The attractiveness of local and national list labels: the role of socio-economic inequalities on the success of electoral lists

ABSTRACT

According to the nationalisation hypothesis, it is sometimes argued that electoral lists competing at local elections under a national party label are more likely to win. Yet, in many countries, local lists are still much present. This article seeks to assess the attractiveness of local and national list labels at local elections. Following Rokkan’s hypothesis of the nationalisation of local politics, we test the role of socio-economic inequality on the success of electoral lists across local polities. Based on an original dataset distinguishing the labels of 1.012 electoral lists – be they local, mixed or national – in the 262 Walloon municipalities in Belgium, the multilevel regression demonstrates that local and mixed labels present a significant electoral advantage vis-à-vis national party labels. However, the article shows that this electoral gain decreases as economic inequalities increase: national labels, especially left-wing parties, attract more voters as inequalities rise.     

Confidence in an election authority and satisfaction with democracy: Evidence from a quasi-natural experiment of a failed election in Sweden

Contemporary research on electoral integrity has focused on the functioning, evaluation, and legitimacy of electoral processes in emerging democracies. By contrast, this study investigates whether a failed election in a well-established democracy can affect individuals' evaluations of the electoral management body, the Election Authority, and whether those evaluations affect satisfaction with democracy. Using the case of a Swedish regional election in 2010 that had to be rerun due to procedural mistakes in the vote handling, we found that, in the short term, individuals’ confidence in the Election Authority was reduced after it was announced that the election had to be rerun because of the mistakes. Subsequently, this decreased confidence was strongly associated with less satisfaction with democracy at the regional and national level. As good news for the authority, after a successful rerun election, confidence rebounded to the levels prior to the failed election.     

Constitutional reform and new patterns of electoral violence: evidence from Kenya’s 2013 elections

In places prone to electoral violence, what effects can constitutional changes have on elites’ incentives to organise conflict? This article develops two hypotheses to address the above question. It proposes that in places where national reforms find sub-national resonance, national and local politicians’ incentives regarding the electoral utility of conflict will align. However, in places where national-level changes fail to be locally relevant, these incentives will deviate from one another. The research illustrates these logics through a controlled comparison of two Kenyan counties: one that experienced electoral violence and the other that maintained peace around the 2013 elections.     

Forensic integrity verification of video recordings based on MTS files

Digital video is used in criminal trials as evidence with legal responsibility because video content vividly depicts events occurring at a crime scene. However, using sophisticated video editing software, assailants can easily manipulate visible clues for their own benefit. Therefore, the integrity of digital video files acquired or submitted as evidence must be ensured. Forensic analysis of digital video is key to ensuring the integrity of links with individual cameras. In this study, we analyzed whether it is possible to ensure the integrity of MTS video files. Herein, we propose a method to verify the integrity of MTS files encoded by advanced video coding high definition (AVCHD), which is frequently used for video recording. To verify MTS file integrity, we propose five features. Codec information, picture timing, and camera manufacture/model are modified AVI and MP4-like format video verification features. Group of pictures and Universally Unique Identifier patterns were specifically developed for MTS streams. We analyzed the features of 44 standard files recorded using all recording options of seven cameras. We checked whether integrity can be validated on unmanipulated videos recorded in various environments. In addition, we considered whether manipulated MTS files edited in video editing software could be validated. Experimental results show that all unmanipulated and manipulated MTS files with known recording devices were discriminated only when all five features were checked. These results show that the proposed method verifies the integrity of MTS files, strengthening the validity of MTS file-based evidence in trials.     

Who Represents the Constituency? Online Political Communication by Members of Parliament in the German Mixed-Member Electoral System

Members of parliament (MPs) are elected via two different tiers in mixed-member electoral systems—as winners of a seat in a constituency or as party candidates under proportional rules. While previous research has identified important consequences of this “mandate divide” in parliaments, questions remain how this institutional setup affects MPs' political behavior in other arenas. Analyzing more than one million social media posts, this article investigates regional representation in the online communication of German MPs. The results show that MPs elected under a direct mandate refer approximately twice as often to their constituencies by using regionalized wording and geographic references than MPs elected under the proportional tier. The substantive findings provide new evidence for the benefits of mixed-member electoral systems for political representation while the methodological approach demonstrates the added value of social media data for analyzing the political behavior of elites.     

No sorting,no advantage: Regression discontinuity estimates of incumbency advantage in Japan

While the existing literature has identified a sizable incumbency advantage in single-member district (SMD) races in developed democracies, we argue that some political and institutional contexts of Japan's Lower House elections would undermine the incumbency advantage. Our regression discontinuity (RD) analysis indeed shows little advantage, and further examination suggests this as largely due to the “best-loser” provision in Japan's mixed-member system, which gives a loser of SMD competition a chance to be a “resurrected” incumbent. We also show no evidence of sorting – i.e., systematic difference between bare winners and bare losers – in close SMD races and thus add further evidence to support the methodological argument that the election RD analysis is a viable and promising research design.     

Finland's Parliamentary Election 2015: Certainty of the Result with Uncertainty of the Outcome

The winner of the Finnish parliamentary election 2015 was certain long before the elections. The Centre Party of Finland would win, but for the composition of the government and future societal changes, it was more interesting who would be the runners-up. With eight parliamentary parties and with eight different political agendas, the Finnish political system forms a hard to predict political landscape. Key issues for the Centre Party, rebounding from the catastrophic elections of 2011, were to find a coalition with trust between its members and to generate trust in getting things done. One evident societal outcome of the election is the deceleration of centralization policies furthered by the previous government. The disagreement over regional politics and devolution and related cleavages within the country brought the coalition government between the Centre Party, the National Coalition Party and the Finns Party to the verge of falling after only six months.     

Federal Political Fragmentation in Mexico's 2015 Elections

The 2015 congressional, gubernatorial and mayoral elections in Mexico display the continuation of political changes that started 15 years ago. The most notorious change in 2015 is the electoral success of non-mainstream parties, which have increased their vote share vis-à-vis the mainstream parties, the Party of National Action (PAN), the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI), and the Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD). These mainstream parties lost important vote shares, although the PRI has shown itself to be more resilient to electoral volatility than the other parties. The increase of volatility in Mexico favours the alternation of the parties in power; however, it also increases political fragmentation. This article argues that in a context of growing electoral volatility and political fragmentation, presidential authority is weakened, giving rise to the dispersion of power to other levels of government. Furthermore, the article suggests that party volatility presents important territorial variation in Mexico.     

The conditional impact of winner/loser status and ideological proximity on citizen participation

Many scholars have investigated the relationship between ideological orientations and mass participation, and there is also a growing number of studies comparing political attitudes and behaviour between electoral winners and losers. This article seeks to bring together these two strands of literature with respect to political participation, focusing on the interaction between citizens’ winner/loser status and ideological distance from their government. Analysis of data from 34 countries highlights the importance of this interactive effect: while previous works suggest that losers have a greater propensity to take part in political activities, it is shown here that this relationship holds true only when losers occupy a position along the left‐right spectrum distant from the government. Furthermore, while the hypothesised interactive effect is empirically confirmed for turnout, the magnitude of its impact is much greater for more costly modes of participation such as contacting, campaigning and protesting     

See No Evil,Hear No Evil? Assessing Corruption Risk Perceptions and Strategies of Victorian Public Bodies

This paper critically examines qualitative survey data from 36 Victorian public sector bodies on their perceptions of corruption risks, and strategies to mitigate these risks, as well as the integrity mechanisms in place. The findings indicate that even though corruption does not seem to be prevalent in these bodies it is not on their radar either, though fraud prevention was significantly present. The paper identifies international best practices of integrity management and inculcation of public service ethos in developed countries, and stresses three vital elements or pillars that combine both the ‘values’ and ‘compliance’ based approaches. These pillars are as follows: (1) specific corruption prevention programs and strategies that are additional to but complement existing anti‐fraud programs; (2) targeted anti‐corruption training, both for employees and for the public; and (3) effective leadership engagement and commitment to an ethical culture (Tone at the Top).