Information,perceptions, and electoral behaviour of young voters: A randomised controlled experiment

The way people absorb and process politically relevant information is central to their subsequent political behaviour (in terms of turnout and vote choice). Nonetheless, little is known about how young voters – who might be more impressionable than more experienced voters – respond to the provision of such information. In this article, we design a between-subject randomised controlled trial that exposes a sample of university students to positive, neutral or negative information about central government performance before the 2017 Portuguese local elections. We find that young voters update their perceptions more when exposed to negative news. This negativity bias is stronger for first-time voters. We also find that negative information significantly affects turnout of initially undecided young voters. Our results imply that sensitivity to information is heterogeneous and that some young voters may be prone to manipulation through the provision of negative news.     

Listening to the Government: How Information Shapes Responsibility Attributions

Assigning credit and blame in systems of multilevel government, such as federal states, requires information. This paper examines how voters respond to information about policy outcomes when attributing responsibility to multiple levels of government in a European context. Using an experimental design, we show that the responsibility attributions of British voters are affected by perceptual biases, notably their feelings about the government and the European Union (EU). But interestingly, we also find that voters, regardless of their predispositions, are only responsive to information they receive from their national government, whereas they ignore information provided by EU officials. These findings have implications not only for our understanding of attribution in systems of multiple levels of government, but also for how voters use information selectively depending on the credibility of the source.     

Spatial voting in non-partisan cities: A case study

In spatial voting theory, voters choose the candidate whose policy preferences are most like their own. This requires that (a) voters and candidates have policy preferences that can be meaningfully summarized in terms of low-dimensional “ideal points” on a left-right scale; (b) voters are able to discern, either directly or through relevant cues, the ideal points of the candidates who are running for office; and (c) voters incorporate this information into the choices they make at the ballot box. Perhaps more than in any other elections, it is not clear that any of these requirements are met in non-partisan municipal elections: policy preferences may not be ideologically structured, information may be inadequate, and voters may choose candidates for reasons other than ideology. This makes non-partisan municipal elections an especially hard test for spatial voting theory. Using novel data from both municipal candidates and eligible voters in a major non-partisan municipal election in Canada, we show that municipal policy attitudes are ideologically structured and that these municipal policy ideal points are strongly related to mayoral and council vote choice. Thus, despite the institutional and informational obstacles, spatial voting can play an important role in non-partisan municipal elections.     

Who is responsible? The effect of clarity of responsibility on voter turnout

Does voters’ ability to discern who is responsible for policy outcomes affect voter turnout? Although particular institutional arrangements which influence this ability – known as clarity of responsibility – appear to affect how voters form retrospective judgements, existing literature is less informed about its role on voter turnout. This article argues that voters tend to turn out less if they cannot discern who is responsible for policy outcomes. This lack of clarity hinders the process of retrospective evaluations, makes the electoral stakes less profound, and dampens the voters’ political efficacy. Using 396 elections in 34 established democracies between 1960 and 2015, it is found that lower clarity of responsibility is associated with lower voter turnout. This study highlights the importance of clarity of responsibility, as it enhances democratic accountability, not only by encouraging retrospective voting, but also by increasing political participation.     

Pass the Buck If You Can: How Partisan Competition Triggers Attribution Bias in Multilevel Democracies

Voters’ ability to hold politicians accountable has been shown to be limited in systems of multilevel government. The existence of multiple tiers of government blurs the lines of responsibility, making it more difficult for voters to assign credit or blame for policy performance. However, much less is known about how the vertical division of responsibility affects citizens’ propensity to rationalize responsibility attributions on the basis of group attachment. While these two processes have similar observable implications, they imply markedly different micro-mechanisms. Using experimental and observational data, this paper examines how the partisan division of power moderates the impact of voters’ partisanship and feelings of territorial attachment on attributions of responsibility for the regional economy. Our analyses show that partisan-based attribution bias varies systematically with the partisan context, such that it only emerges in regions where a party other than the national incumbent controls the regional government. We also find that responsibility judgments are rationalized on the basis of territorial identities only when a regional nationalist party is in control of the regional government. Our results contribute to explaining the contextual variations in the strength of regional economic voting and more generally to understanding one of the mechanisms through which low clarity of responsibility reduces government accountability.     

Party Politicisation Reversed? Non‐partisan Alternatives in Norwegian Local Politics

Based on time series data from Norwegian local elections, this article addresses the question of whether the party politicisation process in the local electoral arena is showing signs of reversal. We explore this question by looking at the extent to which non-partisan lists have existed over time in Norwegian municipalities and by an analysis of the degree to which the voters have supported them. Furthermore we examine the nature of the non-partisan lists, and finally we revisit earlier studies that showed that the party politicisation of local government increased participation.
The results show that national parties still dominate local politics. Nevertheless, non-partisan lists continue to mobilise. During the 1990s we witnessed a slight rise in the supply of non-partisan lists. However, supply decreased in the 2003 elections, probably owing to changes in the electoral law. In terms of representation, non-partisan lists appear successful. On average, during the time span we investigate, non-partisan lists obtained mandates in more than 93 percent of the municipalities where they stood for election. Our study gives little support to the assertion that there is a new generation of non-partisan lists consisting mainly of single-issue lists. However, there are signs of a shift away from the traditional local lists. Finally we have analysed the relationship between turnout and the presence of non-partisan lists. In contrast to the 1960s and to some extent the 1970s, turnout is currently highest in municipalities with non-partisan alternatives, irrespective of municipal size. Although it is clearly an overstatement to talk of a non-partisan renaissance, it seems as if the non-partisan lists have a stronger mobilising potential nowadays than they did in the past.     

Female representation and electoral clientelism: New insights from South African municipal electionss

Do citizens experience less electoral clientelism in polities with more elected female representatives? The current literature is remarkably silent on the role of gender and female political representation for electoral clientelism. Due to gender differences in issue priorities, targeted constituent groups, networks and resources, we argue that voters experience less clientelism in municipalities with a higher proportion of female politicians because either female politicians are likely to engage less in clientelism or women are less likely to be viable candidates in more clientelist settings. Through either mechanism, we expect all voters – and female voters in particular – to experience less exposure to clientelism in municipalities with higher female representation. We examine this idea using survey data from the 2016 municipal elections in South Africa – a country with high levels of female representation in politics but increasing problems of corruption and patronage in the political system. Our findings are consistent with the argument that municipalities with more elected female councilors have considerably lower rates of electoral clientelism and that this mostly affects whether female voters are targeted by clientelist distribution. These findings shed new light on how women's representation in elected political office shapes the incidence and use of clientelist distribution during elections.     

Getting Out the Vote: Minority Mobilization in a Presidential Election

Despite attempts to mobilize communities of color, gaps in turnout among racial and ethnic minorities persist (e.g., Abrajano et al., J Polit 70:368–382, 2008; Pantoja et al., Polit Res Q 54:729–750, 2001; Kaufmann, Polit Res Q 56:199–210, 2003; Ramirez, Ann Am Acad Pol Soc Sci 601:66–84, 2005, Am Polit Res 35:155–175, 2007). Scholars are only beginning to understand how parties or independent groups seek to mobilize these communities. In this paper, we develop and test the Differential Contact Thesis, which holds that turnout differences between whites and minority groups are influenced both by lower rates of contact by the parties and the use of less effective methods of contact. To test this, we examine data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Study (NAES), 2004 American National Election Study (ANES), and the 2004 Miami Exit Poll. Our results support the Differential Contact Thesis: even controlling for the initial likelihood to be contacted by the parties, racial and ethnic minorities were less likely to be contacted using the most effective techniques. To some extent, non-partisan contact seems to compensate for the inattention of the major parties toward minority voters, but this contact is less likely to mobilize voters than contact from the parties.     

Perceptions of Partisan Ideologies: The Effect of Coalition Participation

Recent scholarship in comparative political behavior has begun to address how voters in coalitional systems manage the complexity of those environments. We contribute to this emerging literature by asking how voters update their perceptions of the policy positions of political parties that participate in coalition cabinets. In contrast to previous work on the sources of voter perceptions of party ideology in parliamentary systems, which has asked how voters respond to changes in party manifestos (i.e., promises), we argue that in updating their perceptions, voters will give more weight to observable actions than to promises. Further, coalition participation is an easily observed party action that voters use as a heuristic to infer the direction of policy change in the absence of detailed information about parties’ legislative records. Specifically, we propose that all voters should perceive parties in coalition cabinets as more ideologically similar, but that this tendency will be muted for more politically interested voters (who have greater access to countervailing messages from parties). Using an individual‐level data set constructed from 54 electoral surveys in 18 European countries, we find robust support for these propositions.     

Citizen political knowledge and accountability: Survey evidence on devolution in Kenya

Devolution complicates citizens’ ability to assign responsibility for the provision of public goods and services to different tiers of government. Misattribution of responsibility limits the effectiveness of electoral accountability in the nested principal–agent relationships comprising voters, politicians, and bureaucrats. This raises two important questions. First, how do citizens learn about the functions of different tiers of government under devolution? Second, how do levels of political knowledge condition citizens’ evaluations of subnational governments? Using cross‐sectional and panel survey data from Kenya (2014–2018), this article shows that voters accumulate knowledge through exposure to government services, and that gender and partisanship mediate knowledge accumulation. In addition, exposed citizens are more likely to give positive evaluations of subnational politicians, despite the fact that such exposure may reveal subnational governments’ low capacity, ineffectiveness, and governance gaps. These findings advance our understanding of the dynamics of political accountability under devolution.     

Values and candidate evaluation: How voters respond to allegations of sexual harassment

How do voters respond to candidates accused of sexual harassment? The literature on political scandals demonstrates that candidate characteristics, scandal type, and voter characteristics matter; as well as party affiliation. However, empirical evidence suggests that not all co-partisans react the same way. Why is this the case? Our study uses Schwartz's (1996) theory of values to hypothesise that voters prioritising ‘universalism’ and ‘benevolence’ are less likely to vote for candidates accused of sexual harassment compared to voters who prioritise ‘self-enhancement’ values. Using an original, mixed methods, online survey experiment (n = 704), we show that American voters do become less favourable towards candidates linked to allegations of sexual harassment; but a sizeable minority would nevertheless vote for a co-partisan candidate accused of sexual harassment. Values are an important mechanism to explain this heterogeneity. Qualitative data corroborates our findings, and helps explain why sexual harassment allegations are not always a barrier to electoral success.     

Gamson's Law and voters’ perceptions of portfolio allocation

The assignment of ministerial portfolios to parties is one of the most contested and consequential processes in coalition politics. Accordingly, a great deal of scholarship has investigated how many portfolios different parties obtain in coalition negotiations as well as which parties are assigned which portfolios. However, to our knowledge, no one has ever examined how voters perceive the outcomes of this process – perceptions which must be fundamental to any assessment of policy responsibility in systems with coalition government. This article uses original survey data from four Western European countries to examine voter perceptions of the distribution of cabinet portfolios across parties. In addition to describing the extent to which voters know this distribution, the article also examines whether their perceptions are consistent with a number of different heuristics that voters might use to infer characteristics of the cabinet portfolio distribution. The results suggest that many voters use party role and size heuristics to infer the number of portfolios allocated to different parties as well as an ‘importance rule’, a ‘topical affinity rule’ and a ‘historical regularity rule’ to infer which parties hold which portfolios, but also that a significant number of voters have direct knowledge (not inferred using heuristics) of which parties hold which ministries.     

The abiding voter: The lengthy horizon of retrospective evaluations

Although the theory of retrospective voting receives wide support in the literature on voting behaviour, less agreement exists on voters’ time horizon when assessing the government's performance – that is, whether voters are myopic. Previous studies on voter myopia tend to focus on aggregate-level measures of the economy, or use an experimental approach. Using panel data, this article offers the first investigation into voter myopia that uses individual-level evaluations of government performance in a representative survey at several points during the electoral cycle. The study focuses on The Netherlands, but it also provide tests of the generalisability and robustness of the findings, and a replication in the American context. The results indicate that voter satisfaction early in the government's term adds to explaining incumbent voting. Thus, rather than the myopic voter, evidence is found of the abiding voter – steady at her or his post, evaluating government performance over a long length of time.     

Strategic poll responses when elections create mandates

Larger margins of victory impart mandates that pull government policy toward a winner's platform. Voters with centrist preferences then may find pre-election polls useful. Centrists wish to moderate mandates and may abstain rather than vote for the nearest candidate. If polls are known to elicit voting intentions, then races will tend to be closer than predicted, and turnout will be highest in races predicted to be tight. However, voters at the extremes will respond to polls with guile – indeed all voters will. As a result, centrists cannot rely on pre-election polls, and poll results have no effect on voting.     

A swing vote from the ethnic backstage: The role of German American isolationist tradition for Trump's 2016 victory

We question the growing consensus in the literature that European Americans behave as a homogenous pan-ethnic coalition of voters. Seemingly below the radar of scholarship on voting groups in American politics, we identify a group of white voters that behaves differently from others: German Americans, the largest ethnic group, regionally concentrated in the ‘Swinging Midwest’. Using county level voting returns, ancestry group information from the American Community Survey (ACS), current survey data and historical census data going back as early as 1910, we provide evidence for a partisan and a non-partisan pathway that motivated German Americans to vote for Trump in 2016: a historically grown association with the Republican Party and an acquired taste for isolationist attitudes that mobilizes non-partisan German Americans to support isolationist candidates. Our findings indicate that European American experiences of migration and integration still echo into the political arena of today.     

Who should be chef? The dynamics of valence evaluations across income groups during economic crises

In this paper, we investigate partisan rationalization in valence politics by trying to better specify the direct and indirect effects of the economy on government support. To do so, we examine how income levels moderate the influence of objective economic conditions on perceptions of which party is the best manager of the economy during a period of economic crisis, 2004–2010, in the United Kingdom. We find that low-income voters are more responsive in their assessments of the incumbent Labour government based on unemployment, as are high-income voters in terms of inflation. In addition, high-income voters tend to behave in a manner consistent with partisan rationalization, while low-income voters do not. These conclusions offer important implications for the effectiveness of electoral control of government policy, as well as the quality of representation.     

Good times,bad times: Taxation and electoral accountability

In this article we address two important and related questions. First, do economic hard times make defeat inevitable for any incumbent? And, second, do voters sanction incumbents for a poor economy whatever the economic policy pursued? To answer these questions, we propose a new theory about the ways in which taxation policies, clarity of responsibility, government ideology, and economic conditions come together to shape election outcomes. We address these questions with a new set of data collected on elections, government policies, and economic measures before and during the current economic crisis. Our findings indicate that taxation policies have effects on incumbent electoral patterns net of economic performance measures, but that these effects differ in theoretically-expected fashions depending on clarity of responsibility, government ideology, and whether or not there has been a recession in the year before an election is held.     

Learning about Voter Rationality

An important empirical literature evaluates whether voters are rational by examining how electoral outcomes respond to events outside the control of politicians, such as natural disasters or economic shocks. The argument is that rational voters should not base electoral decisions on such events, so evidence that these events affect electoral outcomes is evidence of voter irrationality. We show that such events can affect electoral outcomes, even if voters are rational and have instrumental preferences. The reason is that these events change voters' opportunities to learn new information about incumbents. Thus, identifying voter (ir)rationality requires more than just identifying the impact of exogenous shocks on electoral fortunes. Our analysis highlights systematic ways in which electoral fortunes are expected to change in response to events outside incumbents' control. Such results can inform empirical work attempting to identify voter (ir)rationality.     

The accountability effect of endorsements: A survey experiment

Do endorsements from incumbent politicians to co-partisans lead to more electoral accountability for the performance of the government? I use a randomized experiment embedded in a national survey conducted before the 2012 Mexican general election to examine the effect of endorsements by the outgoing president Felipe Calderón to the Senate candidates of his Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). Results show that among PAN identifiers, the incumbent vote is more tightly linked to the performance of the president when voters are exposed to the endorsement. I improve on the current standing of the accountability literature by showing that the relationship between an outgoing politician and the candidates of her party matters for electoral sanctioning. My findings imply that politicians’ strategic decisions have an effect on how voters assign responsibility: By nominating candidates without close ties to the endorser in cases of weak government performance, parties can use nominations strategically to diffuse responsibility.     

Do opportunistic snap elections affect political trust? Evidence from a natural experiment

Snap elections, those triggered by incumbents in advance of their original date in the electoral calendar, are a common feature of parliamentary democracies. In this paper, I ask: do snap elections influence citizens’ trust in the government? Theoretically, I argue that providing citizens with an additional means of endorsing or rejecting the incumbent – giving voters a chance to ‘have their say’ – can be interpreted by citizens as normatively desirable and demonstrative of the incumbent's desire to legitimise their agenda by (re)-invigorating their political mandate. Leveraging the quasi-experimental setting provided by the coincidental timing of the UK Prime Minister, Theresa May's, shock announcement of early elections in April 2017 with the fieldwork for the Eurobarometer survey, I demonstrate that the announcement of snap elections had a sizeable and significant positive effect on political trust. This trust-inducing effect is at odds with the observed electoral consequences of the 2017 snap elections. Whilst incumbent-triggered elections can facilitate net gains for the sitting government, May's 2017 gamble cost the Conservative Party their majority. Snap elections did increase political trust. These trust-inducing effects were not observed symmetrically for all citizens. Whilst Eurosceptics and voters on the right of the ideological spectrum – those most inclined to support the incumbent May-led Conservative government in 2017 – became more trusting, no such changes in trust were observed amongst left-wing or non-Eurosceptic respondents. This study advances the understanding of a relatively understudied yet not uncommon political phenomenon, providing causal evidence that snap elections have implications for political trust.