Village Elections in China: Cooperation between the State and the Peasantry

Village elections, as a policy response to developmental problems in rural China in the 1980s, were not designed to promote democracy in China. The process of village elections, however, has served as a new form of cooperation between the state and the peasantry over the last decade. To understand why an authoritarian regime introduced an electoral process to its countryside and why this electoral process of village elections has served as a new form of cooperation between the state and the peasantry over the last decade, we should try to understand where the congruence between the state and the peasantry was in this form of cooperation, what the role of the state was in this process, and what the implications of this electoral process for democracy were in China. The process of village elections might eventually have a benign result that was not originally envisioned by its sponsor, but little progress has been made in that direction over the last decade. Putting village elections in such perspective, this paper examines the economic, political and democratic dimensions of this electoral process of village elections as a new form of cooperation between the state and the peasantry.     

Administrative aspects of the Uganda election—December 1980: A comparison with Zimbabwe

Since international observers were used to give legitimacy both to the Uganda and Zimbabwe elections in 1980 there is an obvious point of comparison between them. Despite this initial similarity comparing the administration of the elections in the two emphasizes the differences and draws attention to the administrative problems in Uganda resulting from the use of a law and procedures which derived from different circumstances in the country and which assumed an experience in operating elections which was largely lacking. This article explains problems encountered and points to lessons to be learnt.     

Candidate Cues and Voter Confidence in American Elections

A primary objective of election administration is ensuring voter confidence. Logically, this entails meeting two conditions: procedures should insure that elections are fair and accurate, and voters should be aware of the procedures. Yet American election procedures such as ballot access and design, post-election audits and recounts, voter registration, and polling place operations are complex and highly decentralized. Given the complexity of the information environment and the relatively limited information most voters have about politics, what (if any) connection is there between election administration and voter confidence? We consider whether candidates fill the gap between election administration and voter confidence in elections. We test several hypotheses using an experimental design with multiple measures of voter confidence. The results show that candidates have a significant effect on voter confidence.     

Can the Democrats Win Again?

After losing two successive elections, debate has raged within the Democratic party over how to win back power without comprising the principles which the party has long stood for. This article explores the reasons why the Democrats were unable to defeat George W. Bush in 2004, despite the numerous problems of the incumbent' first term, and asks what lessons the Democrats can learn from their defeat. The second half of the article focuses on what issues and policies the Democrats should concentrate and what strategies the party should adopt in order to improve its image and broaden its popular appeal ahead of the 2008 election.     

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?     

What Happens at the Polling Place: Using Administrative Data to Look Inside Elections

Tremendous attention has been paid to local election administration since the 2000 presidential election meltdown, yet policy makers still lack basic information about what happens at the polling place. One strategy to understand the interactions between citizens and street‐level election bureaucrats is to turn to administrative data. Using logs collected by polling place workers, the authors analyze more than 66,000 individual incidents recorded from four different statewide elections. Such data provide novel insights and guidance for the administration of elections. Findings indicate that task scale (in terms of the number of ballots) and complexity (in terms of absentee ballots) increase the incident rate. Managerial choices about how polling places are run also matter: the use of electronic voting machines and central count processing of ballots reduce the incident rate, while splitting poll worker shifts increases it. Operator capacity, measured in terms of experience, also reduces the number of incidents.     

Blame,Responsibility, and the Tea Party in the 2010 Midterm Elections

There is a general consensus both in the news media and scholarly research that 2010 was a highly nationalized election year. Reports have indicated that anti-Obama sentiment, the Democrats’ legislative agenda, the economy, and the Tea Party were all factors contributing to Democratic losses in the congressional elections. In this paper, we use data from 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to examine the individual-level dynamics that contributed to the heightened nationalization of the 2010 congressional elections. Our analysis shows that Tea Party support and the attribution of blame and responsibility by voters are essential to understanding the 2010 election outcome, beyond what we would expect from a simple referendum model of midterm elections. Not surprisingly, Tea Party supporters blamed Democrats for the state of national affairs, disapproved of the Democrats’ policy agenda, and overwhelmingly supported Republican candidates in the congressional elections. However, our analysis shows that not all voters who supported Republican candidates were driven by high levels of opposition to President Obama and the Democrats. Another key group of voters blamed both Democrats and Republicans for the nation’s problems but ultimately held Democrats responsible in the voting booth by supporting Republican congressional candidates.     

Gubernatorial Transitions: Lessons From the 1982-1983 Experience

The 1982 gubernatorial elections led to transitions betweenoutgoing and incoming administrations in seventeen states. Thisarticle is an overview of what transpired during those transitionsbased on studies conducted by state analysts in sixteen of theseventeen states. While politics was still a major part of thecontext in which the transitions occurred, the fiscal situationin the states framed the transitions, and there was an apparentincrease in professionalism. Not all was politics. Further,transition is a longer period than normally understood, startingwell before the election and continuing until the legislaturehas adjourned.     

Approval voting in practice

Several leading professional associations have recently decided to use approval voting (AV). The largest of them, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE), with more than 300,000 members, adopted AV in response to practical political problems with conventional plurality elections of precisely the sort that AV was designed to solve. This paper analyzes results of the first three multicandidate elections conducted by the IEEE using the new system. Issues examined include participation rates, use of multiple votes, patterns of shared support, majority rule, AV-dominance, effects on outcomes, and encouragement of candidate entry. In general, AV appears to have had a successful test.     

The incumbency advantage in second-order PR elections: Evidence from the Irish context, 1942–2019

Do candidates in local elections benefit from an incumbency advantage? And which factors moderate the strength of this incumbency bonus? Analyzing seven decades of Irish local elections (1942–2019) conducted under proportional representation through the single transferable vote, we reassess and extend the mixed evidence on the incumbency advantage under proportional representation and in second-order elections. By applying the Regression Discontinuity Design, we find that the incumbency advantage is at least as strong in Irish local as in general elections, which are conducted under the identical electoral system. We also show that marginally elected candidates in local elections have much higher reelection probabilities when they do not face a high-quality candidate in their local electoral area after getting elected. The findings point to the importance of name recognition as a major driver of the incumbency advantage in local elections.     

The social sub-optimality of competitive elections

One of the common normative assumptions about elections is that competitive elections are inherently good, and non-competitive elections are problematic. This paper challenges that assumption. At the level of individual elections, competitive elections produce either sub-optimal results or trivially optimal results, but competitive elections are never uniquely optimal. In aggregation, competitive elections for a set of offices are inherently sub-optimal. From a procedural perspective, the circumstances in which competitive elections are appropriate are rare, and from a diagnostic perspective, we cannot conclude that there are problems in the electoral system based on a lack of competition. In the context of social choice theory, competitive elections are not inherently good.     

Serving Two Masters: Professionalization versus Corruption in Ukraine's Election Administration

The development of a neutral, professional bureaucracy has been a profound concern for emerging democracies. International and domestic actors have expended significant resources to encourage the development of the rule of law, yet many postcommunist societies remain mired in corruption. When corrupt behaviors are integrated with a core function of democratic states, such as the implementation of free and fair elections, the implications of failures to professionalize bureaucrats are enhanced. This article empirically evaluates how professionalization and corruption interact in election administration, using unique survey data from Ukraine. We assess the results of pre‐ and postelection surveys of administrators conducted across Ukraine during the 2014 parliamentary elections. Our results suggest that aspects of a professionalized bureaucracy coexist with corruption and that mitigating incentives for state capture is a major challenge for democratization.     

Digital Election Observation: Regulatory Challenges around Legal Online Content

Between public debates about ‘hacking’ elections, so-called ‘fake news’ and online disinformation campaigns, it has become hard to imagine what free and fair elections in a digital environment could look like. This challenge is particularly pronounced for election observers who monitor free and fair elections. How should election observers fulfil this task when reliable data in online media campaigns are often not even available to media regulators? The following article provides a brief overview of existing challenges around online content regulation and how these apply to elections and election observation. It then considers where resources for digital electoral observation exist and how most effectively to build on these before, in conclusion, discussing next steps and potential opportunities to develop digital election observation further.     

Repression and reaction: militant democracy and the radical right in Germany and France

The June 2004 elections offered the British National Party unique opportunities for growth. There were three different elections being held at once: for seats on local councils, for the London mayor and the London Assembly, and for members of the European parliament (MEPs). Following boundary changes, the local council election was being conducted on a three-candidates-per-seat basis. The London and European elections were being run according to the rules of proportional representation. Both systems favour minor parties. The BNP went into the elections buoyed up by almost four years of considerable success. However, the party failed to achieve the gains anticipated. After several years that witnessed increasing votes, this was the first instance of the BNP vote stagnating. Renton explains the BNP's failure in terms of a series of factors: poor leadership, tactical errors, the hardening of Conservative anti-BNP voters, the press publicity garnered by the UK Independence Party, and the successful intervention of anti-BNP campaigners.     

Electronic Voting in Belgium: A Legitimised Choice?

Computer voting was introduced in Belgium in 1994. Paradoxically, no action had been taken to ascertain the opinion of electors confronted with this original method of voting. This article verifies the social and empirical dimensions of legitimacy of this new method through several empirical indicators used in a survey conducted on the occasion of the federal elections of 18 May 2003: (a) how easy/difficult it was for electors to vote on a computer; (b) to what extent they trust voting on a computer; (c) if they have a philosophical/social opposition to voting on a computer.     

Consideration and Choice: Analyzing Party Choice in the Swedish European Election 2014

For a long time the question of to what extent party choice in the European Parliament (EP) elections is primarily dependent on voters’ orientations towards the European Union (EU) or just a mere reflection of orientations towards issues and actors in national politics has been debated. By combining insights from individual‐level models of party choice in second‐order elections with theories of sequential decision making this article investigates if, how and at what stages in the decision process attitudes to European integration matters for party choice. In line with previous work on first and second decision rule criteria in EP elections, this article develops and tests hypotheses about how voters’ orientations work at different stages of the voter decision process. The findings, based on Swedish data from a probability‐based three‐wave Internet campaign panel, indicate that many voters are in fact considering more than one party to vote for in the beginning of the election campaign. As expected, left‐right orientations function as a main decision rule with respect to which parties voters even consider voting for, while proximity on the European integration dimension mainly matters as a second decision rule in the final stage of the decision process. Using a sequential model with consideration and choice stages, the article reveals a much larger complimentary effect of EU proximity on party choice than has generally been found in previous research. This serves as a distinct contribution to the emerging research field of individual party choice in second‐order elections.     

Second-order elections

Abstract The composition of the directly elected European Parliament does not precisely reflect the 'real' balance of political forces in the European Community. As long as the national political systems decide most of what there is to be decided politically, and everything really important, European elections are additional national second-order elections. They are determined more by the domestic political cleavages than by alternatives originating in the EC, but in a different way than if nine first-order national elections took place simultaneously. This is the case because European elections occur at different stages of the national political systems' respective 'electoral cycles'. Such a relationship between a second-order arena and the chief arena of a political system is not at all unusual. What is new here, is that one second-order political arena is related to nine different first-order arenas. A first analysis of European election results satisfactorily justifies the assumption mat European Parliament direct elections should be treated as nine simultaneous national second-order elections.     

The midterm referendum: The importance of attributions of responsibility

Analysts and commentators have long regarded midterm congressional elections as an interim evaluation of the president. Recent research has emphasized the effect of the individual qualities of congressional candidates on the vote. Both factors contributed to the 1982 congressional vote. However, the relative success of the Republican party in 1982 was made possible by the unwillingness of a majority of the electorate to attribute the country's economic problems to the administration. This attribution factor, implicitly ignored in most analyses of the effect of the economy on vote choices, is examined here.     

PCC Elections as a ‘Failed Experiment’: What Lessons can be Learned?

The low turnout of the 2012 police and crime commissioner (PCC) elections have led to questions surrounding their legitimacy and have even led to the former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg describing the elections—elections his party helped to introduce—as a ‘failed experiment’. Despite this, the election of a majority Conservative government in May 2015 appears to offer some longevity to the role of police and crime commissioners and cements next year's PCC elections in the political diary. Concerns in the immediate aftermath of the elections focused upon the costs of the elections. In this article I offer some suggestions as to what lessons could be learned from this experiment and, through exploring the attitudes of voters, political parties and the media, suggest that we can learn four lessons: (1) that spoilt ballots cannot be ignored; that (2) political parties and (3) the media's attitudes toward elections are important in encouraging people to vote; and (4) that high numbers of independent candidates cannot simply be welcomed at times of elections.     

Does fraud trump partisanship? The impact of contentious elections on voter confidence

Fraudulent elections can reduce citizen trust in elections and other political institutions. But what about the impact of contentious elections that resolve successfully, leading to democratizing change? Do national movements toward democracy trump individual experiences with electoral manipulation? Using public opinion survey data collected before and after the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, we evaluate changes in voter confidence in electoral practices, political institutions, and democracy. Although national trends show increased voter confidence overall, subnational variation suggests pervasive partisan differences in opinions about election quality and institutional confidence. Remarkably, we find that direct exposure to fraud matters far less than anticipated; voters who were personally exposed to fraud felt no more or less confident than their co-partisans. We show that partisanship and the national electoral context may interact in ways that complicate the effects of democratizing elections, suggesting important avenues for future research.