The Europeanization of national elections. The role of country characteristics in shaping EU issue voting

Research has shown that voting in European elections is affected by domestic politics. However, in the last years, and particularly after the European debt crisis, also the EU has gained relevance and salience in national politics. In this paper we address the Europeanization of national elections and assess to what extent the characteristics of countries condition the intensity of EU issue voting. Using data from the European Election Studies and the Comparative Manifestos Project, our results demonstrate the importance of congruence between citizens' and parties’ positions on the EU for the individual vote on the national level and show how this varies across countries. We provide evidence that EU issue voting is more intense in countries with more political influence in the EU as well as in countries that are net contributors to EU funds.     

Economic voting in multi-level contexts: Evidence from Kerala and West Bengal in India

What determines electoral support for national incumbent parties and state-level challengers in sub-national pro-poor contexts? Based on survey data from the Indian states of Kerala and West Bengal, collected prior to the 2019 national election, we find that voters were more (less) inclined to vote for the sub-national incumbent relative to the national incumbent if their household economic conditions were perceived to have improved (deteriorated) relative to national economic conditions. Our findings indicate that voters in these settings correctly assume that the sub-national incumbent cannot be held responsible for changes in national economic conditions, but, at the same time, the existence of a strong welfare state at the sub-national level creates expectations that the sub-national government is responsible for personal welfare. Hence, the national election is used to assess the economic performance of both the sub-national and the national incumbent.     

Voting rules in insolvency law: a simple-game theoretic approach

A chief characteristic of modern insolvency law in Canada, Germany, the UK, and the US is the provision for ‘workouts’ or ‘schemes of arrangement’ by which insolvent companies can attempt to rehabilitate the business. If reorganization is chosen, the debtor has to devise a plan of action which will be voted upon by claimants. The voting rules, however, differ in each jurisdiction to a greater or lesser extent and as yet have not been analyzed in any rigorous manner. This paper provides an approach based upon the theory of simple games to analyze the rules in terms of the ease which each of these regimes can pass (or hinder) plans and how these rules distribute value among claimants. We pay particular attention to the role of classification and the effect of coalition formation.     

公司累积投票制度的理论与实践

累积投票制度作为股东选择公司管理者的一种表决权制度,最早起源于美国伊利诺伊州《宪法》的规定。累积投票制度保护了中小投资者的投资热情,符合资本社会化的原则。公司股东选任董事或者监事时,实行累积投票制度对保护中小股东的利益,特别是对完善我国公司治理结构具有独特的价值。     

保持协调发展 构建和谐社会

构建和谐社会,既是崇高的社会理想,也是紧迫的现实任务。构建和谐社会的根本途径是坚持科学发展观指导下的社会经济全面协调发展。经济与社会协调发展、经济与环境协调发展、城市协调发展和区域协调发展对构建和谐社会具有重要的意义。     

Transnational absentee voting in the 2006 Mexican presidential election: The roots of participation

In many of the major migrant-sending countries of the developing world, governments have extended political rights to expatriates, often including the right to vote via absentee ballot. Little is known about the factors that shape transnational electoral participation, however. Using official records provided by the Mexican Federal Electoral Institute, we model the incidence of expatriate ballot solicitations prior to the 2006 presidential election in Mexico. Based on a series of event count regression analyses conducted at the level of U.S. metropolitan statistical areas, we find that transnational involvement in the election depended not only on socioeconomic factors but also on the concentration of Mexican civic associations within the local community, the presence of Spanish-language media, and distance from the Mexican border. This suggests that the roots of immigrant transnational participation include factors familiar to social scientists as well as dynamics uniquely relevant to immigrant communities.     

Patience as the rational foundation of sociotropic voting

Economic voting is one of the most important mechanisms on explaining voting behavior and on establishing the democratic accountability. However, people tend to use perceived national economic condition on evaluating the incumbent, which is known as sociotropic voting, instead of their pocketbook. Previous studies suggest both altruism and self-interested future expectation may help explain this seemingly irrational behavior, but empirical works have not yet found convincing evidence to prove or disprove the self-interested motivation. This article suggests that patience makes people discount less on the potential future influence of the current national economic change; if self-interest drives sociotropic voting, patient voters would be more sociotropic. Consistent with the hypothesis, individual-level data from 2014 Comparative Congressional Election Survey shows that patient voters rely more on the perceived national economic change to evaluate the incumbent and make vote choice. Limited evidence of the linkage between impatience and pocketbook voting among non-partisans, and on the country-level is also provided.     

The UK Politics of Overseas Voting

The enfranchisement of non‐resident citizens has always been controversial in the UK, where for historical reasons, voting rights are not as closely associated with citizenship as elsewhere. The introduction of ‘overseas’ voting in the 1980s by the Conservatives was contested by Labour as a form of ‘international gerrymandering’ since expatriates were widely assumed to be disproportionately wealthy and therefore more likely to vote Tory. Expatriate campaigners have been increasingly vocal in denouncing the ‘electoral injustice’ of the ‘fifteen‐year rule’ which disenfranchises them after fifteen years abroad, and the exclusion of so many from the EU referendum highlighted their cause. A recent private member's bill proposing ‘votes for life’ for UK expatriates aimed to meet their demands to abolish the time restriction, now considered anachronistic. But their arguments were hijacked by historically embedded attitudes and disputes driven by party politics, ending in a dramatic and bewildering filibuster which this paper elucidates.     

Old wine in new bottles? Reassessing the effects of globalisation on political preferences in Western Europe

In both public and scholarly debates, globalisation has recently been accredited with a massive impact on the political preferences and electoral behaviour of Western citizens. Some go as far as to declare a new cleavage between winners and losers of globalisation, driven, for example, by individuals’ exposure to international competition and their degree of national as opposed to cosmopolitan identification. Extant tests of this argument have, however, relied on class and education as proxies for these processes. In contrast, this study provides a direct test of the influence of the globalisation processes on attitudes to economic distribution, the European Union and immigration as well as on vote choice across nine West European countries. The results show that variables tapping the core aspects of globalisation have relatively little impact on attitudes and vote choice; are largely unable to account for the effects of class and education; and do not seem to lead to the establishment of new divisions between winners and losers within or across classes. Rather, the winners and losers of globalisation seem to be the traditional winners and losers with respect to material positions and political influence in modern Western societies – that is, those placed higher as opposed to lower in the class and education hierarchies. In this way, the proposed cleavage between winners and losers of globalisation may seem to be rather much like old wine in new bottles.     

Republican democracy and compulsory voting

In this article, I focus on Chapters 4 and 5 of On the People’s Terms, chapters that deal with democratic influence and control. I take an applied political science approach to how Pettit’s republic might be practically achieved by exploring the under-appreciated capacity of elections to mobilise the resistance-prone, contestatory public upon which his republicanism depends. Whereas Pettit tends to focus on public contestation between elections and only demands that the public has the opportunity to vote when elections are held, I argue that they should be given a more prominent role within his republic and further, that access to voting is not enough: rather, citizens should actually vote. In order to ensure that participation is socially inclusive and that the public’s attempts at influence are ‘individualised’, ‘unconditioned’ and ‘efficacious’ in the manner Pettit desires, I suggest that compulsory voting should be a major pillar of his republicanism.