Electoral context,habit-formation and voter turnout: A new analysis

Drawing on the concept of habitual voting (Plutzer, 2002), Franklin (2004) argues that the effects of electoral context on voter turnout will be largely limited to the cohorts who have experienced few elections in their lifetime. Those with more electoral experience would thus remain unaffected. Testing the above hypothesis is a way of a feasible indirect examination of the concept of habitual voting. Such tests have so far focused primarily on the impact of electoral competitiveness on turnout. I propose a new superior analysis of Franklin's hypothesis that, I claim, approaches the standards of a natural experiment. My test – focusing on the national election cycles as a contextual trait of the European Parliament elections – delivers new evidence supporting this hypothesis.     

Timing and targeting of state repression in authoritarian elections

Autocrats face a fundamental tension: how to make elections appear credible (maintaining legitimacy) without losing control over outcomes (losing power). In this context, we claim that incumbents choose the timing and targets of state repression strategically. We expect that before elections, regimes will moderate their use of violence against ordinary citizens, while simultaneously directing state-sponsored repression towards opposition elites. Ordinary citizens are likely to experience greater repression after the election. We test these expectations using unique events-based repression data, conducting cross-national analysis of all presidential elections in authoritarian regimes from 1990 to 2008 to understand the timing and targeting of repression around elections under authoritarian regimes. In keeping with our expectations, we find that in the months prior and during the election, opposition leaders experience greater rates of repression than voters. We suspect that incumbents find it more effective to repress electoral challengers, since these pose a direct threat to their victory. Conversely, incumbents resist repressing voters whose support they need at the polls to win and to legitimize the election itself.     

Nomination rules and the calculus of mobilization: Theory and evidence from Mexico

Does party organization shape candidates’ electoral mobilization efforts? I develop a novel theoretical account linking candidate selection rules to electoral mobilization. Nomination rules that require aspiring candidates to compete in electoral races, such as primary elections, create incentives for them to make considerable investments in order to win the party’s nomination. Using a decision-theoretic model, I show how these initial investments at the nomination stage shape the candidates’ mobilization expenditures in the general election. The main theoretical result establishes that primaries increase candidates’ mobilization efforts only when the general election is not expected to be competitive; when a close race is expected, candidates mobilize at the same rates regardless of how they were nominated. Analysis of an original dataset on candidate selection and electoral mobilization in Mexico provides strong support for the theory.     

When the election rains out and how bad weather excludes marginal voters from turning out

Ostensibly random and trivial experiences of everyday life, e.g., local weather, can have significant political consequences. First, we present a comprehensive meta-analysis of 34 studies of electoral turnout and rainfall – the vast majority demonstrating a negative association. Secondly, we present a new analysis of a voter panel with validated turnout for a complete electorate merged with fine-grained meteorological observations to show that Election Day rainfall reduces turnout by 0.95 percentage points per centimeter, while more sunshine increases turnout. Marginal voters (young voters) are up to six times more susceptible to bad weather and respond more positively to pleasant weather. Thus, bad weather exacerbates unequal democratic participation by pushing low-propensity voters to abstain. Efforts to include marginal voters therefore ought to be intensified during poor weather, and elections could even be moved to seasons with more pleasant weather to improve participatory equality.     

Mind the gap(s): Winning,losing, and perceptions of electoral integrity in mixed-member proportional systems

This study investigates whether and how experiences of winning and losing at the ballot box shape voters' views about the integrity of the electoral process in Germany's mixed-member proportional system. Relying on comprehensive data from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) 2021, the analysis provides evidence for a consistent winner-loser gap in voters' electoral-integrity perceptions, with electoral losers evaluating the electoral process systematically more negative than electoral winners. Moreover, the analysis shows that the winner-loser gap is particularly pronounced for voters who lost in two consecutive federal elections (‘repeated losers’) as well as for those who suffered electoral defeat with both their list and district votes (‘double losers’). These findings provide novel insights on how voters in mixed-member proportional systems cope with winning and losing at the ballot box, highlighting that electoral losers place (part of) the blame for their electoral defeat on the electoral process and procedures as such. In addition, the findings point to the relevance of specific features of electoral systems in shaping winner-loser gaps in electoral-integrity beliefs.     

推进我国选举制度建设的几点思考

选举制度建设直接关系到党的领导和执政地位的实现，关系到人民代表大会制度的发展和完善，人民当家作主权利的实现，关系到依法治国方略的贯彻实施。我国现行选举制度存在的主要问题是，制度规定过于分散，直接选举过于频繁且范围过窄，竞争不够充分，不尊重被提名人意愿，候选人介绍存在缺陷，选区划分制度不科学，选举程序不够严密，选举制度与代表制度存在冲突，代表结构比例要求与区域选举制存在冲突，救济和裁判制度不健全。选举制度建设需要顶层设计，通盘考虑，要以坚持人民主体地位、不断提高人民当家作主水平为价值导向，走法制化道路。一方面要通过改革和完善选举立法，解决现行法律制度中存在的问题，另一方面又要有意识地进行实践探索和制度创新，回应公民民主法制意识的提高对选举制度建设的要求。     

Regression Discontinuity diagnostics reveal statistical anomalies in Turkish elections

Using Regression Discontinuity diagnostics we document a number of statistical anomalies in the 2004 Turkish mayoral elections. The governing party that controls the parliament is much more likely to win close races than lose. Moreover, compared to close governing party losses, there is a sharp drop in turnout and contending party votes in close governing party wins. Finally, the parties that disproportionately lose very close races are exclusively ideological competitors of the governing party. Among the potential mechanisms that may create those anomalies, electoral manipulation seems to a plausible explanation. Those anomalies show that the outcomes of very close popular elections can be non-random and that the assumption of the continuity of the expected potential outcomes at the threshold could be violated. We discuss implications of our findings for Regression Discontinuity Designs and for understanding the consolidation of the right-wing electorate in Turkey during the last decade.     

Distinguishing territorial structure from electoral adventurism: The distinct sources of static and dynamic nationalization

Estimates of static nationalization do not always reflect stark qualitative differences between parties. We use a research design oriented around a comparison of sharply different parties—the unstable Democratic Left in Ecuador and the stable Broad Front in Uruguay—to develop the distinctiveness of static and dynamic nationalization. Snapshot measures that only consider a single election suggest that both parties are poorly statically nationalized; but we show that the former case is highly statically nationalized, and that the observed territorial differences arise because it is poorly dynamically nationalized. We adopt the linear mixed modeling approach to reduce the bias in extant estimators. The approach is also informative about the sources of variance in a party's territorial support: relatively stable district attributes account for static nationalization, while features unique to the electoral cycle account for dynamic nationalization. Substantively, our study alters conclusions about parties operating in highly unstable electoral contexts.     

The Seat Product Model of the effective number of parties: A case for applied political science

This paper extends Taagepera's (2007) Seat Product Model and shows that the effective number of seat-wining parties and vote winning parties can both be predicted with institutional variables alone, namely district magnitude, assembly size, and upper-tier seat share. The expected coefficients are remarkably stable across different samples. Including the further information of ethnic diversity in the models hardly improves the estimate of the effective number of parties, and thus the institutions-only models are preferable on the grounds of parsimony and the applicability to electoral-system design or “engineering”.     

Electoral Reform as an Engine of Party System Change in Italy

Abstract

After more than forty years of proportional representation, in 1991 Italy embarked on a period of electoral law revision. The ongoing debate about how to engineer an electoral system capable of producing the preferred political outcomes stands out against the stasis in constitutional reform, most recently demonstrated in the rejection by popular referendum of Matteo Renzi’s package of reforms. The extent to which the different electoral reforms have had an impact on Italian politics, especially following the 2005 electoral legislation, can be evaluated by analysing the changing Italian party system over the past decade and beyond in terms of its morphology, dynamics, and party/parliamentary group switching. The 2005 electoral reform has had a clear effect on Italian politics and on the party system, but that effect is unlikely to endure given the highly controversial new electoral law that came into force in 2017.