If Immigrants Could Vote in the UK: A Thought Experiment with Data from the 2015 General Election

The distribution of voting rights in the UK is an artefact of history rather than a product of clear legal or philosophical principles. Consequently, some resident aliens (i.e. immigrants) have the right to vote in all UK elections; others can vote in local elections but are excluded from national elections; still others are excluded from all elections. In England and Wales alone, roughly 2.3 million immigrants are excluded from voting in national elections. This exclusion is inconsistent with the founding principle of democracy and distorts political discourse. What if all immigrants could vote in national elections? We estimate that up to ninety‐five parliamentary seats could have been won by a different party in the 2015 general election. More substantially, enfranchising all immigrants would require re‐drawing UK constituency boundaries. The new electoral map would increase the relative power of urban constituencies and would incentivise some political entrepreneurs and parties to temper anti‐immigration rhetoric.     

The turnout ‘gap’ and the costs of voting – a comparison of participation at the 2001 general and 2002 local elections in England

Evidence from both sample surveys and the marked electoral registers is used to compare the participation of individual electors at the 2001 general election and the 2002 local elections in England. In those cases where conventional electoral procedures have been retained, there is a continuing gap between local and general election turnout. Those who vote at both types of election tend to have a sharper sense of civic duty and/or an incentive to vote based on the benefits perceived to be likely to accrue from the outcome of the local contest. However, in those places where the costs of participation are reduced through the introduction of all-postal voting, the turnout gap disappears as does the distinctive character of those who vote in local elections. In each case the findings support a rational choice model of participation with respondents weighing the benefits and costs of voting in the context of their own sense of duty.     

Random votes under compulsory voting: Evidence from Brazil

Compulsory voting is known for boosting electoral turnout, even when sanctions for abstaining are small or loosely enforced. Much less is known, however, about the consequences of compulsory voting on vote choice, and, in particular, about the quality of electoral decisions. In this paper, we explore the extent to which voters meaningfully engage in the electoral process or simply vote randomly because voting is required by law. We conducted a large online survey in Brazil during the 2018 national elections to assess if voters engage in random voting. We evaluate random voting for low-profile, low-information elected offices (state and federal legislators) and others that receive greater media coverage (governor and president) and evaluate the determinants of random voting for each of them. We find that: 1) random voting does not appear to be affected by social desirability bias; 2) there is substantial random voting under compulsory voting; 3) more voters tend to engage in random voting in low-profile, low-information elections, as compared to elections that receive greater media coverage; and, 4) interest in politics, education, and disposition to vote if voting were to be voluntary reduce random voting. Our findings carry important implications for the study of citizen participation and civic competence under compulsory voting and for democratic representation, more broadly.     

The impact of at-large elections: vote dilution or choice dilution?

Multi-member, at-large legislative elections result in election outcomes different from outcomes in single-member district elections for two reasons: they cancel out the voting strength of geographically concentrated groups of voters (e.g., party groups, racial groups), and they make it difficult for a voter to vote for an individual candidate, rather than for one of the competing lists of candidates. An electoral setting in Long Island, New York, presents an opportunity to test which of these two aspects of at-large elections—vote dilution or choice dilution—accounts for the usual pattern of one party (or group) winning all the legislative seats at stake.     

Electoral Cycles and Turnout in Multilevel Electoral Systems

This article differentiates between three ways in which electoral cycles may impact on participation in elections. First, it identifies a simultaneity effect – turnout increases to the extent that elections are held on the same date. A second effect is voter fatigue – turnout declines when another election has just been held before. Poll voting is a third effect. It suggests that turnout increases when another election is to be held shortly after. On the basis of a novel dataset that includes 2,915 regional elections held in 317 regions and 18 countries from 1945 to 2009, evidence is found for all three effects. The results point towards a basic dilemma in multilevel electoral systems: increase turnout by holding elections on the same date but accept high vote congruence across elections or decouple election cycles, which decreases vote congruence but lowers participation rates.     

Trust in elections,vote buying,and turnout in Latin America

Although national elections in Latin America are now described as reasonably free and fair by international observations teams, electoral processes are still affected by a series of malpractices (unequal access to the media and public resources, registration problems, vote buying). These irregularities negatively affect citizens' trust in elections. In this paper, we analyze the consequences of low trust in elections and exposure to vote buying practices on electoral participation in Latin America. Using data from the 2010 wave of LAPOP surveys, we find that perceiving that the election is unfair reduces the willingness to participate in national elections, but receiving material incentives during the campaign has the opposite effect of increasing electoral participation. We also show that the effect of trust in elections on turnout is larger in countries where voting is not mandatory.     

Structural constraints on partisan bias under the efficient gerrymander

Partisan bias occurs when the translation of the popular vote into legislative seats differs between competing parties. This paper contains a theoretical and empirical analysis of the consequences of an efficient gerrymander for the partisan bias of an electoral system. Under partisan apportionment, bias is shown to depend on some structural features of the electoral environment; namely, the size of the voting population and the number of single-member districts within a political jurisdiction. A statistical analysis reveals the predicted relationships in data on Congressional elections across states in the 1950–1984 period. This paper highlights the importance of some measurable features of the electoral environment for determining bias and provides an indirect test of partisan gerrymandering in congressional apportionment processes.     

Tactical Voting in Norway: Context,Motives and Occurrence

Hitherto, tactical voting has not been a topic in Norwegian electoral research, despite the fact that tactical considerations have been publically discussed both by politicians and citizens for years. The complexity of the electoral system is partly to blame. Norwegian voters experience a number of tactical situations that give rise to rather different dilemmas, and hence several tactical motives. These need to be mapped and analysed separately. A set of survey questions has been especially designed for the present study to record these motives. Special attention has also been paid to the political sophistication of voters, campaign messages encouraging tactical voting, and the restraining effects of habitual voting and negative attitudes towards tactical voting. These factors may modify the inclination to tactical electoral behaviour. The web survey designed for the present project was conducted immediately following the Norwegian parliamentary election of 2013 (N = 2,278). Of the voters in the survey, 18.3 percent reported casting a tactically motivated vote. The 4 percent threshold on the distribution of compensatory seats, the competition for the last district seats and the composition of government coalitions triggered tactical voting. Tactical voters do not stand out as more politically sophisticated than other voters. Rather than calculating the expected utility for each party, they seem to rely on campaign information from the political parties and the media when voting tactically. For the habitual voters and voters with a strong dislike of tactical voting, the propensity for tactical voting is well below average.     

International Constraints and Electoral Decisions: Does the Room to Maneuver Attenuate Economic Voting?

Prominent studies of electoral accountability and economic voting suggest that government constraints and international financial structures decrease the economic vote. The proposed mechanism is often labeled as the “room to maneuver,” and it posits that because elected officials have limited space to propose and implement economic policy, politicians can shirk responsibility, and thus voters are less likely to place voting weights on the economy. However, results from elections that took place in Europe during the Great Recession and scholarly research on economic voting in these elections cast serious doubts on the causal mechanism. This article directly tests this mechanism with a survey experiment using data from Greece (the country most affected by the debt crisis). The results suggest that although the economic vote is strong and substantive, its size does not vary across the room to maneuver treatments. This finding informs the literature on economic voting and carries out important implications for party strategies with respect to exogenous policy impositions and their electoral effects.     

The impact of electoral reform at the local level in Africa: the case of Senegal's 1996 local elections

Local electoral systems in transitional polities can play a critical role in the growth and development of democratic governance. In this study, the impact of electoral system change at the subnational level in an African nation, Senegal, is examined. Senegal recently altered the electoral system it employs for the selection of its local and municipal councils. The mixed plurality-proportional system, favors the largest parties. It clearly introduced distortions between the distribution of voter support and seats on councils. These distortions are modified by the proportional part of the vote which provides opportunities for smaller parties to obtain seats. The presence and impact of strategic entry and strategic voting, both in rural and urban areas is assessed.     

Elections as poorer reflections of preferences under compulsory voting

Compulsory voting is known to increase electoral participation, but its second-order effects are not well established. In this paper, I argue that vote choices are a relatively poor reflection of individuals' preferences under compulsory voting, as it boosts participation among those who are unlikely to cast well-reasoned ballots—the politically disinterested and unknowledgeable and those who see elections as flawed or pointless. I test this expectation with cross-national survey data, and I conduct supplementary tests with regional survey data from Switzerland, which employs compulsory voting in select cantons. Results from both sets of analyses support my expectations, suggesting that elections conducted under compulsory rules are relatively unlikely to signal the preferences of the voting population.     

Going Postal: How All-Mail Elections Influence Turnout

We examine the question of whether or not reducing the costs of voting by conducting elections entirely through the mail rather than at the traditional polling place increases participation. Using election data from Oregon, we examine whether or not elections conducted through the mail increase turnout in both local and statewide elections. Using precinct-level data merged with census data we also examine how postal voting may alter the composition of the electorate. We find that, while all-mail elections tend to produce higher turnout, the most significant increases occur in low stimulus elections, such as local elections or primaries where turnout is usually low. The increase in turnout, however, is not uniform across demographic groups. Voting only by mail is likely to increase turnout among those who are already predisposed to vote, such as those with higher socioeconomic status. Like other administrative reforms designed to make voting easier, postal voting has the potential to increase turnout. However, the expanded pool of voters will be limited most likely to those already inclined to vote but find it inconvenient to go to the polling place. This conclusion is consistent with the growing body of research that suggests that relaxing administrative requirements is not likely to be the panacea for low turnout among the disenfranchised.     

The microeconomic voter

In the United States, aggregate and individual level studies of economic voting for the Congress have produced contradictory findings. The same is true for models of economic voting for the Australian Parliament. This paper presents data taken from a series of individual level studies which show that voters' attitudes towards fiscal and microeconomic issues have been better predictors of the vote for the Australian House of Representatives over the last four elections than their attitudes towards macroeconomic issues. This finding suggests that the cause of the inconsistency between aggregate and individual level models of voting may be that aggregate models of economic voting which include only macroeconomic variables are inadequately specified, since they do not take broader aspects of the economy into account.     

An application of the multicandidate calculus of voting to the 1972 and 1976 German federal elections

Two important assumptions underlying the Riker-McKelvey-Ordeshook, expected-utility-based, multicandidate calculus of voting are that citizens decide whether or not and for whom to vote in a single-member district (SMD), plurality-winner electoral system and that they ignore aggregate outcomes, that is, how citizens in other districts may vote. Aranson modifies this calculus by investigating citizens' decisions in proportional-representation (PR) systems and/or situations in which aggregate outcomes require parties to form parliamentary coalitions to govern. This study operationalizes and applies the probability and utility components of this modified calculus to data on the 1972 and 1976 West German federal elections, which combine features of SMD and PR systems and of which coalition politics is an integral part. Expected-utility calculations used to predict reported voting decisions achieve reasonably good levels of aggregate accuracy. Further analysis reveals that gradations in respondents' expected utilities, as well as in their utilities and surrogate measures of the subjective probabilities of electoral outcomes, relate significantly to reported voting decisions. Also, variables that model coalition considerations are commonly the most significant.     

The rational behavior theory of voting participation: Evidence from the 1970 and 1982 elections

In recent years a substantial literature on the determinants of voting participation has been developed. In many of these studies voting is assumed to be an expression of rational behavior. That is, people vote when they expect that the benefits will exceed the related costs. Voting is largely an act of consumption based upon the widely held belief that one should vote to fulfill a civic duty or upon some combination of personal characteristics which is sufficiently vague to make precise measurement impossible. The rational behavior theory, however, holds that voting is influenced at the margin by personal and environmental factors which incrementally affect expected benefits and costs, making the act of voting more or less rational. Those factors which increase expected benefits will, ceteris paribus, enhance the probability that one will vote. Those factors which increase expected costs will, of course, have the opposite effect. This study is presented as a primarily empirical contribution to the literature which assumes that, since voting is an expression of rational behavior, it can be modeled and tested using standard economic analysis and methodology. The study is designed to fulfill several purposes. First, we update previous empirical work using data from the 1980 census and from the 1982 congressional elections. The results of our regressions strongly support the rational behavior theory. In addition, we test to determine whether it is less rational for southern blacks to vote as compared to their white counterparts. Our results suggest that the answer is affirmative. Tests of parameter equivalency between the 1970 and 1982 congressional elections are performed with some interesting results. Finally, tests for specification error provide evidence that the rational behavior model and congressional district data generate statistically valid estimates of the determinants of voting participation.     

The 2015 National Elections in Switzerland: Renewed Polarization and Shift to the Right

The 2015 election to the Swiss Parliament marks a return to an already observed trend that was only interrupted in 2011: a shift to the right and an increase in polarization. The vote share of the nationalist-conservative Swiss People's Party (SVP) has now reached a historical height of 29.4% (+2.8). This note discusses why cantons matter in the Swiss national elections, and to what degree elections have become nationalized. Institutionally, the 26 cantons serve as electoral districts. This leads to a highly disproportional electoral system and has magnified the minor vote shifts to a slightly more pronounced shift in seats, with the right now holding a tiny majority of 101 of 200 seats in the first chamber. The two winners, the SVP and the Liberals, also had most campaign funds at their disposal. They were able to guide an extensive nationwide campaign in which they advocated their core issues instead of candidates. Other parties only advertised at the cantonal level.     

Improving access to voting with optimized matchings

Research on political representation has traditionally focused on the design of electoral systems. Yet there is evidence that voting costs result in lower turnout and undermine voters’ confidence in the electoral system. Election administrators can selectively manipulate participation costs for different individuals and groups, leading to biased electoral outcomes. Quantifying the costs of voting and designing fair, transparent and efficient rules for voter assignment to polling stations are important for theoretical and practical reasons. Using analytical models, we quantify the differential costs of participation faced by voters, which we measure in terms of distance to polling stations and wait times to cast a vote. To estimate the model parameters, we use real-world data on the 2013 midterm elections in Argentina. The assignment produced by our model cut average voting time by more than 27%, underscoring the inefficiencies of the current method of alphabetical assignment. Our strategy generates better estimates of the role of geographical and temporal conditions on electoral outcomes.     

The role of the political context in voting indecision

A substantive portion of the electorate declares in pre-electoral surveys that they are undecided. However, little has been done in trying to understand who these voters are and how they finally decide their vote. In this article, we try to advance the literature by disentangling the circumstances under which voters are more likely to be undecided. While the traditional approach to the study of electoral indecision has been to characterize which individual traits make voters more likely to be undecided, this article provides consistent evidence showing that key elements of the political context may also affect electoral indecision. Using long-term harmonized data from Spanish pre-electoral surveys over 30 years, we find that voting indecision is influenced by two different types of contextual factors. First, there are some political contexts that reduce voters' cognitive costs when deciding their vote, i.e. the level of electoral competitiveness and the number of parties competing in the elections. Second, there are other political contexts that increase voters' social or expressive costs, i.e. the level of government popularity, since costs of expressing preference for the party in government increases when its public image is undermined.     

Ticket-splitting in mixed-member systems: on the importance of seat linkage between electoral tiers

Abstract

In mixed-member electoral systems, voters usually have two votes: a nominal and a list vote. According to some studies, voters are increasingly using them to cast a split-ticket vote. However, very little is known about whether the type of mixed-member system, and in particular whether the allocation of seats across tiers is linked or not, creates different sets of incentives for this behaviour. This article provides new insights into the topic by analysing survey data from seven countries and 18 elections since 1990. It is found that the proportion of split-ticket votes is greater in mixed-member proportional than in mixed-member majoritarian systems. The results suggest that voters understand the operation of the electoral system and its consequences for the distribution of seats among parties, and adapt their behaviour accordingly.     

Split-ticket Voting in Times of Sub-national Government Reorganisation: Evidence from Denmark

Local government amalgamations may have unintended consequences on electoral behaviour. Using the most recent local elections in Denmark as its case, this article demonstrates that inter-level split-ticket voting between three levels (national, regional and local) decreased slightly from 2001 to 2005 – that is, simultaneously with the implementation of a major reform, where many municipalities and all the counties were amalgamated. These amalgamations affect the level of split voting through a process where the local party system operates as an intervening variable: the larger municipalities have a more nationalised local party system, which leads to fewer voters being vote splitters by necessity. The analyses combine general electoral statistics with large voter surveys and benefit from the quasi-experimental setting offered by the fact that not all municipalities were amalgamated.