Issue Voting and Partisan Defections in Congressional Elections

In every election cycle the fate of some candidates is determined by partisans who defect from their usual voting habits to cast a ballot for the candidate of the opposing party. Defections in congressional elections have been attributed to incumbency, presidential approval, partisan strength, and factors related to individual voters. Our systematic assessment of the impact of issues on voter defections shows that party‐owned issues and performance issues associated favorably with one party affect the likelihood of partisan defections. The results suggest that congressional candidates can use issues to draw supporters away from the opposing party and to keep partisan voters loyal.     

Having One's Cake and Eating It Too: Cameron's Conservatives and Immigration

The May 2010 general election represented a change in tone on immigration and asylum policy for the Conservative party. Although its manifesto still contained a promise to limit numbers and expressed concern about the abuse of student visas, the Party's previous fixation with asylum seekers had disappeared. This article considers the rationale for these developments in the light of David Cameron's election as leader in late 2005 and his efforts from then on to reposition his party. Cameron's initial silence on this issue and his appointment of a moderate as immigration spokesman were part of an attempt both to shift the focus onto the economic impact of migration and, more broadly, to ‘decontaminate the Tory brand’ in order to gain ‘permission to be heard’ by small‐l liberals who were critical to the Party's electoral recovery but alienated by hard‐line stances. That said, immigration was never entirely forgotten even in this early period and was always seen, so long as it was carefully handled, as an issue capable of benefitting the Tories. As such, it was skilfully factored back into the Party's offer from late 2007 onwards. In government, the Conservatives may have the upper hand on immigration over their junior coalition partner, but this is no guarantee that they will be able to deliver the outcomes they promised     

Cross‐Border Shopping and State Use Tax Liabilities: Evidence from eBay Transactions

Online commerce presents consumers with a convenient way of shopping outside of their local jurisdiction, and this online purchase decision is capable of affecting in significant ways the sales and use tax collections of state governments. However, the actual revenue impact has proven difficult to estimate. There is considerable work that examines the revenue impact of seller compliance with sales taxes. However, there is little work on buyer compliance with use taxes. In this paper, we investigate the potential impact of cross‐border shopping on state use tax liabilities of buyers, using data from the largest online consumer‐to‐consumer and business‐to‐consumer marketplace, eBay.com . We collect our own data on actual cross‐border shopping transactions from eBay, focusing upon a “representative” commodity classification and a “typical” day; these data consist of nearly 21,000 eBay listings generated by roughly 7,000 individual sellers with over 9,000 buyers. These data allow us to examine the extent of actual, not estimated, cross‐border shopping by buyers, and the subsequent potential impact of this cross‐border shopping on state use tax liabilities. Our results indicate that cross‐border shopping is highly prevalent on eBay, with out‐of‐state purchases accounting for on average 94 percent of the volume of a state's purchase transactions. Even so, given the limited volume of eBay‐based transactions relative to total sales transactions, the likely impact of cross‐border transactions on state use tax revenue streams is quite low, at least at present, typically less than one percent of actual state sales tax revenues.