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.     

Understanding unequal turnout: Education and voting in comparative perspective

Well-educated citizens vote more frequently than the poorly educated in some countries, including the USA. However, in many countries, no such differences are observed. One classical explanation of the presence or absence of this inequality in voting is that the strength of left-wing forces sharpens or reduces it. An alternative explanation is that some institutional arrangements and contextual features disproportionately affect the voter participation of some individuals depending on their resources, thus shaping turnout inequality. These theories are tested using multilevel modeling with data from 28 advanced industrial democracies. Compulsory voting reduces inequalities because under this system quasi-universal turnout is achieved. In addition, the poorly educated vote more frequently when the voting procedure is easy and when there are few political parties, thus reducing turnout inequality. However, strong left-wing parties and trade unions are not associated with more equal turnout.     

Random votes under compulsory voting: Evidence from Brazil

Compulsory voting is known for boosting electoral turnout, even when sanctions for abstaining are small or loosely enforced. Much less is known, however, about the consequences of compulsory voting on vote choice, and, in particular, about the quality of electoral decisions. In this paper, we explore the extent to which voters meaningfully engage in the electoral process or simply vote randomly because voting is required by law. We conducted a large online survey in Brazil during the 2018 national elections to assess if voters engage in random voting. We evaluate random voting for low-profile, low-information elected offices (state and federal legislators) and others that receive greater media coverage (governor and president) and evaluate the determinants of random voting for each of them. We find that: 1) random voting does not appear to be affected by social desirability bias; 2) there is substantial random voting under compulsory voting; 3) more voters tend to engage in random voting in low-profile, low-information elections, as compared to elections that receive greater media coverage; and, 4) interest in politics, education, and disposition to vote if voting were to be voluntary reduce random voting. Our findings carry important implications for the study of citizen participation and civic competence under compulsory voting and for democratic representation, more broadly.     

Selective abstention in simultaneous elections: Understanding the turnout gap

If two elections are held at the same day, why do some people choose to vote in one but to abstain in another? We argue that selective abstention is driven by the same factors that determine voter turnout. Our empirical analysis focuses on Sweden where the (aggregate) turnout gap between local and national elections has been about 2–3%. Rich administrative register data reveal that people from higher socio-economic backgrounds, immigrants, women, older individuals, and people who have been less geographically mobile are less likely to selectively abstain.     

The design,purpose, and effects of voting advice applications

In recent electoral politics, one of the most striking internet-related developments is the increasingly widespread use of Voting Advice Applications (VAAs). In this introduction to the symposium devoted to analysing the design, purpose, and effects of voting advice applications, we briefly discuss the literature on these tools for voters, articulate the aims of the symposium, and summarise the six contributions. These papers represent the leading edge of an emerging subfield of electoral research, which has not only significant practical relevance but also research links with many other fields in political science.     

Going Postal: How All-Mail Elections Influence Turnout

We examine the question of whether or not reducing the costs of voting by conducting elections entirely through the mail rather than at the traditional polling place increases participation. Using election data from Oregon, we examine whether or not elections conducted through the mail increase turnout in both local and statewide elections. Using precinct-level data merged with census data we also examine how postal voting may alter the composition of the electorate. We find that, while all-mail elections tend to produce higher turnout, the most significant increases occur in low stimulus elections, such as local elections or primaries where turnout is usually low. The increase in turnout, however, is not uniform across demographic groups. Voting only by mail is likely to increase turnout among those who are already predisposed to vote, such as those with higher socioeconomic status. Like other administrative reforms designed to make voting easier, postal voting has the potential to increase turnout. However, the expanded pool of voters will be limited most likely to those already inclined to vote but find it inconvenient to go to the polling place. This conclusion is consistent with the growing body of research that suggests that relaxing administrative requirements is not likely to be the panacea for low turnout among the disenfranchised.     

Campaign civility under preferential and plurality voting

We present reasons to expect that campaigns are less negative under preferential voting. We then examine if preferential voting systems affect how people perceive the conduct of elections. This paper reports results from surveys designed to measure voters‘ perceptions of candidates’ campaigns, comparing places with plurality elections to those that used preferential voting rules. Our surveys of voters indicate that people in cities using preferential voting were significantly more satisfied with the conduct of local campaigns than people in similar cities with plurality elections. People in cities with preferential voting were also less likely to view campaigns as negative, and less likely to respond that candidates were frequently criticizing each other. Results are consistent across a series of robustness checks.     

The Calculus of Voting in Compulsory Voting Systems

Compulsory voting laws have consistently been demonstrated to boost electoral participation. Despite the widespread presence of compulsory voting and the significant impact these laws appear to have on voting behavior, surprisingly little effort has been devoted to analyzing how mandatory voting alters the decision-making calculus of individual voters in these systems. Moreover, studies that investigate the influence of compulsory voting laws on electoral participation generally treat these policies monolithically, with scant attention to the nuances that differentiate mandatory voting laws across systems and to their consequences for voting rates. Analyses that explicitly and empirically examine the effects of penalties and enforcement are surprisingly rare. This study aims to fill that void by adapting rational choice models of participation in elections for compulsory voting systems. I find that the level of penalties countries impose for non-compliance and the degree of penalty enforcement impact turnout rates. Voters in mandatory voting systems abstain least when both the penalties and the likelihood of enforcement are high, and abstain most when both meaningless.

Strategic coalition voting: Evidence from New Zealand

Whereas the classic literature on strategic voting has focused on the dilemma faced by voters who prefer a candidate for whom they expect has little chance of winning a seat, we consider the dilemma faced by voters in PR systems who do not expect their preferred party to be in government. We develop hypotheses relating to strategic voting over multi-party governments that we test using the New Zealand Election Study (NZES) campaign study of 2002. We find evidence that expectations play a role in structuring vote choice. While there is clear evidence of wishful thinking there is also evidence that voters respond to expectations about government formation. These expectations may mobilize voters and lead them to defect from their first preference.     

Mobilizing the Seldom Voter: Campaign Contact and Effects in High-Profile Elections

Decades of research suggests that campaign contact together with an advantageous socioeconomic profile increases the likelihood of casting a ballot. Measurement and modeling handicaps permit a lingering uncertainty about campaign communication as a source of political mobilization however. Using data from a uniquely detailed telephone survey conducted in a pair of highly competitive 2002 U.S. Senate races, we further investigate who gets contacted, in what form, and with what effect. We conclude that even in high-profile, high-dollar races the most important determinant of voter turnout is vote history, but that holding this variable constant reveals a positive effect for campaign communication among “seldom” voters, registered but rarely active participants who—ironically—are less likely than regular or intermittent voters to receive such communication.

Rainfall,population density and voter turnout

We create a dataset linking rainfall amounts to constituency-level election data for Irish general elections over the period 1989–2016. Rainfall is shown to significantly reduce voter turnout. The marginal effect of rainfall on turnout is greater in densely populated constituencies, where a rainy day decreases turnout by as much as three percentage points (or five percent). Using a theoretical framework based on a rational voting model, we propose two possible explanations for this effect. Firstly, if rural voters have higher civic duty than urban voters, they may be immune to rain on election day. Secondly, mode of transport may play a role. Urban voters are more likely to travel on foot or bicycle, whereas rural voters typically travel by car. Therefore, the cost to voting associated with rainfall may be higher in urban areas. Constituency-level data on mode of transport from 1997 to 2016 provides some empirical support for this hypothesis.     

Patience as a Political Virtue: Delayed Gratification and Turnout

A number of scholars have demonstrated that voter turnout is influenced by the costs of processing information and going to the polls, and the policy benefits associated with the outcome of the election. However, no one has yet noted that the costs of voting are paid on or before Election Day, while policy benefits may not materialize until several days, months, or even years later. Since the costs of voting must be borne before the benefits are realized, people who are more patient should be more willing to vote. We use a “choice game” from experimental economics to estimate individual discount factors which are used to measure patience. We then show that patience significantly increases voter turnout.

Keeping Up with the Joneses: The Interplay of Personal and Collective Evaluations in Voter Turnout

Do citizens turnout to vote because of changes in their personal financial situation or are they influenced by the nation’s economic performance? Previous research on this question is far from united. We attempt to unify the disparate literature on the effects of pocketbook and sociotropic evaluations on voter turnout in midterm and presidential elections. Our analysis of ANES data from 1978 to 2004, based on a reference-dependent model of voter turnout, indicates that both pocketbook and sociotropic considerations affect individuals’ decision of whether to vote in midterm elections. Those who perceive that over the last year their own financial situation has improved relative to the economy are less likely to vote than those who view the economy as outperforming their own financial situation.     

Internet voting and turnout: Evidence from Switzerland

Internet voting (i-voting) is often discussed as a potential remedy against declining turnout rates. This paper presents new evidence on the causal effect of i-voting on turnout, drawing on trials conducted in two Swiss cantons: Geneva and Zurich. Both Geneva and Zurich constitute hard cases for i-voting, given that i-voting was introduced in the presence of postal voting. However, this setting allows us to test some of the more optimistic claims regarding i-voting's ability to increase turnout. Empirically, we exploit the advantageous circumstance that federal legislation created a situation coming close to a natural experiment, with some of Geneva's and Zurich's municipalities participating in i-voting trials and others not. Using difference-in-differences estimation, we find that i-voting did not increase turnout in the cantons of Geneva and Zurich.     

Strategic voting,information, and ethnicity in emerging democracies: Evidence from Kenya

This paper explores the conditions under which voters in emerging democracies support non-viable candidates. We argue that cognitive biases and the geographic clustering of minor-party supporters in ethno-political enclaves lead to misperceptions about the electoral prospects of minor-party candidates, weakening strategic defections both among co-ethnic and non-co-ethnic supporters. We explore these arguments using original survey data from Kenya's 2007 presidential election, a contest that featured a minor-party candidate, Kalonzo Musyoka, who stood little chance of electoral victory. Despite this, results show that most of his supporters chose to vote for the candidate, failing to perceive that he was not a viable contender. The findings suggest that theories of political behavior in multi-ethnic settings can be enriched by drawing upon insights from the political psychology literature on belief formation.     

Voting when the economy goes bad,everyone is in charge,and no one is to blame: The case of the 2009 German election

The economy was a major issue in Germany’s 2009 election. The global economic crisis did not spare Germany, whose economy is tightly integrated into the global economy. So when the German economy experienced a historical shock, did voters connect their views of the economy with their vote choice? Or did they, as some research has suggested, recognize Germany’s dependence on global markets and cut the government slack, especially when the government consists of the country’s two major parties? Using pre- and post-election panel surveys from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), we investigate the weight that voters gave to the economy, relative to other considerations, when casting their ballot and whether governing parties were disproportionately judged based on the state of the economy.     

Ecological inference under unfavorable conditions: Straight and split-ticket voting in diverse settings and small samples

Problems of ecological inference have long troubled political scientists. Thomsen's (1987) estimator for ecological inference has been shown to produce estimates close to the individual level estimates for transitions across elections, but it is unknown how well it performs under unfavorable conditions. We fill this void by testing the estimator as the across-unit variance increases and introduce a new procedure to examine the bias of the estimates as the number of aggregate units decreases. Looking at partisan voting patterns across races within the 2000 general election in Florida counties and taking advantage of ballot image data to study straight-ticket voting we demonstrate that the estimator performs well in both heterogeneous societies and when the number of aggregate units is limited.     

Ideology,party systems and corruption voting in European democracies

What is the impact of corruption on citizens' voting behavior? There is a growing literature on an increasingly ubiquitous puzzle in many democratic countries: that corrupt officials continue to be re-elected by voters. In this study we address this issue with a novel theory and newly collected original survey data for 24 European countries. The crux of the argument is that voters' ideology is a salient factor in explaining why citizens would continue voting for their preferred party despite the fact that it has been involved in a corruption scandal. Developing a theory of supply (number of effective parties) and demand (voters must have acceptable ideological alternatives to their preferred party), we posit that there is a U-shaped relationship between the likelihood of corruption voting and where voters place themselves on the left/right spectrum. The further to the fringes, the more likely the voters are to neglect corruption charges and continue to support their party. However, as the number of viable party alternatives increases, the effect of ideology is expected to play a smaller role. In systems with a large number of effective parties, the curve is expected to be flat, as the likelihood that the fringe voters also have a clean and reasonably ideologically close alternative to switch to. The hypothesis implies a cross level interaction for which we find strong and robust empirical evidence using hierarchical modeling. In addition, we provide empirical insights about how individual level ideology and country level party systems – among other factors – impact a voter's decision to switch parties or stay home in the face of their party being involved in a corruption scandal.     

Religious voting and moral traditionalism: The moderating role of party characteristics

One of the most important theoretical explanations for why religion is associated with party choice is that religion affects citizens' moral values, which in turn affect party preference. In this article, I first estimate the empirical importance of this mechanism. On average, about ten percent of religious voting is mediated by moral traditionalism. Secondly, I argue that the importance of this mechanism varies depending on party characteristics. The effect is indirect through moral traditionalism to the extent that parties emphasize moral issues such as abortion or euthanasia. Under these conditions, group belonging may provide useful cues for voters. Combining data on 50 parties with survey data on more than 10,000 citizens from 13 West European countries, this article provides empirical evidence of this proposition in the case of the religious cleavage. The findings may be of relevance also for other social structural variables, such as class or gender.