A rational choice model of citizen participation in high and low commitment electoral activities

Weisberg and Grofman (1981) propose a rational choice model of voter turnout which they test with data from the 1976 Presidential election. We extend and generalize that model to cover a wide variety of forms of electoral participation including working on a campaign, wearing campaign buttons, and talking to others about the campaign. We find that voters who see a difference between the candidates, with one candidate positively evaluated and the other negatively, are roughly twice as likely to participate in high involvement electoral activities as are those who are alienated from or indifferent to the candidates.     

How Turnout Depends on the Number of Parties: A Logical Model

We illustrate the power of “logical models” (Taagepera, 2007 Taagepera, Rein (2007) Predicting Party Sizes: The Logic of Simple Electoral Systems (NewYork: Oxford University Press).[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) by offering a three-parameter model of the relationship between the effective number of parties and electoral turnout that makes use of the constraints on what parameter values are internally coherent given boundary conditions to specify functional form, and seeks not optimal curve fitting but rather a direct model testing. In our model, one parameter reflects an effect that generally acts to increase turnout as the effective number of parties increases, another an effect that generally acts to decrease turnout as the effective number of parties increases, while a third parameter allows for baseline variation in turnout across countries (or within countries across elections). We fit this model to district-level data from 237 elections held in 17 countries, representing a wide range of electoral system types generating multi-party contests, with over 20,000 district-election observations. The basic intuition, that turnout rises to a peak as the effective number of parties increases and then falls slowly, fits our data pretty well.     

Explaining variation in the competitiveness of U.S. Senate elections, 1922–2004

We develop and test predictions about the factors determining the competitiveness of elections to the U.S. Senate. To do so, we deliberately abstract away from candidate-specific conditions that have often been used to study political competitiveness in order to focus on basic structural features of the electoral landscape. In our framework, party-specific constraints on the ideological positioning of local candidates, linked to the national party organization and its contributors, interact with the heterogeneity of state electorates to determine the number of highly competitive Senate contests. Three hypotheses emerge from this model: (1) the greater the diversity of a party’s national legislative delegation, the more highly competitive Senate elections we will observe; (2) states in which the ideological heterogeneity of the electorate is relatively high will exhibit a greater number of highly competitive elections; and (3) highly competitive Senate contests will be more common in states with closed primaries than in states with open primaries. We provide strong evidence in support of the first two hypotheses and some evidence in support of the third.     

Modeling the effects of changing issue salience in two-party competition

For a given distribution of voter ideal points, candidates may compete, not only by changing their policy platforms, but also by seeking to persuade voters to place more weight on one of the given dimensions. We do not examine persuasion mechanisms, per se, but, rather, investigate how change of the salience weights can lead to alternation of majorities for the candidates, even though candidate positions remain fixed. Thus, competition over the salience of issue dimensions can, under certain circumstances, be crucial for determining election outcomes. We illustrate potential non-monotonicities in priming effects in terms of the Fourier series decomposition of the distribution of voter preferences, showing that the existence of higher-level harmonics leads to greater uncertainty about election outcomes and about best heresthetic strategies. We then demonstrate the empirical relevance of our results with data on two issue dimensions of political competition in the 2000 U.S. presidential election.