Does Television Personalise Voting Behaviour? Studying the Effects of Media Exposure on Voting for Candidates or Parties

Scholars have long argued that politics has become personalised throughout the post Second World War era. Increasingly, focus shifts from policy to politicians' personal traits. The media – particularly television, it is argued – is the driving force in the process by focusing more on individual politicians and their personal traits than parties and their policy proposals. Empirically, it is not known whether the personalisation of media content affects the political behaviour of voters. Based on survey data from the 2009 Danish local elections (N = 3,336), this article explores the determinants of preferential voting – that is, voting for a specific candidate rather than a party. The findings show that institutional factors and individual characteristics are far better predictors of personalised voting behaviour than any measure of media exposure – and that viewing the main national news bulletins, as well as reading regional newspapers, have a similar positive effect. Thus, the study provides answers to the highly debated but rarely studied question of whether and how the media possibly personalise politics with regard to voting behaviour.     

RETRACTED: “I’m Not Leaving,I’m Not Afraid”: (Re)Visiting the Dysfunctional Systems of Justice on Gender-based Violence (GBV) in Uganda

This article has been retracted.     

Voting for locals: Voters’ information processing strategies in open-list PR systems

While most of the literature on information shortcuts in open-list PR systems focuses on the importance of ballot position effects, the influence of a candidate’s localness has widely been ignored by existing studies. In this paper, I address this research gap and argue that voting patterns in open-list PR systems are more versatile than existing research would suggest. By analyzing a special characteristic of the open-list PR system employed in the parliamentary elections of Hamburg, it is shown that a large portion of voters chooses to vote for local candidates irrespective of the ballot position of the candidate. The paper further controls for factors conditioning the effect and finds that it remains strong even after taking them into consideration. The results have important implications for the representativeness of open-list PR systems, ballot paper design, as well as for our understanding of voters’ decision making process.     

Voting for development? Ruling coalitions and literacy in India

Across the world, governments skew the distribution of state resources for political gain. But does such politicisation of resource allocation affect development trajectories in the long run? We focus on the long-term effects of voting for the ruling coalition on primary education in India. Using a close-election instrumental variable design and drawing on a new socio-economic dataset of India's state assembly constituencies in 1971 and 2001, we examine whether areas represented by members of ruling coalitions experienced greater increases in literacy over 30 years. We find no evidence of this being the case, in the overall data or in relevant sub-samples. The null results are precisely estimated, and are consistent across OLS and 2SLS specifications and several robustness checks. These findings suggest the politicised distribution of some funds in the short run does not affect long-term development trajectories.     

But Can She Make America Great Again? Threat,Stability, and Support for Female Candidates in the United States

Political Behavior - Drawing on the literature on system justification, I argue that the fate of female candidates in the U.S. is tied to whether the election is occurring in relatively good or bad...     

Does the Ideological Proximity Between Candidates and Voters Affect Voting in U.S. House Elections?

Do citizens hold congressional candidates accountable for their policy positions? Recent studies reach different conclusions on this important question. In line with the predictions of spatial voting theory, a number of recent survey-based studies have found reassuring evidence that voters choose the candidate with the most spatially proximate policy positions. In contrast, most electoral studies find that candidates’ ideological moderation has only a small association with vote margins, especially in the modern, polarized Congress. We bring clarity to these discordant findings using the largest dataset to date of voting behavior in congressional elections. We find that the ideological positions of congressional candidates have only a small association with citizens’ voting behavior. Instead, citizens cast their votes “as if” based on proximity to parties rather than individual candidates. The modest degree of candidate-centered spatial voting in recent Congressional elections may help explain the polarization and lack of responsiveness in the contemporary Congress.     

Decomposing the Relationship Between Candidates’ Facial Appearance and Electoral Success

Numerous studies show that candidates’ facial competence predicts electoral success. However, a handful of other studies suggest that candidates’ attractiveness is a stronger predictor of electoral success than facial competence. Furthermore, the overall relationship between inferences from candidates’ faces and electoral success is challenged in two ways: (i) non-facial factors in candidate photos such as clothing and hair style as well as (ii) parties’ nomination strategies are suggested as potential confounds. This study is based on original data about all 268 candidates running in three local elections in 2009 in Denmark and supports a two-component structure of the relationship between candidates’ facial appearance and their electoral success. Facial competence is found to mediate a positive relationship between candidates’ attractiveness and electoral success, but simultaneously facial competence also predicts electoral success over and above what can be accounted for by attractiveness. Importantly these relationships are found when seven different non-facial factors, parties’ nomination strategies and candidates’ age and gender are controlled for. This suggests that the two-component structure of the relationship between candidates’ facial appearance and electoral success is highly robust.     

Voting for the Radical Right in Swedish Municipalities: Social Marginality and Ethnic Competition?

Sweden is no longer a negative, exceptional case regarding the presence of radical right‐wing populist parties. The Sweden Democrats has continually grown stronger, and in 2010 they won seats in the Swedish parliament. However, their electoral support varies considerably across Sweden. This study analyses their electoral support in 290 Swedish municipalities in order to explain this variance. Support is found for the social marginality hypothesis: electoral support for the Sweden Democrats tends to be negatively correlated with the average level of education and with the Gross Regional Product per capita, and positively correlated with the unemployment rate. The ethnic competition hypothesis, that there is a positive correlation between the proportion of immigrants and electoral support of the Sweden Democrats, is also supported.     

Reconciling Sexism and Women’s Support for Republican Candidates: A Look at Gender,Class, and Whiteness in the 2012 and 2016 Presidential Races

Political Behavior - Much of the gender gap literature focuses on women’s greater average liberalism relative to men. This approach masks considerable heterogeneity in political identity and...     

A Rural-Urban Divide? Reassessing Voting in Chinese Villagers’ Committee and Residents’ Committee Elections

Journal of Chinese Political Science - While Chinese scholars, media, and writers have long reported a noteworthy rural-urban difference in political participation, the meaning of this...     

Selfish and Cooperative Voting: Can the Majority Restrain Themselves?

At every scale from small committees to national elections, voters face tradeoffs between self-interest and the common good. We report three experiments in which participants vote for policies with real payoffs at stake. We manipulate self-interest by randomly assigning participants to two groups in society with different policy payoffs. Participants in the majority group are confronted by a simple choice between a policy that is better for themselves or a policy that is best for society. Overall, we find a clear effect of self-interest: Participants are more likely to choose the policy that earns them more money, compared to participants in the other group, even when the policy is detrimental to the common good. Simultaneously, we observe considerable levels of cooperative voting among participants in the majority, ranging from 47% to 79% across different payoff regimes. Finally, participants were not more cooperative when voting compared to when they chose between the same policies with a lottery or leader institution, departing from the hypothesis that voting institutions promote cooperative motives. We discuss implications for multiple literatures about voting behavior.

     

Enacting multi-layered citizenship: Turkey’s Armenians’ struggle for justice and equality

Throughout the history of the Turkish Republic, Turkey’s Armenians have been subjected to a trade-off between the limited minority rights granted by the 1923 Lausanne Treaty and equal national citizenship. Traditionally a closed, depoliticized community, the citizenship practices of the Armenian minority have become increasingly differentiated in recent years. Building on a notion of citizenship as multi-layered and constituted through collective practice, this article investigates the implications of the political acts of Turkey’s Armenian minority on sub-national and national citizenship in Turkey. We show that Turkey’s Armenians are coupling rights demands, identification, normative references, and mobilization at the sub-national, national, and transnational levels in innovative ways, and are thereby negotiating different layers of citizenship in Turkey in a way that strengthens equal national citizenship.     

Voting in the UN: a Second Image of China’s Human Rights

It is generally agreed that China has a poor domestic human rights practice. In contrast, China has a better-than-average voting record on human rights in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Based on a new UNGA human rights dataset that we identified, we found that since joining the United Nations (UN) in 1971, China voted in the affirmative on human rights resolutions 79 % of the time, compared to the world average favoring ratio of 75 %. This positive image of consistently voting in the affirmative on UNGA human rights resolutions suggests a second image of China’s human rights. However, while the Chinese government is willing to accept the international human rights regime, it also strategically alters its endorsement of UNGA human rights resolutions based on changing levels of domestic threats.     

Who Votes for the Future? Information,Expectations, and Endogeneity in Economic Voting

Voters’ four primary evaluations of the economy—retrospective national, retrospective pocketbook, prospective national, and prospective pocketbook—vary in the cognitive steps necessary to link economic outcomes to candidates in elections. We hypothesize that the effects of the different economic evaluations on vote choice vary with a voter’s ability to acquire information and anticipate the election outcome. Using data from the 1980 through 2004 US presidential elections, we estimate a model of vote choice that includes all four economic evaluations as well as information and uncertainty moderators. The effects of retrospective evaluations on vote choice do not vary by voter information. Prospective economic evaluations weigh in the decisions of the most informed voters, who rely on prospective national evaluations when they believe the incumbent party will win and on prospective pocketbook evaluations when they are uncertain about the election outcome or believe that the challenger will win. Voters who have accurate expectations about who will win the election show the strongest relationship between their vote choice and sociotropic evaluations of the economy, both retrospective and prospective. Voters whose economic evaluations are most likely to be endogenous to vote choice show a weaker relationship between economic evaluations and their votes than the voters who appear to be more objective in their assessments of the election. Economic voting is broader and more prospective than previously accepted, and concerns about endogeneity in economic evaluations are overstated.     

How Terrorism Does (and Does Not) Affect Citizens’ Political Attitudes: A Meta-Analysis

How does terrorism affect citizens’ political attitudes? Over the years, many scholars have tried to answer this question. This article performs a meta-analysis on this literature, reviewing about 325 studies conducted between 1985 and 2020 on more than 400,000 respondents. The findings confirm that terrorism is associated—to a small but significant extent—with outgroup hostility, political conservatism and rally-‘round-the-flag effects. At the same time, the effects of terrorism vary widely, with studies on Islamist violence, conducted in the United States or Israel, and using cross-sectional data yielding stronger results on average. Finally, the review reveals remaining gaps in this field of study, including a lack of research on non-Islamist violence or conducted in non-Western contexts. Taken together, this meta-analysis consolidates existing evidence, determines which results hold across contexts, and identifies key gaps in our current knowledge. Its data can also be accessed interactively via a Shiny App .     

‘I have so many successful stories’: framing social citizenship for refugees

The current US refugee resettlement system reflects the US government's agenda of having refugees acquire quick employment with low state welfare dependence and minimal fiscal and cultural disruption to the receiving communities. The non-governmental organizations (NGOs) assisting refugees hold broader goals for refugees, including feeling a sense of belonging in the USA. These goals represent a framing of social citizenship rights for refugees, and how NGOs frame social citizenship varies depending upon the NGOs contractual relationship with the US welfare state. Using data from 57 in-depth interviews, I describe how resettlement and assistance NGOs currently frame social citizenship for refugees in relation to market citizenship, and how their relationship with the federal government shapes this framing. Findings illustrate the role of NGOs in creating a discursive space for expanding the social citizenship rights of refugees and the ways such framing is highly constrained by the definitions of belonging that emerge from market citizenship.     

Two of a kind? Voting motivations for populist radical right and religious fundamentalist parties

Over the last two decades a number of theoretical perspectives have emphasized the growing phenomenon of extremist political challenges. These challenges come from two main sources: largely secular radical right-wing populism and religious fundamentalism. Yet the relationship between the two is still theoretically and empirically limited. Researchers have usually limited their discussion to only one of the phenomena, ignoring the fact that despite the basic distinction between the two (i.e., secular versus religious orientation), the literature points to many commonalities. This article takes up the challenge by analyzing the predictive power of socioeconomic, ideological, and security threat factors on voting behavior for populist radical right (PRR) parties and for religious fundamentalist (RF) parties. Data collected following the Israeli parliamentary election of 2003 (N = 808) offer a challenge to the conventional, secular wisdom of right-wing extremism. The radical right party family is multifaceted with at least two flanks – a hawkish nationalist flank on the one hand, and a ‘faith-based’ radical flank on the other. Implications of these distinctions for voting behavior scholars and radical right-wing scholars are discussed.     

Sympathy for the ‘devil’? Voting for populists in the 2006 and 2010 Dutch general elections

What motivations do voters have to vote for populist parties? How do their motivations differ from those of voters for mainstream parties? Analyzing new empirical material – the Dutch elections of 2006 and 2010 – we demonstrate that policy preferences, protest attitudes and evaluations of party leaders are important reasons to vote for populist parties. Yet only protest attitudes distinguish voters for populist parties from voters for mainstream parties; evaluations of party leaders turn out to be equally important for both. We theorize how protest attitudes and party leader evaluations overlap and employ an exploratory simulation technique to test this. We find that populist parties differ strongly from each other with regard to the specific patchwork of motivations of their voters.     

“If You've Got Friends and Neighbours”: Constituency Voting Patterns for the UK Labour Party Leader in 2010

Most attention in British electoral studies has been paid to the pattern of voting for parties, with relatively little to that for individual candidates. In intra-party elections, however, candidates may perform better in some areas than others, illustrating V. O. Key's well-known “friends and neighbours” effect. This paper explores whether that was so at the election for the leader of the UK Labour party in 2010, expecting each of the five candidates to perform better in their own constituency and its environs and also with those constituency parties whose MPs supported their candidature. The results are in line with the expectations, especially for one of the candidates who ran an explicitly geographical campaign.