining the equation with 200 additional state elections from 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 indicates that the equation remains well supported, but suggests several opportunities for improvement. A revised equation has a mean absolute error of 3.2 percentage points and correctly predicts 87 percent of all electoral votes. The extension of the analysis adapts the forecast equation to predict electoral vote winners, conducting a logit analysis that takes into account both the size of the state and the closeness of its previous election. This produces more accurate forecasts of both electoral vote winners in the states and the division of the aggregate national electoral vote.     

Symposium on “The nationalization of electoral politics: Frontiers of research”

This editorial introduces the theme of the symposium which addresses the most recent advances in the field of the nationalization of electoral politics. After a decade of an increasing number of contribution in this field, the symposium takes stock of the diversity of applications of nationalization studies, the progress in data collection, and its innovative methods in designs including it as both a dependent and independent variable and analyzing it both for legislative and presidential elections. The editorial reviews the growth and diversification of the literature over time and illustrates in what directions it has evolved mapping out an increasingly rich and complex theory. It links the articles of the symposium to this evolution of the literature and discusses their innovative character.     

The rise of negative partisanship and the nationalization of U.S. elections in the 21st century

One of the most important developments affecting electoral competition in the United States has been the increasingly partisan behavior of the American electorate. Yet more voters than ever claim to be independents. We argue that the explanation for these seemingly contradictory trends is the rise of negative partisanship. Using data from the American National Election Studies, we show that as partisan identities have become more closely aligned with social, cultural and ideological divisions in American society, party supporters including leaning independents have developed increasingly negative feelings about the opposing party and its candidates. This has led to dramatic increases in party loyalty and straight-ticket voting, a steep decline in the advantage of incumbency and growing consistency between the results of presidential elections and the results of House, Senate and even state legislative elections. The rise of negative partisanship has had profound consequences for electoral competition, democratic representation and governance.     

The electoral college and the rational vote

We have shown first, that if the electoral college was abolished the theoretically measured power of voters would increase and second, that in presidential elections the measure of voting power used does in fact have a highly significant impact on the decision as to whether or not to vote. Thus, the analysis predicts that the abolition of the electoral college would have a significant impact on voter participation. From a policy viewpoint, if we view participation in elections as desirable, this could be used as an argument in favor of direct election of the president. From a scientific viewpoint, we are able to make a strong and unambiguous prediction about the results of a (possible) future event from theoretical considerations. If the electoral college should be abolished, it will be possible to test our predictions. In addition, we have provided a further test of the rational behavior view of electoral participation and have shown that this model applies to presidential elections. Finally, we have shown that the theoretical measure of voting power does predict actual behavior.     

Multiparty politics in Argentina? Electoral rules and changing patterns

This article attempts to illuminate some institutional features of the past and the current electoral systems of Argentina and the problematic relationship between these characteristics and the trend of changes that the party system has been experiencing since the return of democracy in 1983. The focus is on the dangers of political stalemate that might have developed if the institutional arrangements implemented at the end of the military rule had not been reformed subsequently. The study has two objectives: (a) to demonstrate that there is a trend towards an increasing fractionalization of the Argentine party system; and (b) to show that the combination of an electoral college with a majority requirement, proportional representation to allocate presidential electors, malapportionment among districts, and this increasing process of pluralization in most provinces (where presidential elections were decided because of electoral college complexities) threatened the stability of democracy.     

Institutions and the stabilization of party systems in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe

Most explanations of party system stability focus on the strength of mass-elite linkages. We highlight the role of institutions, focusing on how electoral rules and elected institutions, especially the presidency, impact elites' incentives to coordinate on a stable set of parties or to form new parties, thus affecting electoral volatility. Using Central and Eastern European elections data, we find that directly elected presidents increase volatility and that presidential power magnifies this effect. Absent a directly elected president, high district magnitude is associated with increased volatility, but district magnitude dampens the impact of an elected president on volatility; hence, our findings underscore the interactive impact of institutions on party systems. We also find evidence that bicameralism and concurrence of presidential and parliamentary elections decrease electoral volatility. Our model not only explains persistently high electoral volatility in Eastern Europe, but the extreme stability of Western European party systems.