The Personal Vote in Australian Federal Elections

Although there has been little reliable evidence to date, the 'personal vote' for local Members of Parliament in Australian elections is generally thought to be negligible by political scientists. This article analyses new data from the 1987 Australian National Social Science Survey which demonstrate that the personal vote is a significant factor in federal lower house elections even when numerous other variables known to influence voting behaviour are controlled for. The data allow a calculation of the potential electoral effect of the personal vote which shows that it could be worth at least ³ per cent in some circumstances. The analysis tests for varying levels of personal voting in safe and marginal seats, Labor and coalition seats, urban and rural seats and according to the length of time the incumbent has been in office. Lastly, the electoral effects of the social background of local members are examined.     

Ideology and Vote Choice in U.S. Mayoral Elections: Evidence from Facebook Surveys

City elections in the U.S. are widely thought to be low-information contests decided by non-ideological factors. This consensus casts doubt on the possibility of electoral accountability in cities, and renders recent evidence of municipal responsiveness puzzling. However, our knowledge of how voters actually behave in local elections is severely limited by a lack of individual-level survey data collected from local contests. Using three such original surveys, I re-examine the role of ideology in mayoral elections, recruiting samples of local voters via geotargeted Facebook advertisements. In two large cities, I find ideology is a powerful and independent predictor of vote choice. Using a panel design, I find voters learn the relative ideological positions of candidates over the course of a campaign, and that learning causally impacts vote choice. The effect of ideology also replicates in a conjoint experiment fielded to a sample of small-city voters in another region. Electoral accountability is thus a plausible explanation for ideological responsiveness in U.S. cities, and the methodological tools introduced here can now be applied to a variety of questions about local voter behavior.     

Vote Buying and Social Desirability Bias: Experimental Evidence from Nicaragua

Qualitative studies of vote buying find the practice to be common in many Latin American countries, but quantitative studies using surveys find little evidence of vote buying. Social desirability bias can account for this discrepancy. We employ a survey‐based list experiment to minimize the problem. After the 2008 Nicaraguan municipal elections, we asked about vote‐buying behavior by campaigns using a list experiment and the questions traditionally used by studies of vote buying on a nationally representative survey. Our list experiment estimated that 24% of registered voters in Nicaragua were offered a gift or service in exchange for votes, whereas only 2% reported the behavior when asked directly. This detected social desirability bias is nonrandom and analysis based on traditional obtrusive measures of vote buying is unreliable. We also provide systematic evidence that shows the importance of monitoring strategies by parties in determining who is targeted for vote buying.     

Fit for the Job: Candidate Qualifications and Vote Choice in Low Information Elections

Cues and heuristics—like party, gender, and race/ethnicity—help voters choose among a set of candidates. We consider candidate professional experience—signaled through occupation—as a cue that voters can use to evaluate candidates’ functional competence for office. We outline and test one condition under which citizens are most likely to use such cues: when there is a clear connection between candidate qualifications and the particular elected office. We further argue that voters in these contexts are likely to make subtle distinctions between candidates, and to vote accordingly. We test our account in the context of local school board elections, and show—through both observational analyses of California election results and a conjoint experiment—that (1) voters favor candidates who work in education; (2) that voters discriminate even among candidates associated with education by only favoring those with strong ties to students; and (3) that the effects are not muted by partisanship. Voters appear to value functional competence for office in and of itself, and use cues in the form of candidate occupation to assess who is and who is not fit for the job.

     

Happiness and Voting: Evidence from Four Decades of Elections in Europe

There is a growing interest among policy makers in the use of subjective well-being (or “happiness”) data to measure societal progress, as well as to inform and evaluate public policy. Yet despite a sharp rise in the supply of well-being-based policymaking, it remains unclear whether there is any electoral demand for it. In this article, I study a long-run panel of general elections in Europe and find that well-being is a strong predictor of election results. National measures of subjective well-being are able to explain more of the variance in governing party vote share than standard macroeconomic indicators typically used in the economic voting literature. Consistent results are found at the individual level when considering subjective well-being and voting intentions, both in cross-sectional and panel analyses.     

Sorting and the Split-Ticket: Evidence from Presidential and Subpresidential Elections

Although prior research demonstrates that strong partisans are less likely to cast a split-ticket, recent scholarly work hints that partisan-ideological sorting—the matching of an individual’s partisan and ideological identities—may play a comparatively stronger role in shaping this voting behavior. Simply, if a high degree of congruence between identities underscores psychological orientations that prevent association with an out-group, then highly-sorted voters should be less likely to cross-party lines within the voting booth. Using the 1972–2012 ANES Time-Series and 2010 CCES surveys, we provide evidence that demonstrates that a high degree of partisan-ideological sorting produces the strongest negative effect on split-ticket voting among a variety of alternative explanations at both the national and subnational levels. We then supplement these analyses with 1992–1996 ANES panel data to demonstrate how changes in sorting over time affect this voting behavior. Our results indicate that although an increase in partisan strength alone is insufficient to reduce an individual’s propensity to cast a split-ticket, an increase in identity sorting over time has a strong negative effect on split-ticket voting. We conclude with a brief discussion about the consequences of identity convergence; namely, that sorting fosters a unique form of electoral “polarization.”     

Racial Inequality in Democratic Accountability: Evidence from Retrospective Voting in Local Elections

One important and, to date, overlooked component of democratic accountability is the extent to which it might exacerbate existing societal inequalities if the outcomes for some groups of citizens are prioritized over others when voters evaluate governmental performance. We analyze a decade of California school board elections and find evidence that voters reward or punish incumbent board members based on the achievement of white students in their district, whereas outcomes for African American and Hispanic students receive comparatively little attention. We then examine public opinion data on the racial education achievement gap and report results from an original list experiment of California school board members that finds approximately 40% of incumbents detect no electoral pressure to address poor academic outcomes among racial minority students. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for several scholarly literatures, including retrospective voting, racial inequality in political influence, intergovernmental policymaking, and education politics.     

Terrorist Threat,Leadership, and the Vote: Evidence from Three Experiments

From 9/11 in the U.S. to train, subway, and airport bombings elsewhere, individuals frequently must make political decisions in the shadow of terrorist attacks. To date, few studies have examined how times of terror threat influence voters’ decision-making processes. Using data generated from three experiments we show that, in times of terrorist threat (compared to good times), individuals weight leadership more heavily in the voting booth. Our results also shed light on how much weight is given to other determinants of the vote (issues and partisanship) across these two conditions.     

European Community politics and electoral representation: Evidence from the 1989 European Elections Study

Abstract: In spite of the fact that the European elections were, in most countries, not fought over the issue of Community building and European integration, this article shows that only a few parties take positions towards the Community which are clearly out of line with the average position of their voters. The parties involved are the orthodox-Protestant combination in the Netherlands, the Workers Party in Ireland, the Italian MSI, and the greens in Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Luxembourg. The discrepancies between these parties'positions and the attitudes of their electorates - in combination with their generally successful electoral performance - underscores what is known from other analyses: Parties do not acquire votes on the basis of European issue concerns, but on the basis of national political concerns. The result of the European elections may still, however, be considered as an ex post facto , endorsement and legitimation of parties'policies towards European integration.     

Building Network Implementation Capacity: Evidence from China

ABSTRACT

Network research increasingly draws attention to capacity affecting outcomes. This study examines network implementation capacity and develops a framework that focuses on three dimensions: financial, managerial, and technical capacity. It also contributes by focusing on the Network Administrator Organization (NAO)-type network. Based on a case study of two large eco-financing networks in China, this study finds positive impacts of network implementation capacity on policy outcomes. It also draws attention to network strategies and their impact on capacity. It identifies the positive effect of efforts to maintain network stability as well as negotiation and participation strategies on network implementation capacity. This study draws attention to implementation capacity as a determinant of network outcomes and suggests that studies in public administration give greater attention to NAO-type networks.     

Leadership Experiences Within Civil Organizations and Candidacy in Public Elections: Causal Evidence from a Quasi-Experimental Approach

Standing as a candidate in public elections has been characterized as the ultimate act of political participation. We test the hypothesis that acquiring office within civil organizations increases the probability of becoming a candidate in public elections. In order to take self-selection problems into account, we provide quasi-experimental evidence using election discontinuities, in which we compare the likelihood of being nominated for public office between closely ranked winners and losers in Swedish student union (SU) elections. Our original data cover 5,000 SU candidates and register data on their candidacies in public elections (1991–2010). The analysis provides support to the hypothesis: Students elected to SU councils were about 34 percent (6 percentage points) more likely to become a candidate in a public election than SU council candidates who were not elected. The causal impact is fairly stable over time. The analysis makes important contributions to two interrelated bodies of literature: First, it provides political recruitment literature with causal evidence that acquiring leadership experiences at arenas outside of representative democratic institutions facilitate entry into election processes. Second, it provides strong evidence to an increasingly contested issue within political participation research by showing that certain organizational activities increase individuals’ political involvement.     

The Political Limitations of Evidence: A Critique of the Electoral Reform Society's It's Good To Talk

The Electoral Reform Society has called for more and better quality information to improve democratic debate in relation to referendums. This article argues that, particularly in relation to the European Union referendum, this would have had a marginal impact, because much of the debate was not reducible to facts and emotional and dispositional factors were of particular significance in the campaign.     

The Impact of Elections on Cooperation: Evidence from a Lab‐in‐the‐Field Experiment in Uganda

Communities often rely on sanctioning to induce public goods contributions. Past studies focus on how external agencies or peer sanctioning induce cooperation. In this article, we focus instead on the role played by centralized authorities, internal to the community. Combining “lab‐in‐the‐field” experiments with observational data on 1,541 Ugandan farmers from 50 communities, we demonstrate the positive effect of internal centralized sanctioning authorities on cooperative behavior. We also show that the size of this effect depends on the political process by which authority is granted: subjects electing leaders contribute more to public goods than subjects who were assigned leaders through a lottery. To test the ecological validity of our findings, we relate farmers’ behavior in the experiment to their level of cooperation in their community organization. We show that deference to authority in the controlled setting predicts cooperative behavior in the farmers’ natural environment, in which they face a similar social dilemma.     

Issue Voting in Portugal: The 2002 Legislative Elections

This article analyses the relative impact of position versus performance issues in Portuguese voting behaviour at the 2002 legislative elections and examines the relative importance of issues compared to other determinants of voting behaviour. The article first defines issues and then presents a model of voting choice, before examining the salience of different issues. The impact of issues, as opposed to other major voting determinants, is evaluated as vote predicting factor.     

Policy Voting in Senate Elections: The Case of Abortion

Questions about whether voters rely on their policy preferences when casting ballots have been present since scholars first began examining the determinants of voting behavior. This paper seeks to contribute to research in this area by analyzing abortion policy voting in Senate elections. Specifically, I investigate how the effects of national party position divergence, candidate position divergence, and voter information and salience moderate the relationship between abortion policy preferences and vote choice. The results suggest that the national parties' divergence on abortion does not directly strengthen the connection between abortion policy preferences and ballot decisions. Instead, candidate contrast appears to be the key. And, well informed and motivated voters are especially responsive. Taken together, the findings illuminate the nature of abortion policy voting and also inform the burgeoning scholarship on campaign effects, the role of information, and issue publics in American politics.