Differential turnout and party advantage in British general elections, 1964–83

Contradictory expectations exist about the effect of differential turnout on party support. This paper estimates the likely changes in party support in Britain under different levels of turnout. By applying multivariate analysis to individual-level data collected in 1964, 1974 and 1983, we argue that there is a consistent Conservative disadvantage in higher turnout, but that the corresponding Labour advantage is either slight or non-existent. The Liberals (and the Alliance in 1983) usually make a modest gain from increased turnout. While the magnitude of these changes in the vote may be small, they have the potential to determine the outcome of closely fought elections.     

Spoiler effects in proportional representation systems: evidence from eight Polish parliamentary elections, 1991–2015

I consider a model of multiple winner elections with several types of spoilers. In single-office elections, a “classic” spoiler turns a winner into a non-winner and a non-winner into a winner. Such spoilers rarely appear in multi-office elections. In such elections, spoilers include a “Kingmaker”, who turns a non-winner into a winner; a “Kingslayer”, who turns a winner into a non-winner; a “Valuegobbler”, who subtracts from some competitor more seats than it receives; and “Selfspoilers”, who may be hurt by competing separately rather than creating an electoral coalition. Various strategic spoilers, such as fake parties, are possible as well. I look for spoilers in eight Polish parliamentary elections that have taken place since the fall of communism in 1989. In two elections, the consequences of spoilers were massive. In 1993, multiple spoilers on the right helped the two post-communist parties return to power, slow down decommunization and create strong institutional obstacles to further democratization. In 2015, a spoiler manufactured a majority for the largest party (PiS) and, as a consequence, enabled PiS quickly to implement radical reforms. In other elections, spoilers had smaller, but noticeable consequences. The results suggest that parliamentary elections using PR party-list systems are vulnerable to spoiler problems that may cause significant political effects.     

The German intelligence estimates in the west, 1885–1914

Little has been known of German intelligence estimates prior to the First World War. The recent discovery of several German intelligence documents, including a classified history of German pre-war intelligence operations which was written during the inter-war period, in addition to some important German pre-war intelligence analysis, now gives considerable insight into the German intelligence estimates as well as their relationship to German war planning from 1885 to 1914.     

British Intelligence in the Middle East, 1898–1906

This article examines British intelligence efforts in Turkish Arabia at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that intelligence collection was really three separate efforts, carried out by the War Office, the Foreign Office, and the Government of India, and it reflected concerns about British decline, the problems experienced during the Boer War, as well as an effort to penetrate the ‘information order’ of India's sub-empire. Although intelligence efforts suffered from bureaucratic disharmony in Whitehall, and between London and the Government of India, valuable contributions were nevertheless made to Britain's knowledge of Turkish Arabia.     

Do party leadership contests forecast British general elections?

When assessing election forecasts, two important criteria emerge: their accuracy (precision) and lead time (distance to event). Curiously, in both 2010 and 2015 the most accurate forecasts came from models having the longest lead time—albeit at most 12 months. Can we increase the lead time further, supposing we tolerate a small decrease in accuracy? Here, we develop a model with a lead time of more than 3 years. Our Party Leadership Model relies on the votes of MPs when selecting their party leader. We assess the forecasting quality of our model with both leave-one-out cross-validation and a before-the-fact forecast of the 2019 general election. Compared to both simple forecasting methods and other scientific forecasts, our model emerges as a leading contender. This result suggests that election forecasting may benefit from developing models with longer lead times, and that party leaders may influence election outcomes more than is usually thought.     

Campaign spending and Senate elections, 1978–84

This paper uses a sample of recent Senate election results and estimates vote equations that show challenger spending hurts, and incumbent spending helps, incumbent re-election. While both types of spending have diminishing returns, the effects are asymmetrical. Challenger spending is more productive at lower levels of spending, but incumbents can spend greater amounts more profitably than can challengers. These results can explain why Senate incumbents spend money, why they typically outspend their challenger, and why incumbents who can outspend their challenger would tend to be against spending limits or public financing.However, the results do not explain why incumbent spending does not work in House election equations. Jacobson and others have run countless linear and quadratic specifications that persistently show perverse effects for incumbent spending. These results are not affected by the procedural problem of logging observations that have a value of zero, and pose a genuine puzzle. There are other empirical results suggesting the idea that there are basic differences in the nature of elections between the House and Senate. For example, Grier and Carlson (1988) find that state-level economic conditions have a strong effect on individual Senate elections, while Owens and Olson (1980) find that district-level economic conditions have no effect on House elections. Since I show that there are a significant number of elections where incumbent spending does matter, and that simultaneity bias may not be a tenable explanation for results where incumbent expenditures do not matter, it may be time to take a new look at the House data or to develop a testable theory that can explain persistant empirical differences in the determinants of elections in the House and Senate.     

Political-economic context and partisan strategies in the German federal elections, 1990–2002

This contribution develops a theory of the impact of differentiation on integration and unity among EU member states and discusses empirical evidence from four policy areas. According to the theory, the centripetal effects of closer co‐operation among willing EU members on initially unwilling non‐participants are strongly influenced by the character of the respective policy area in terms of public goods theory. The eventual participation of initially reluctant member states, which leads to the re‐establishment of long‐run unity despite short run differentiation, is most likely in policy areas involving excludable network effects, and most unlikely in areas dealing with common pool resource problems (the four remaining types of goods ranking in between these two extremes). The theoretical conclusions are supported by empirical evidence from four EU‐related policies: the successful three show strong characteristics of excludable network goods (EMU, Schengen and the Dublin Convention), while the one which has proved extraordinarily difficult so far involves a common pool resource problem (tax harmonisation).     

The glitterati government? Amateur celebrity candidates in American elections, 1928–2018

This paper examines amateur celebrity candidates in American elections from 1928 to 2018. Our central finding is that while not many celebrities run for public office, those who do usually win. We argue that the strategic-politician theory helps explain both why so few stars run for office and why those who do are generally successful. Besides name recognition, celebrities' most significant electoral advantage might be that they do not need a career in politics, which allows them to be picky about the races they enter. Although winning is not a foregone conclusion for celebrities, the most pertinent question seems to be not “can they win?” but “will they run?”     

Economic and elections in Spain (1982–2008): Cross-measures,cross-time

In other leading Western democracies, the effects of economic voting are well-established. However, for Spain, a strong scholarly current argues against economic voting in that nation. Unfortunately, these various studies are limited, because they are based on incomplete survey cross-sections, which use individual subjective measures of the economy. We employ a full survey pool (of eight elections, 1982–2008), to examine the effects of two national economic measures (one objective and one subjective). In a carefully specified, and estimated, general voting model, the impact of economic conditions, variously measured, reveals itself to be statistically and substantively significant. After all, national economic voting in Spain appears to operate much as it does elsewhere.     

Partisanship & nationalization in American elections: Evidence from presidential,senatorial, & gubernatorial elections in the U.S. counties, 1872–2020

Scholars argue that contemporary American elections are pronounced in their degree of partisanship and nationalization. While much of this work largely uncovers a heightened degree of nationalization in contemporary elections, little is known about how far back these patterns generalize. Given the limited availability of American electoral data, this work also generally focuses on a single office or during a certain segment of the post-war period since 1946. Moreover, this work largely focuses on states as salient units of analysis, masking potential variation found in U.S. counties, the smallest geographical unit constituting panel observations over time and across elections. In this note, we leverage a novel dataset of county-level election returns for President, U.S. Senate, and Governor, to specify a model assessing whether American elections are more nationalized and partisan than during any other period since the Civil War. We find evidence that presidential and Senate elections are more partisan today than any period since the Civil War, while gubernatorial elections are as partisan today as they were during the late 1800s. Our findings have implications for contemporary-based theories explaining the rise of partisanship in American elections and demonstrates the utility of county-level data in assessing electoral changes in America.     

Can hybrid regimes foster constituencies? Ethnic minorities in Georgian elections, 1992–2012

Do ethnic minorities in postcommunist regimes vote in systematic ways? This paper examines ethnic minority voting in Georgian elections from 1992 to 2012, examining the causes for ethnic minorities' high electoral turnout and ruling party support. Although some argue that electoral fraud is the explanatory cause, other interests, such as experience of poverty and party electoral strategy, help explain minority electoral behaviour. This paper uses statistical methods to examine electoral fraud, as well as OLS regression to investigate the role of socio-economic factors such as urban density or poverty on ethnic minority voting behaviour. The paper also draws from in-country field research to investigate the party strategies and programs in ethnic minority areas during the 2008 parliamentary election.     

Explaining variation in the competitiveness of U.S. Senate elections, 1922–2004

We develop and test predictions about the factors determining the competitiveness of elections to the U.S. Senate. To do so, we deliberately abstract away from candidate-specific conditions that have often been used to study political competitiveness in order to focus on basic structural features of the electoral landscape. In our framework, party-specific constraints on the ideological positioning of local candidates, linked to the national party organization and its contributors, interact with the heterogeneity of state electorates to determine the number of highly competitive Senate contests. Three hypotheses emerge from this model: (1) the greater the diversity of a party’s national legislative delegation, the more highly competitive Senate elections we will observe; (2) states in which the ideological heterogeneity of the electorate is relatively high will exhibit a greater number of highly competitive elections; and (3) highly competitive Senate contests will be more common in states with closed primaries than in states with open primaries. We provide strong evidence in support of the first two hypotheses and some evidence in support of the third.     

W.E.B. Du Bois in Turn-of-the-Century Atlanta, 1897–1910

In the decade and a half between the completion of his Harvard Ph.D. (1895) and his founding of The Crisis for the NAACP (1910), African American historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois laid the empirical foundations for modern sociology and the revisionist interpretation of history. Despite his prodigious academic efforts, he eventually lost faith in the ability of scholarship to help African Americans and he left academe for the NAACP and the world of advocacy.     

Generation effects? Evolution of independence–unification views in Taiwan, 1996–2016

The landslide victory of the Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan's 2016 presidential and legislative elections is often interpreted as a persistent swing in attitudes toward cross-strait relations and Taiwan independence. Popular as this interpretation may be, it still runs the risk of mistaking a short-term reaction to a lame duck president's policy performance for a long-term change in attitudes.This study analyzes the evolution of independence–unification (IU) views in the Taiwan population from 1996 to 2016. After reviewing the literature on political generations in Taiwan, I hypothesize that a long-term cohort succession replacing older prounification generations accounted for the evolution toward proindependence views. By pooling six independent face-to-face surveys into repeated cross-sectional data, this study applies a comprehensive multilevel cross-classified random-effect model of age–period–cohort analysis. Markov chain Monte Carlo estimation results confirm that, besides age and period effects, younger cohorts and the 1999 Taiwan-centered high school curriculum have had significant effects on the change in trends in IU views.     

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 First China Watchers: British Intelligence Officers in China, 1878–1900

In 1878, Britain developed the first systematic intelligence collection and analysis of China by a Western nation. Undertaken in response to intelligence failure and military defeat, the British Army in India established an intelligence section in Beijing using small numbers of Chinese-speaking British military officers. Their reports reveal their struggles to understand a culture and government radically different than their own and express a strong respect for Chinese military capabilities. The intelligence reports produced are a unique window into British history, intelligence practices and Chinese strategic thinking.