Economic voting in Hungary, 1998–2008

This study investigates retrospective voting and issue voting, and their change over time in a transitioning country. Sociotropic, as well as egocentric economic evaluations, and policy issues of parties are expected to play an increasing role in party preferences of citizens over time. Data consist of 41 Hungarian cross-sectional surveys, between 1998 and 2008. Results of conditional logistic regression models reveal that voters reward incumbent parties when they see improvements in their personal or the national economic situation, and punish them if the economy deteriorates. Distance from a given party on the left–right scale also decreases the chance of voting for that party. Voting behavior is changing during transition. The evaluations of the national economy and personal situation have an increasing impact on party preferences over time. We found educational heterogeneity in the extent of economic voting.     

Government accountability and voting choice in Italy, 1990–2008

Between 1996 and 2008 Italy has experienced four government alternations in as many consecutive elections. It could be argued that after the dramatic party change that occurred in the early 90s the Italian system is in a state of constant flux and voters appear rather bewildered. This paper presents an opposite argument, showing that voters' choice reflects the greater importance of valence politics – performance, the economy – acting as a cue to voting behaviour, interacting with a long-term political predisposition. In turn, this promotes parties' responsiveness and accountability since the overall performance of a government – even of a coalition government – appears as a goal to be shared by all partners, under the threat of defeat for all. The analysis is carried out employing the Italian National Elections Studies series.     

Negative personalization and voting behavior in 14 parliamentary democracies, 1961–2018

Existing research has begun to tackle the electoral consequences of affective polarization through the lens of negative partisanship. However, not equal attention has been paid to voters’ polarized opinions toward political leaders and their impact on electoral behavior. This paper offers a comparative, longitudinal assessment of the relationship between negativity towards party leaders and vote choice in multi-party systems. We develop our negative personalization hypothesis and test it empirically on an original pooled dataset featuring 109 national election surveys from 14 Western European parliamentary democracies collected over the last six decades. Our findings confirm the existence of a robust relationship between negative party-leader evaluations and vote choice. Furthermore, the results demonstrate a sizable growth in the incidence of negative personalization across time, now of a magnitude that compares to that exerted by in-party-leader evaluations. This finding constitutes a central innovation adding to the personalization of politics literature.     

Managing the MedUSA: comparing the political economy of US–Japan,US–German,and US–UK relations

Abstract

International experience tells that public services often fail to work for those in need. To make things work requires complex institutional changes that are difficult to come by, let alone sustain. This paper examines the situation of rural public service provision in China and a local attempt to revamp the service provision institution through adjusting the mix of state and the market. It reveals the dialectical process of policy evolution whereby innovation, and resistance to it, has emerged.     

Patriotism, pigskins, and politics: an empirical examination of expressive behavior and voting

In this paper we use data collected from nearly 4,000 single-family residences in Auburn, Alabama to investigate empirically whether specific political expressiveness (displaying a candidate’s election sign in one’s yard), general socio-political expressiveness (flying an American flag on either Memorial Day or Independence Day), or non-political expressiveness (displaying support for Auburn University’s football team outside one’s home) is related to the likelihood that at least one resident voted in the national/state/local elections held November 7, 2006. Controlling for the assessed value of the property and length of residential ownership, we find strong evidence that all three measures of expressive behavior are statistically significant predictors of a greater likelihood of voting than occurred at residences showing no evidence of these expressive behaviors. These findings suggest that voting may be more completely understood not as politically-expressive behavior but, rather, as a generally expressive tendency that happens on occasion to be manifested in a political context. That is, an understanding of why some people vote and others do not may require an understanding of why some individuals are more expressive (generally speaking) than others.     

A banana republic? The effects of inconsistencies in the counting of votes on voting behavior

Public Choice - We examine whether local inconsistencies in the counting of votes influence voting behavior. We exploit the case of the second ballot of the 2016 presidential election in Austria....     

Economic voting in Portugal, 2002–2009

This article tests the economic voting hypothesis in Portugal during the three most recent first-order elections (2002, 2005, 2009), trying to make sense of the multiplicity of choices in the Portuguese party system. We observed that positive sociotropic perceptions increase the probability to vote for the incumbent, even when we control for long-term factors of vote choice; egotropic effects are weaker. Negative economic perceptions not only lead to a higher probability to vote for the major opposition party, but, in some cases, increase the probabilities to vote for small parties or to refrain from voting. Sociotropic effects are actually quite constant in this timeframe, but their strength to explain the vote is lower than that of ideology and (before 2009) religiosity.     

Politics,economics and party popularity in Britain, 1979–83

Analysts of party popularity frequently have emphasized macroeconomic conditions at the expense of political events. The wisdom of doing so is challenged by time-series analyses of British party popularity between the 1979 and 1983 elections. Some of the significant political interventions modeled were part of ‘usual’ politics, that is, by-elections, intraparty disputes, and public reactions to party leaders, whereas others were ‘unusual’, that is, engagement and victory in a foreign war, and the emergence of a new party. Analyses also show that inflation and unemployment had significant effects, but, taken together, they were not in accord with the dominant ‘reward-punishment’ model of party support. Rather, they conformed to an ‘issue-priority’ model which postulates that the impact of macroeconomic conditions depends upon how the electorate perceives the priorities of competing parties. Future expectations as well as evaluations of past performance govern the political economy of party popularity.     

Economic voting in Britain, 1857–1914

Despite limited government control over the pre-1914 economy, opposition politicians were enthusiastic in blaming bad economic news on the incumbent. In a study of 458 by-elections between 1857 and 1914, we find that voters typically gave new governments a 'honeymoon' but thereafter held them responsible for high unemployment and high prices. Each 1% rise in the price level, on average, brought about a 0.21% swing against the government of the day, while each one-point rise in the percentage unemployed had double this effect. However, when we split the electorate into borough and county constituencies, economic voting appears to be confined to the former.     

Bayesian hierarchical age-period-cohort models with time-structured effects: An application to religious voting in the US, 1972–2008

To examine dynamics of political processes using repeated cross-section data, effects of age, cohort, and time period have to be disentangled. I propose a Bayesian dynamic hierarchical model with cohort and period effects modeled as random walk through time. It includes smoothly time-varying effects of covariates, allowing researchers to study changing effects of individual characteristics on political behavior. It provides a flexible functional form estimate of age by integrating a semi-parametric approach in the hierarchical model. I employ this approach to examine religious voting in the United States using repeated cross-sectional surveys from 1972 to 2008. I find starkly differing nonlinear trends of de- and re-alignment among different religious denominations.     

Interest groups, public choice and the economics of religion

This article reviews Bob Tollison’s conjoint contributions to the burgeoning area of the economics of religion, underscoring his integration of public choice and interest-group themes into the microeconomic analysis of faith-based organizational architecture, institutional decision making and doctrinal innovation. Beginning with study of the medieval Catholic Church, moving forward to the Protestant Reformation and beyond, it supplies a timeline of developments and the major findings of each phase of his research program.     

Ideology,economic interests,and congressional roll-call voting: Partisan instability and Bank of the United States legislation, 1811–1816

We introduce a wrinkle into the study of Congressional roll-call voting by focusing on a period of partisan instability in American History: the Era of Good Feelings. During deviations from normal periods of two-party rule, the dominant model of voting behavior, the ideological model, loses precision in correctly classifying individual votes. We contend that a “pooled” voting model – comprised of both ideological and economic variables – performs better than the basic ideological model during these unstable periods. When party mechanisms no longer constrain or structure actions, we believe the “electoral connection” is especially important, and, thus, economic-based constituency factors must be included in models of vote choice. To explore this belief, we focus on a particularly contentious issue – the rechartering of the Bank of the United States (BUS) – which was dealt with before and after a partisan decomposition occurred in the House. Using measures developed by Poole and Rosenthal (1985, 1997), we find that the vote on the First BUS in 1811, during a stable partisan period, is organized along ideological lines. By 1816, the two-party system collapsed, and we do not find the vote on the Second BUS to exhibit much ideological structure. Conversely, we find that our pooled model predicts the vote on the Second BUS quite well, providing a substantial improvement in fit over the basic ideological classification.     

Strategic Disorder,the Office of Policy Coordination and the Inauguration of US Political Warfare against the Soviet Bloc, 1948–50

This article examines the inauguration of US political warfare operations against the Soviet bloc, 1948–50. It builds on diplomatic and military historiography of US Cold War foreign policy, and engages with more recent scholarship of the ‘covert’ and unconventional confrontation between east and west. Two key interrelated themes are explored. The failure of Truman's policymakers, particularly the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, to devise a coherent strategy to wage political warfare against communist regimes was fundamental to its ultimate failure. Also, the disordered US government bureaucracy further impaired and strategically dislocated the application and overall success of political warfare operations by the Office of Policy Coordination.     

Voice of America and Iran, 1949–1953: US liberal developmentalism,propaganda and the Cold War

The administration of President Harry S. Truman used Voice of America radio to promote Iranian ‘liberal developmentalism’. Radio propaganda joined economic assistance, military aid, and other information programs to promote Western‐style capitalism and to repel Communist appeals in Iran. But President Dwight D. Eisenhower abandoned Truman's gradualist Iran policy in favor of covert action, a seemingly more expedient solution to perceived Iranian political instability. The US‐British engineered coup in 1953 to overthrow the nationalistic Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq revealed the shallowness of US commitments to liberal reform in Iran and highlighted Americans' willingness to undermine Iranian sovereignty in order to preserve US security interests in the Middle East.     

The Remaking of China–EUrope Relations in the New Era of US–China Antagonism

Journal of Chinese Political Science - The recent years have witnessed a significant change in China–EUrope relations, with the EU’s strategic positioning of China undergoing a...     

Mapping the northern frontier: Canada and the origins of the US army's Military Information Division, 1885–1898

In 1885, the United States Army established its first official peacetime intelligence organization, the Military Information Division (MID), at least in part to collect intelligence enabling it to strike Canada in the event of conflict with Great Britain. Examining MID's leadership, information collection methods, intelligence objectives, organizational structure, and officer recruitment criteria during its first dozen years of existence reveals that it devoted significant resources to mapping the Canadian border, restructured its organization in part to increase the efficiency of those scouting expeditions, and selected officers to lead MID and conduct its reconnaissance missions based on their topographical skills, their knowledge of Canada, and their ability to keep their work quiet.     

What Goes with Red and Blue? Mapping Partisan and Ideological Associations in the Minds of Voters

Political Behavior - To what extent do voters grasp “what goes with what” among key political objects as they attempt to understand the choices they face at the ballot box? Is...     

Class voting in Western industrialized countries, 1945–1990: Systematizing and testing explanations

Abstract. Analyzing data obtained from the literature and our own calculations, significant differences were found among countries in their levels of class voting. The Scandinavian countries had the highest and Canada and the USA the lowest levels of class voting. Since the 1950s, there was a decline in almost all countries in the level of class voting. In this article, several hypotheses were deduced from a limited number of individual assumptions, each purporting to explain the differences among and declining trends within countries. Testing these hypotheses with multilevel techniques revealed that differences among countries can best be explained by their population's religious–ethnic–linguistic diversity, and by the union density within countries. The decline in most countries can best be explained by the rise in their standard of living. Furthermore, a rise in the percentage of union members, especially among the nonmanual classes, accelerated the decline in the level of class voting in some countries.     

Anti‐Zionist politics and political antisemitism in Britain, 1920–1924

Anti‐Zionism in Britain in the early 1920s was inextricably bound up with an assault on the Jews as Jews which obscured the substantive issues of Palestine and Jewish‐Arab relations. As a result, Jews were later inclined to disregard the case anti‐Zionism made.