Economic voting theory: Testing new dimensions

Classical economic voting theory has received considerable empirical support. Voters reward the incumbent for good times, punish it for bad. But the success of this paradigm, which views the economy as strictly a valence issue, has crowded out testing of other theoretical dimensions. In particular, positional and patrimonial economic voting have hardly been examined. The former concerns the different preferences voters have on economic policy issues, such as progressive taxation. The latter concerns the place of voters in the economic structure itself, not merely as members of a social class but as actual property owners. Through analysis of a special battery of economic items, from a 2008 US presidential election survey, we demonstrate that the economy was important to voters in three ways: valence, position, and patrimony. Taken together, these dimensions go far as an explanation of vote choice, at least with respect to the short-term forces acting on this political behavior.     

Citizen forecasting: Can UK voters see the future?

The leading approaches to election forecasting have been statistical models, prediction markets, or vote intention polls. This paper explores a different, little used approach - citizen forecasting - a method never yet tried for the case of the United Kingdom. Citizen forecasting simply asks voters in a scientific pre-election survey who they think will win. This aggregated (averaged) result is then assessed for its accuracy in forecasting the overall election outcome. This assessment is carried out on UK general elections from 1951 to 2005, and then applied to 2010. We find, among other things, that generally speaking the majority of the electorate can foretell the winner in advance.     

The (In)stability of Voters’ Perceptions of Competence and Associative Issue Ownership: The Role of Media Campaign Coverage

Recent work has suggested that issue ownership has a competence and an associative dimension and that both dimensions are less stable than originally assumed. This study is the first attempt to directly compare the stability and change of voters’ perceptions on both dimensions. Using data from the 2015 Swiss Election Study, linking data from a combined panel/rolling cross-section survey with an extensive media analysis, this study finds that voters are more likely to maintain their issue ownership perceptions if the party they identify as the issue owner before the campaign receives a higher share of media campaign coverage. This stabilizing effect is conditional on the importance of the issue for the voter, and it is stronger for voters’ competence evaluations than for their party-issue associations, which proved to be more stable. Thus, the results confirm the literature’s previously untested assumption that voters’ associative ownership perceptions are more stable than their competence ownership evaluations.     

Superdiversity and the Browning of Labour

Superdiversity across Europe has focused attention on the increasing significance of ethnic minorities to electoral outcomes. We use unique Origins software to analyse a sample of minority voters in the May 2014 European elections; drawing on the work of the Ethnic Minority British Election Study (EMBES), we show that the growth of non‐White minorities will combine with a persistent preference for Labour to produce some unexpected consequences. We also compute the different ethnic penalties suffered by minority Labour and Conservative supporters, and demonstrate their likely trend between now and mid‐century. The analysis shows the increased importance of social and cultural factors in determining political preferences, and illustrates the way in which Big Data‐derived tools such as Origins can be used to produce fresh insights.     

县级党代表直选的实践探索──以浙江省台州市路桥区为例

党代表选举是党代表任期制的基础,党代表的产生方式、结构比例、代表性等问题是选举过程中所面临的重要问题。台州市路桥区试行的县级党代表直选,其本质特征是竞争性选举,增强了党员的主体意识,有利于党员主体作用的发挥,是完善党代表任期制和改革党内选举制度的有益探索。其探索实践表明,在试点基础上,党代表直选以县级层面为突破口和切入点,通过横向拓展,将对整个党内选举制度的改革和完善产生较为深远的影响。     

完善党政领导人才选拔任用机制的三个方向:制度化、民主化、科学化

党政领导人才选拔任用机制创新是我国公共部门人力资源管理领域的核心问题,本文在总结党政领导人才选拔任用工作的成就和分析其存在问题的基础上,从制度化、民主化和科学化的角度,探索了完善党政领导人才选拔任用机制的方向与途径。     

Generation effects? Evolution of independence–unification views in Taiwan, 1996–2016

The landslide victory of the Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan's 2016 presidential and legislative elections is often interpreted as a persistent swing in attitudes toward cross-strait relations and Taiwan independence. Popular as this interpretation may be, it still runs the risk of mistaking a short-term reaction to a lame duck president's policy performance for a long-term change in attitudes.This study analyzes the evolution of independence–unification (IU) views in the Taiwan population from 1996 to 2016. After reviewing the literature on political generations in Taiwan, I hypothesize that a long-term cohort succession replacing older prounification generations accounted for the evolution toward proindependence views. By pooling six independent face-to-face surveys into repeated cross-sectional data, this study applies a comprehensive multilevel cross-classified random-effect model of age–period–cohort analysis. Markov chain Monte Carlo estimation results confirm that, besides age and period effects, younger cohorts and the 1999 Taiwan-centered high school curriculum have had significant effects on the change in trends in IU views.     

Limited information and coordinated voting in multi-party elections under plurality rule: The role of campaigns

This essay bridges the logic of electoral coordination with the observation that many voters cannot recognize ex post viable candidates. When strategic voting is limited, behavioral factors of sincere voting play a large part in coordinating uninformed voters and inform the expectations of potentially strategic voters about the patterns of voting. Using the 2011 Canadian Election Survey, I found strong effects of the density of campaign contacts and the asymmetries in the campaigns spending and party identification on the predictability of the patterns of intra-district competition. A comparison of the effects of behavioral factors on the uninformed and informed voters confirms that the effect of centrifugal spending and party identification is conditional on the ability of voters to recognize the leaders of district competition.     

The British Election Study 2015 general election constituency forecast

This paper develops a votes-to-seats nowcast model using individual level data from the British Election Study Internet panel to model the flow of the vote between 2010 and 2015. Transition matrices for each constituency are calculated using multinomial models of flows between 2010 origins and 2015 destinations. Respondents are reweighted to the polling average for England, Scotland and Wales and are further reweighted using predicted turnout to downweight respondents who are less likely to vote. The forecast performed poorly in 2015 because of polling errors and because the “Ashcroft” constituency vote intention question overestimated the Liberal Democrat incumbency effect. Without these errors, the forecast would have come much closer to the result but would still have underestimated the Conservatives' seats.     

美国企业工会选举的法律保障初探

美国企业工会选举是其集体谈判制度的重要组成部分.美国企业工会选举的法律保障包括确认谈判单位、举行工会选举及其相关的劳动争议处理.美国企业工会选举的法律保障具有制定法与判例法相结合、政府中立、程序公正和保障企业民主等特点.这对构建我国的集体协商/谈判制度有着积极的借鉴意义.