Voting as an act of contribution

This paper presents a theory which rationalizes voting in terms of the marginal utility a citizen derives from contributing a small amount of effort in the political process when the cost of voting is small. Citizens abstain when the marginal cost of voting exceeds the marginal perceived benefit. A simple choice rule for voting in a two candidate race is derived from the theory. This rule depends on the voter's subjective belief about the election outcome as well as his preferences for the candidates. The key assumption is that the voter's utility increases if he votes for a winner, or decreases if he votes for a loser. This assumption is no less plausible than the assumption that voters believe they can be pivotal.     

Explaining near-universal turnout: The case of Malta

Abstract. Even though voting is not compulsory, Malta has the highest turnout of all democratic nations. This study examines characteristics of the Maltese electorate, the country's governmental institutions and electoral system, and the nature of its politics to identify the most powerful factors (or combination of factors) responsible for the high voter turnout. Among these are: (1) intense and pervasive partisanship; (2) concentration of political power in a single elective institution; (3) highly competitive elections resulting in one-party governments despite PR.; (4) maximization of the impact of a single ballot because the number of votes a candidate needs to be elected is very low and because the voter's lower-order preferences count under STV, and (5) unusually intense campaigning by individual candidates because they compete against other candidates of the same party, and by parties because the electorate is polarized, which leaves few uncommitted voters while rendering voter conversion unlikely, thus making mobilization of all existing supporters vital to electoral success.     

Efficacy,power and equity under approval voting

Approval voting allows each voter to vote for as many candidates as he wishes in a multicandidate election. Previous studies show that approval voting compares favorably with other practicable election systems. The present study examines the extent to which votes for different numbers of candidates can affect the outcome. It also considers generic powers of voters and the extent to which approval voting treats voters equitably. If there are three candidates, votes for one or two candidates are equally efficacious in large electorates. For four or more candidates, votes for about half the candidates are most efficacious. Although inequities among voters can arise under approval voting, the common plurality voting system is considerably less equitable than approval voting.     

Designing preference voting

Electoral systems in which voters can cast preference votes for individual candidates within a party list are increasingly popular. To the best of our knowledge, there is no research on whether and how the scale used to evaluate candidates can affect electoral behavior and results. In this paper, we analyze data from an original voting experiment leveraging real-life political preferences and embedded in a nationally representative online survey in Austria. We show that the scale used by voters to evaluate candidates makes differences. For example, the possibility to give up to two points advantages male candidates because male voters are more likely to give ‘zero points’ to female candidates. Yet this pattern does not exist in the system in which voters can give positive and negative points because male voters seem reluctant to actively withdraw points from female candidates. We thus encourage constitution makers to think carefully about the design of preference voting.     

Confused or competent? How voters use the STV ballot paper

STV is often extolled because it allows voters to express a nuanced choice, but is criticised for being too confusing. In practice the system is little used, but evidence from where it is indicates much depends on how voters choose to use it. STV was used for the first time in Scottish local elections in 2007, providing valuable new evidence on how voters respond to the system. We use survey data to examine the incidence of various indicators of apparent failure by Scottish voters to exploit STV, and compare both the levels and patterns of incidence with equivalent data for Ireland. We find little sign of confusion in either country, but significant evidence of ballot order effects in Scotland.     

Candidates’ policy strategies in primary elections: does strategic voting by the primary electorate matter?

Empirical research reports conflicting conclusions about whether primary election voters strategically account for candidates’ general election prospects when casting their votes. We model the strategic calculations of office-seeking candidates facing two-stage elections beginning with a primary, and we compare candidates’ policy strategies in situations where primary voters strategically support the most viable general election candidate against candidate strategies when voters expressively support their preferred primary candidate regardless of electability. Our analyses—in which the candidates’ appeal is based on their policy positions and their campaigning skills—suggest a surprising conclusion: namely, that strategic and expressive primary voting typically support identical equilibrium configurations in candidate strategies. Our conclusions are relevant to candidates facing contested primaries, and also to political parties facing the strategic decision about whether or not to use primary elections to select their candidates—a common dilemma for Latin American (and some European) parties.     

Too much choice,too little impact: a multilevel analysis of the contextual determinants of preference voting

Abstract

Despite the rich and growing body of research addressing how turnout and party choice depend on the institutional context, far less is known about the impact of the political environment on voters’ propensity to vote for candidates – not parties. Recent single-country studies have focused almost exclusively on individual-level resource- and identity-based differences in preference voting. Combining data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) and Participation and Representation in Modern Democracies (PARTIREP) election studies in six countries, this article provides the first comprehensive, cross-national test of the impact of macro-contextual factors on a voter’s decision to indicate a candidate preference, instead of simply casting a party list vote. It demonstrates that both the failure of preference votes to affect the allocation of seats and choice overload dissuade voters from marking a candidate name on the ballot. These contextual factors affect informed and uninformed voters differently, moreover. The findings have important implications for electoral scholars and political practitioners when designing electoral systems.     

Is there such a thing as a Muslim vote?

This contribution explores to what extent there is such a thing as a distinct Muslim vote in flexible proportional list systems. We test in a new and reliable way whether the religious belonging and behavioural dimension of Muslim voters play a role in their decision-making process when casting preferential votes in a secular democracy. To achieve this, voter and candidate characteristics are modelled simultaneously in cross-classified multilevel analyses where the decision-making process of voters (the demand side) is studied while taking into account the list composition in terms of individual candidates (the supply side). We use data of an exit poll related to the local elections of 2018 in Belgium, especially at oversampled locations. The analyses show that voters who belong to Muslim faith are more likely to vote for Muslim candidates. Contrary, the behaviour dimension of Muslim voters – measured in mosque attendance - has no effect on voting primarily for Muslim candidates.     

Supplementary vote; analysis, applications, and alternatives

The Supplementary Vote (SV) was invented as a compromise between the two-round runoff system and the alternative vote. This paper shows that in many ways it is not. Under SV voters rank order a limited number of candidates. If one candidate is supported by over 50% of the voters he/she is declared the winner. Otherwise, all but the top two candidates are eliminated from the contest. Then, all second preferences of voters are taken into account. The candidate winning most first and second votes is declared the winner. SV violates fundamental criteria used to evaluate electoral systems and is difficult for voters. The paper discusses an alternative to SV which avoids at least some of its most apparent flaws.     

The impact of cuing candidate quality on female candidates

How can parties improve the electoral prospects of traditionally under-represented women? We argue that if a party signals that a single female candidate is of high quality, other women appearing on the ballot with her will receive a boost in support. More specifically, if a female candidate heads a party's list in the district, other women from her party will be rewarded with more votes. We test our reasoning by examining the nomination and election of women in three Free-List Proportional Representation systems where voters can cast multiple preference votes for individual candidates. We find robust support for the finding that when voters receive a signal that women can be quality candidates, they tend to reward additional women with preference votes regardless of their rank on the ballot.     

Do voters prefer educated candidates? How candidate education influences vote choice in congressional elections

Previous research shows that democracies are more likely to produce educated politicians, but is this because voters prefer educated representatives or because of other features of the democratic process? Education may serve as a signal of candidate quality to voters or it may simply be associated with other factors, such as access to campaign funds, that help candidates win elections. We address this puzzle by analyzing head-to-head matches between candidates in US House elections from 2002 to 2012 along with a conjoint experiment. We find evidence that candidates with higher levels of education win more votes than candidates with lower levels of education, even after we account for standard indicators of candidate quality and campaign spending. This education premium not only garners more votes, but it also translates into higher probabilities of winning. The experimental results and sensitivity analyses show that it is unlikely that these results are explained by a hidden confound. The experiment also illuminates that the education premium flows from perceptions of candidate qualification and ability to pursue respondent interests.     

Making wasted votes count: Turnout,transfers, and preferential voting in practice

Proponents of electoral reform champion the single transferable vote (STV) or aligned forms of preferential voting (AV, IRV, RCV) as a method to improve participation among and representation of the general public. Voters provide an ordinal ranking among alternatives on the ballot, and ballots not used to elect a candidate are transferred to another favored alternative. Preferential voting is intended to encourage both citizen participation in an election and sincere voting. Yet the empirical evidence about the effects of preferential voting in the scholarly literature is scant. Elections of members to the Dáil Éireann, the lower house of national parliament in Ireland, provide a wealth of data on preferential voting. Data from four recent Irish elections (1997, 2002, 2007, and 2011) are analyzed to assess the effectiveness of STV on reducing wasted votes. The number of nontransferable ballots, votes not used for any candidate, is large and increases as the need for lower level preferences (that is, later counts or rounds) grows. Voter turnout does not correspond to preferential voting in predictable ways; turnout declines as the number of candidates elected increases. Although preferential voting systems have much to offer, their effects need to be evaluated.     

On the mismeasurement of sincere and strategic voting in mixed-member electoral systems

Under mixed systems, voters cast two votes to elect the same legislative body: one vote for parties using proportional rules and one for candidates using majoritarian rules. Voters are said to cast straight-tickets if the candidate they vote for is of the same party as their proportional vote; otherwise, they are said to cast split-tickets. Split-ticket voting is commonly used as a measure of strategic voting as splitters are usually assumed to express their true preference in one vote but vote strategically in the other. This study challenges this practice showing that split-ticket voting does not necessarily indicate strategic voting, just as straight-ticket voting does not necessarily indicate a sincere vote. This result has wider consequences as it indicates that measuring strategic voting from observed behaviour can result in incorrect conclusions about vote choice.     

Who Votes for the Future? Information,Expectations, and Endogeneity in Economic Voting

Voters’ four primary evaluations of the economy—retrospective national, retrospective pocketbook, prospective national, and prospective pocketbook—vary in the cognitive steps necessary to link economic outcomes to candidates in elections. We hypothesize that the effects of the different economic evaluations on vote choice vary with a voter’s ability to acquire information and anticipate the election outcome. Using data from the 1980 through 2004 US presidential elections, we estimate a model of vote choice that includes all four economic evaluations as well as information and uncertainty moderators. The effects of retrospective evaluations on vote choice do not vary by voter information. Prospective economic evaluations weigh in the decisions of the most informed voters, who rely on prospective national evaluations when they believe the incumbent party will win and on prospective pocketbook evaluations when they are uncertain about the election outcome or believe that the challenger will win. Voters who have accurate expectations about who will win the election show the strongest relationship between their vote choice and sociotropic evaluations of the economy, both retrospective and prospective. Voters whose economic evaluations are most likely to be endogenous to vote choice show a weaker relationship between economic evaluations and their votes than the voters who appear to be more objective in their assessments of the election. Economic voting is broader and more prospective than previously accepted, and concerns about endogeneity in economic evaluations are overstated.     

Voters and their representatives: electoral institutions and delegation in parliamentary democracies

Abstract. Of all the links in the democratic delegation chain, the first link (from voters to legislators) may be fraught with the greatest potential for agency losses. Voters — the ultimate principals – may lack the information and resources to select the best legislators and subsequently ensure that they do the public's bidding. This paper uses some of the insights of the principal–agent approach to examine the Voter–MP relationship by focusing primarily on two sets of organisational and institutional rules: methods of candidate selection and electoral laws. Since the emphasis is on direct links between voters and legislators (rather than on the intermediary role of parties), we examine electoral laws in terms of the incentives they provide for candidates to seek a personal vote. Since agency losses are most likely when the MPs' careers do not directly depend on voters, electoral systems are arranged on a continuum from party–centred systems (little or no incentive to seek personal votes), to intermediate systems (limited effectiveness of personal voting) to candidate–centred systems (where personal voting is most effective). One of the arguments is that a trade–off often exists between the directness of the link between voter and agent and the choice of agents that is crucial to voters' abilities to sanction agents. If it is thought desirable that voters have the ability to directly sanction representatives, then an institutional design involving effective preferential voting in districts of moderate magnitude should be optimal.     

Vote-earning strategies in flexible list systems: Seats at the price of unity

In theory, flexible list systems are a compromise between closed-list and open-list proportional representation. A party's list of candidates can be reordered by voters if the number of votes cast for an individual candidate exceeds some quota. Because these barriers to reordering are rarely overcome, these systems are often characterized as basically closed-list systems. Paradoxically, in many cases, candidates are increasingly earning individual-level preference votes. Using data from Slovakia, we show that incumbents cultivate personal reputations because parties reward preference vote earning candidates with better pre-election list positions in the future. Ironically, the party's vote-earning strategy comes at a price, as incumbents use voting against the party on the chamber floor to generate the reputations that garner preference votes.     

Bribing Voters

We present a model of influence over collective decisions made through voting. We show how an outside party offering incentives to a committee can manipulate the committee's decisions at no cost and induce inefficient outcomes. A key condition is that the outsider be able to reward decisive votes differently. Inefficiency results from voting externalities. We relax all initial assumptions to investigate how to insulate committees. We study different information settings, credibility assumptions, payoff structures (voters caring about the collective decision and about their own votes), and incentive schemes (offers contingent on pivotal votes, individual votes, vote shares, and the collective decision). We analyze when voting should be made secret; we elucidate the role of individual accountability and various political institutions in preventing vote buying. We discuss implications for lobbying, for clientelism, for decisions in legislatures, boards, and central banks, and for the efficiency of democracy .     

Face Value? Experimental Evidence that Candidate Appearance Influences Electoral Choice

According to numerous studies, candidates’ looks predict voters’ choices—a finding that raises concerns about voter competence and about the quality of elected officials. This potentially worrisome finding, however, is observational and therefore vulnerable to alternative explanations. To better test the appearance effect, we conducted two experiments. Just before primary and general elections for various offices, we randomly assigned voters to receive ballots with and without candidate photos. Simply showing voters these pictures increased the vote for appearance-advantaged candidates. Experimental evidence therefore supports the view that candidates’ looks could influence some voters. In general elections, we find that high-knowledge voters appear immune to this influence, while low-knowledge voters use appearance as a low-information heuristic. In primaries, however, candidate appearance influences even high-knowledge and strongly partisan voters.     

Consideration set models of electoral choice: Theory,method, and application

In electoral research, decisions by voters are usually analysed as if they choose at once from the whole set of all competing parties or candidates. Consideration Set Models (CSM) posit that voters choose differently, namely in two stages. In the first stage, they exclude certain choice options and create a consideration set of viable options, while in the second stage they choose from within this set. This paper, which serves as an introduction to a special symposium about consideration set models of electoral choice, outlines the theoretical foundations of these models and discusses three methodological issues: research design, measurement, and statistical modelling. More specifically, we recommend the use of pre-election panel surveys, direct measures of electoral consideration sets, and statistical models suitable for analysing dichotomous variables and voter-party dyads. Furthermore, we briefly summarise the other contributions to this symposium and sketch some avenues for their application in future research.     

Moderate,extreme, or both? How voters respond to ideologically unpredictable candidates

Candidates and parties often face a choice between endorsing policies that appeal to their core constituencies or generate support from more diverse groups of voters. While the latter strategy may make overtures to a wider set of citizens, existing literature says little about how the overall mix of issue positions affects electoral support. We argue that candidates who endorse diverse sets of policy positions appear unpredictable to voters and incur subsequent electoral penalties. Using data from the 2006 congressional elections, we find that ideological predictability substantially increases electoral support at both the individual and aggregate levels and that voters perceive greater ideological congruence from more predictable candidates. Our results have important implications for candidate and party strategies and suggest that voters are responsive to the mean and the variance of candidates’ policy stances.