Internet voting and turnout: Evidence from Switzerland

Internet voting (i-voting) is often discussed as a potential remedy against declining turnout rates. This paper presents new evidence on the causal effect of i-voting on turnout, drawing on trials conducted in two Swiss cantons: Geneva and Zurich. Both Geneva and Zurich constitute hard cases for i-voting, given that i-voting was introduced in the presence of postal voting. However, this setting allows us to test some of the more optimistic claims regarding i-voting's ability to increase turnout. Empirically, we exploit the advantageous circumstance that federal legislation created a situation coming close to a natural experiment, with some of Geneva's and Zurich's municipalities participating in i-voting trials and others not. Using difference-in-differences estimation, we find that i-voting did not increase turnout in the cantons of Geneva and Zurich.     

Neighborhood heterogeneity and electoral turnout

We perform an empirical analysis to investigate how neighborhood heterogeneity affects electoral turnout. To this end, we rely on a unique dataset on local elections in an Italian municipality, which merges information on socio-economic characteristics of about 370.000 individuals with turnout data for 434 electoral precincts in 2004 and 2009. Exploiting both across and within precincts variation, we are able to disentangle the contextual effects on precinct-level electoral turnout of two different dimensions of neighborhood heterogeneity: income inequality and ethnic composition. Our results support the idea that contextual heterogeneity negatively affects political participation.     

Designing preference voting

Electoral systems in which voters can cast preference votes for individual candidates within a party list are increasingly popular. To the best of our knowledge, there is no research on whether and how the scale used to evaluate candidates can affect electoral behavior and results. In this paper, we analyze data from an original voting experiment leveraging real-life political preferences and embedded in a nationally representative online survey in Austria. We show that the scale used by voters to evaluate candidates makes differences. For example, the possibility to give up to two points advantages male candidates because male voters are more likely to give ‘zero points’ to female candidates. Yet this pattern does not exist in the system in which voters can give positive and negative points because male voters seem reluctant to actively withdraw points from female candidates. We thus encourage constitution makers to think carefully about the design of preference voting.     

Income-based voting and polarization over redistribution under alternative electoral systems

Democracies that have proportional electoral systems spend substantively more on welfare policies than those that have majoritarian systems. Theoretical accounts of this empirical regularity are generally tested using macro-level data, leaving micro-level implications untested. In this paper, I take an alternative approach, leveraging the fact that the theories in question make predictions about the electoral coordination between parties and voters around broad-based redistribution under alternative institutional arrangements. To test the theories, I create a novel measure of income-based voting, which captures the sensitivity of vote choice to changes in income and forms the dependent variable in a second stage model. Overall, I find robust support for more proportionality leading to more income-based voting.     

Ethnicity and electoral manipulation in Russia

To what extent does electoral manipulation follow ethnic lines in Russia? Using an original dataset based on raion-level data, we find that the “ethnic component” of electoral manipulation is more nuanced than previous studies have suggested. Electoral manipulation was most prevalent in majority-minority raions across ethnic and non-ethnic as well as richer and poorer regions. We argue that concentrations of ethnic minorities provide: (1) greater incentives for electoral manipulation by the central state and regional elites in order to signal political dominance and (2) greater capacity to carry out electoral manipulation through networks of local co-ethnic elites. However, multilevel analyses suggest that the extent of electoral manipulation was also strongly contingent on regional context. Electoral manipulation was significantly higher in the more politically volatile Muslim regions, while socioeconomic differences among regions, by contrast, had no discernible effect.     

Does district magnitude matter? The case of Taiwan

A sizable literature on electoral institutions argues that proportional electoral rules lead to higher voter turnout. However, recent work finds little evidence that the effect generalizes beyond western Europe and suggests that the theoretical arguments in the literature remain sparse, incomplete, and contradictory. I use a well-chosen data set to resolve the problem of omitted variable bias and Bayesian model averaging to address model uncertainty. I use Bayes factors to evaluate evidence both for and against the null hypotheses and find that the proportionality of electoral rules exerts no meaningful effect on turnout or any of the theoretical mechanisms I test.     

The impact of incumbency on turnout. Evidence from Italian municipalities

We analyse how the presence of an incumbent among candidates at an election affects electoral turnout. We use a rich data set which provides information on the results of Italian municipal elections over the period 1993–2011. We find that the impact of incumbency is heterogeneous across geographical areas: incumbency produces a positive effect on turnout in the South of Italy, whereas we find a negative and statistically significant effect in the North. We speculate that the north-south divergence is related to differences in social capital and in clientelistic relationships established by incumbent politicians. Our conjecture finds support when we look separately at municipalities in the lower and upper quartile of the social capital distribution and at municipalities with high or low densities of organised crime.     

Electoral Risk and Redistributive Politics in Mexico and the United States

What strategy does a rational party follow in allocating discretionary expenditure? This article conceives redistributive politics as an investment strategy where expenditure allocations respond to electoral risk. To show the effects of risk, it provides evidence from Pronasol in Mexico and an analysis of New Deal spending in the United States. The analysis finds that the federal administrations in both countries responded to systematic electoral risk. Spending diversification into risky voters was a rational response to chances of losing elections. The analysis hence connects electoral volatility with redistributive spending.     

The Presidential and Parliamentary Elections of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela: Change and Continuity (1998–2000)

The paper examines to what extent electoral behaviour in Venezuela, as it appeared in the elections of 1998 and 2000, is different from that observed between 1958 and 1988. The paper reaches the conclusion that given the decline in party identification (dealignment), the short-term variables specific to each election, in particular the attitude towards government performance and personalities, have grown in weight vis-à-vis the structural factors (party identification, institutions, long-standing political predispositions). However, the latter were still relevant and important in the 1998 and 2000 elections and it is very likely they will carry on as such for the future. It is also concluded that, even though the party system has become unstable due to the decline in identification with the traditional government parties, new stabilising factors seem to have appeared and should be taken into account. These are ideology and negative party identification.     

论目前日本的通货紧缩性经济萧条

持续 10余年之久的日本经济萧条 ,近年又与通货紧缩交织在一起 ,演变为一种通货紧缩性经济萧条。以物价水平的全面、持续下跌为标志的通货紧缩 ,在近年日本正呈愈演愈烈之势 ,且治理难度极大 ;而日本的经济萧条也在趋于恶化 ,其主要表现包括衰退过程空前严重、回升势头极其微弱 ,失业率逆周期性攀高 ,企业经营状况恶化、破产空前严重 ,及股市地价双双暴跌等 ;且在通货紧缩与经济萧条之间 ,还形成了多层面的恶性循环 ,其中主要是通货紧缩与消费低迷、通货紧缩与失业加重、通货紧缩与企业困境、以及通货紧缩与财政危机之间的恶性循环