Compensatory Voting in Direct Legislation. Evidence from Switzerland

In elections, voters sometimes compensate for post‐election bargaining processes by electing parties that are more extreme than themselves. We investigate compensatory voting in direct democracy. Our goals are to develop and test a measure of compensatory voting in direct legislation and assess its extent of compensatory voting. Empirically, we draw on the case of Switzerland, a country with frequent popular votes. We operationalize compensatory voting as voting ‘yes’ on a popular initiative in spite of endorsing arguments that speak against this initiative, under the condition of being well‐informed about the initiative. Using data from post‐ballot surveys on 17'570 individuals having voted on 63 popular initiatives in the period 1993 to 2015, our analysis shows that compensatory voting has not significantly increased in Switzerland in this period.     

The Underexplored Species: Selective Participation in Direct Democratic Votes

While electoral research usually distinguishes voters from abstainers, in the Swiss direct democratic context one needs to take into account a third category of citizens, the selective voters, who decide anew at each vote whether they will participate or not. This article offers an investigation of this common but under‐researched form of participation. To that end, we take advantage of a unique data‐set linking official turnout data with survey data. Our results show that selective voters constitute the bulk of the electorate. While they form a heterogeneous group in terms of socio‐demographic characteristics, selective voters lean more towards abstainers than towards permanent voters with respect to political variables. We argue that this is not necessarily bad news in terms of democratic theory.     

The Impact of Religion on Voting Behaviour – A Multilevel Approach for Switzerland

The traditional cleavages like social class or religion are often reported to have lost explanatory power for the voting decision. Regarding the religious cleavage, the evidence is ambiguous depending on the choice of cases and indicators used. The present study tests the impact of religion for the preference to vote the Christian Democratic Party of Switzerland (CVP) using data from the 2007 and 2011 Swiss national elections. Additional to the inclusion of individual variables, a special focus lies on contextual effects. The estimated hierarchical linear models confirm a prevailing influence of the simple individual factors and the presence of a significant contextual effect. Statistical evidence is also presented for some of the supposed interaction effects between individual and contextual religious variables.     

The Impact of Municipality Mergers on Political Participation

The citizen assembly of the Swiss canton Glarus in 2006 decided to radically reduce the historical number of communes from 25 to three. Studies show that the financial and economic consequences are surprisingly small. This paper analyzes the effects on citizens' vote participation as an indicator of their political involvement. Using the difference-in-difference and the synthetic control methods, we empirically show that vote participation dropped significantly, also compared to neighboring cantons and the rest of Switzerland.     

Inequality,Distributive Justice and Political Participation: An Analysis of the Case of Chile

Political participation has frequently been associated with individual resources; that is, individuals with higher incomes, higher educational levels and more time tend to participate in the political process to a greater extent than other individuals do. The present study suggests that in addition to resources, an individual's beliefs about economic distribution are an important determinant of participation both in elections and in protests. Based on the analysis of the Chilean data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) 2012, the results suggest that distributive beliefs are associated primarily with participation in protests.     

Institutional Grievances and Right-Wing Extremism: Voting for Golden Dawn in Greece

This article examines the effect of institutional grievances on extreme right voting by using an original survey to analyse voter support for the Greek Golden Dawn (GD). The article first examines various theories of extreme-right voting and then develops the concept of institutional grievances. Using structural equation modeling, it shows that that the strongest correlates of GD voting are those capturing institutional grievances. Economic grievances have a limited and cultural grievances a moderate effect on GD voting. The article compares the findings with those of the broader literature on extreme-right voting. It concludes with some suggestions on how to link the findings with broader developments in Europe.     

Democracy Beyond Secrecy: Assessing the Promises and Pitfalls of Collective Voting

This paper assesses collective voting as a specific mode of democratic decision‐making and compares it to secret voting. Under collective voting, voters gather in one place and decide by the show of hands. We theorise two potential advantages and two disadvantages of collective voting so defined. We then draw on original survey data from one of the largest polities practising collective voting, the citizen assembly of the Swiss canton of Glarus. We find that both the promises and pitfalls of non‐secret voting are exaggerated. Non‐secret voting’s suspected pitfalls – social pressure and abstention – do not generally materialise in our sample, although for women they do appear to be relevant to some extent. However, the promises of collective voting – enabling cue‐taking and discursive bridging and bonding – are equally realised to a limited extent only.     

Voting for Movement Parties in Southern Europe: The Role of Protest and Digital Information

In recent years ‘movement parties’ such as Syriza in Greece, the Movimento 5 Stelle in Italy, Podemos in Spain and—to a lesser extent—Bloco de Esquerda in Portugal shook national party systems, breaking the consolidated dynamics of political competition. Despite growing interest in movement parties, there has been scant attention to the role of citizens adopting unconventional forms of action and using digital media in accounting for their electoral performance. To fill this gap, four original internet-based post-electoral surveys are employed showing that protesters and digital media users are more likely to vote for these parties, despite important country differences.     

Ethno-Political Effects of Suburbanization in the Vilnius Urban Region: An Analysis of Voting Behavior

We use electoral data to analyze the ethno-political consequences that may arise from the fact that the region surrounding the city of Vilnius is dominated by residents with a Polish identity, while those who move to the suburbs are mainly ethnic Lithuanians. In the suburban ring we found increasing voting turnout, a decreasing share of votes for the Polish party, and an increase of the absolute number of votes for this party. The changing electoral behavior might be an indicator of growing ethno-political tensions and the zones of the most intense changes identify areas of potential social tensions between ethnic groups.     

Stones on the Road: The Politics of Participation and the Generation of Crisis in Bolivia

This paper demonstrates that recent protests in Bolivia must be linked to the failure of efforts to improve democratic participation in the country. It argues that such failures can be traced to a history of prejudices in national development and society and persistent biases and contradictions within international development policy and institutions. Despite these obstacles, the paper concludes that ideas for appropriate development and realistic alternatives for change to government and democracy are visible in recent critical development thinking and amongst the different social and cultural groupings involved in the demonstrations.     

Electoral participation in African democracies: the impact of individual and contextual factors

This paper addresses the question of how electoral participation at the individual level is affected by various political and sociological factors in new democracies in Sub-Saharan Africa. Relying on Afrobarometer (Round 5) data, the study examines the determinants of voting for over 12,000 voting aged individuals in eight countries. Findings confirm the importance of individual characteristics such as age, associational networks, discussing politics, party identification, religiosity, trust and satisfaction with democracy in predicting turnout at the individual level. But more importantly, the addition of contextual factors significantly improves the individual-level model predicting vote choice in these democracies.     

对马华公会党员及其政治参与的研究

马华公会是马来西亚政治史上最为重要的华人政党 ,本文对马华公会的党员及其政治参与进行了初步研究。     

Decomposing the Vote: Individual,Communal, and Cantonal Sources of Voting Behavior in Switzerland

This article considers individual, communal, and cantonal sources of voting behavior in the 2007 National Council elections in Switzerland. Using hierarchical linear models, it is shown how the vote propensity for the five main parties (CVP, FDP, Greens, SP, and SVP) varies across individuals, communes, and cantons. Key explanatory factors at each of these levels are explored, as well as cross‐party differences in the effects of these factors.     

The Effects of Local Government Consolidation on Turnout: Evidence from a Quasi‐Experiment in Switzerland

In the last decades, municipal mergers have been one major element of local government reforms in Switzerland and beyond. In this article, we describe and analyze the political effects of this development. We use a quasi‐experimental setting to test the impact of municipal mergers on electoral participation. We find that in merged municipalities, the decrease in turnout is significantly stronger than in non‐merged municipalities. Further, the effect is more pronounced in relatively small localities. There is a temporal dimension to this effect—that is, turnout drops mainly in the first election after the first merger, but not so much after the second or third merger. Hence, the study provides a skeptical yet differentiated perspective on the democratic consequences of municipal mergers and points to further research avenues to develop a more comprehensive understanding of local government consolidation.     

Taking Turns at the Ballot Box: Selective Participation as a New Perspective on Low Turnout

Participation research on voting usually considers only one vote or election, and therefore separates citizens into the categories of participants and absentees. Consequently, low turnout often is discussed to mean that citizens are either not interested in or fed up with the political system. This paper argues that this cross‐sectional perspective severely underestimates political participation particularly in democracies in which citizens regularly are asked to vote using direct democratic ballot measures. Taking into account not just one but 15 ballot decisions simultaneously, this paper demonstrates that a majority of citizens participates only selectively, and therefore voluntarily chooses to abstain. Using official turnout data, which enables the tracking of individuals’ participative behaviour over time in a Swiss commune, this paper demonstrates that selective participation is indeed a relevant empirical phenomenon and presents first conclusions about who participates selectively and when these individuals are mobilized.     

Civic Participation and Citizenship in Turkey: A Comparative Study of Five Cities

This study explores whether and how participation in civil society organisations (CSOs) has transformed citizenship attitudes in different cities in Turkey, and how civic participation and citizenship attitudes are affected by local politico-cultural dynamics. The analysis is based on interviews conducted with representatives of 36 CSOs in five Turkish cities: Konya, Edirne, Diyarbakir, Trabzon, and Izmir. Our comparative analysis of the five cities reveals that civic life is more active in cities marked by high levels of religiosity (Konya) and politicised by conflict (Diyarbakir). On the other hand, politicisation of civic life through party dominance and clientelism, as in Edirne and Trabzon, undermines trust and discourages participation.     

The Persistence of Confessional Political Cultures in Switzerland: Some Puzzling Empirical Evidence from Local Parties

A comprehensive comparative study of Swiss local parties (1990) shows that ideological positions and attitudes toward political issues still differ considerably in catholic and protestant settings. Catholic parties are more likely to define themselves as “centrist”, while protestant groupings show more dispersion on the right as well as the left wing of the ideological spectrum. Among catholic parties, positions on the left-right scale and attitudes toward specific political issues are weakly associated, while in protestant settings, the coupling between ideology and concrete issues is rather strong. In protestant populations, it is found that specific occupational and class segments differ significantly by their selective preferences for either leftist or rightist parties, while in catholic settings, such differences are attenuated. Astonishingly, most of these regularities persist or get even more pronounced in communities with a highly modernized occupational structure and in groupings with a younger membership. Following Greeley (1989), it is speculated that confessional traditions survive in the “sedimented” form of implicit folks traditions and habitualizations, and that they function as “semantic codes” which find additional ways of expression in the course of societal development.     

Voting rights for nationals of the Southern African Development Community countries living in member states

ABSTRACT

The right to vote remains one of the most critical ways in which individuals influence government. However, the disenfranchisement of certain classes of people – notably non-citizen residents – is the norm in Africa, whereas many countries in Europe recognise the right of non-citizen residents to vote as a key element in the continent's political integration. In the Southern African Development Community (SADC), where the political integration of the region is recognised as an essential contributor to economic integration, the question of extra-national forms of regional citizenship and voting rights does not receive sufficient attention. This article looks at SADC and selected countries within SADC, to determine whether laws and treaties can be amended and developed to broaden the scope of citizenship and extend the right to vote to non-citizen residents.     

Voting on a constitution: Implications for democracy in Kenya

In November 2005, Kenya held its first-ever national referendum on a proposed constitution. After a contentious review process, 58% of voters rejected the final document. It is common in the analysis of Kenyan politics to rely on ethnic explanations; indeed, the referendum results cannot be understood without exploring ethnic cleavages in Kenyan society. However, an exclusive focus on ethnicity obscures other factors that influenced voters, including the controversial process of drafting the constitution, the mobilisation efforts of the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ campaigns, and the perceived performance of the government. In the end, the referendum was seen as a positive step toward democratic consolidation in Kenya and raised hopes for the future. For the second time in three years, voters rejected the preference of the sitting government, which respected the results. Hopes were dashed, though, when irregularities marred the 2007 election and the announcement of contested results sparked a wave of violence. Under intense domestic and international pressure, the opposing sides reached a power-sharing agreement, as the need for a new constitutional order in Kenya became even more apparent.