Electoral Democracy during Wartime: The 2004 U.S. Election

The U.S. election of 2004 affords an opportunity to investigate how wartime affects presidential voting. The conventional wisdom is that wartime presidents always get reelected, but previous studies have not examined how citizens' attitudes on the war affect their voting. The papers in this special issue investigate this process, looking at how attitudes on the Iraq War, the larger War on Terrorism, and the so-called cultural war affected attitudes toward the presidential candidates and voting. The studies use a wide variety of datasets and survey questions, showing that the different aspects of the war resonate with different voters and that some of the effects of wartime are indirect through increasing the salience of leadership in the election. Wartime presidents do not get reelected automatically; they have had success in reelection because of how they use the war to build an image that can get them reelected.

Purifying Suffrage: The Conservative Attack on Voter Registration in Pre-Violencia Colombia

This article aims to contribute to the new electoral history by examining a specific practice of democracy, the voter registration card, known in Colombia as the citizenship card (cédula). After pursuing the themes of electoral reform and universal suffrage in a broader sense, the article outlines the card's history from its inception in 1929 to its role in the polemics over electoral corruption by the Conservative Party, which ranged over the period before the Violencia. While national-level politics are emphasised, the impact of the card at the municipal level also is suggested, as the critical link between the national and the local.     

Broadcasting party information: Can the introduction of community radio reduce the effective number of parties?

The introduction of a more majoritarian electoral system is expected to result in the consolidation of a party system as predicted by institutionalists. However, voters must have information on party viability and be able to coordinate with other voters within a constituency for an electoral system reform to have the expected outcome. I argue that the introduction of independent local radio frequencies can promote party consolidation by enabling coordination on viable candidates because of better information that becomes common knowledge. The effective number of parties (ENEP) is expected to be lower in constituencies where a larger proportion of voters listen to local radio. To test this hypothesis, access to television signals is used as an instrument for radio listening behavior to address potential reverse causality. Using 2SLS, I find that an increase in one standard deviation in regular radio listening is associated with a decrease of 0.42 ENEP in Thailand.     

Why the CCM won't lose: the roots of single-party dominance in Tanzania

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the factors contributing to single-party dominance in Tanzania. Despite the fact that Tanzania has had a multi-party democracy since 1995, the party which governed during single-party rule, the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), has won the vast majority of seats in the National Assembly in the first four multi-party elections. In order to understand the CCM's grip on power, this article analyses the results of a survey conducted amongst subsistence farmers in Tanzania, which provides information on farmers’ livelihood conditions, access to media and political views, and hence provides insight into the preferences underlying voting behaviour. It discusses the dominant reasons for CCM support, as well as the characteristics of farmers who are more likely to support an opposition party. It concludes by discussing possible policy options for enhancing political competition in Tanzania.     

Why can voters anticipate post-election coalition formation likelihoods?

A number of scholars have argued that, in contexts with multi-party governing coalitions, voters can use historical patterns to anticipate the ideological composition of likely post-election coalitions and make vote choices accordingly. In this paper we analyze historical coalition formation data from the period 1960–2007 in order to determine whether the historical regularities in the party composition of coalition governments are such that voters can use this information to assess the likelihood that different coalitions would form after an election. Specifically, we examine: (1) the likelihood of party pairs joining a coalition; (2) the likelihood of different coalition permutations; and (3) the likelihood of a party occupying the Prime Ministership.     

Beyond citizenship and residence? Exploring the extension of voting rights in the age of globalization

The introductory article to the special issue discusses how the extension of voting rights beyond citizenship (that is, to non-national immigrants) and residence (that is, to expatriates) can be interpreted in the light of democratization processes in both Western countries and in developing regions. It does so by inserting the globalization-specific extension of voting rights to immigrants and expatriates within the long-term series of historical waves of democratization. Does the current extension enhance democracy by granting de facto disenfranchised immigrants and emigrants political rights or does it jeopardize the very functioning of democracy by undermining its legitimacy through the removal of territorial and national boundaries? The article offers a synthesis of the findings of the volume's contributions in a broad comparative perspective covering both alien and external voting rights in Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. It shows that reforms toward more expansive electorates vary considerably and that their effects on the inclusion of migrants largely depend on the specific regulations and the socio-political context in which they operate.     

The enfranchisement of resident aliens: variations and explanations

What explains the timing of the liberalization of citizenship laws? Although scholars have offered a number of competing explanations for differences among citizenship regimes, few have examined the timing of liberalization and retraction of rights for non-citizens. To investigate the timing of both liberalization and reversal, this study examines the historical expansion of voting rights for non-citizen residents (VRA). Given both the symbolic and substantive consequences of VRA, democracies may proceed slowly when liberalizing political rights and may retract them quickly. Two bodies of scholarship offer competing explanations. The “national resilience” thesis suggests that differences in cultural definitions of citizenry, political institutions, and social policies produce national citizenship regimes that evolve slowly. By contrast, the “policy constraints” thesis asserts that domestic institutions enact human rights norms that expedite convergence around a common set of political rights. This study tests these explanations by examining the timing of liberalization of VRA in 25 democracies between 1975 and 2010. It finds factors that drive the timing of liberalization differ from those that cause the reversal of rights. While policy constraints best explain the timing of liberalization, policy constraints interact with national resilience factors to explain the retraction of rights.     

Is compulsory voting habit-forming? Regression discontinuity evidence from Brazil

Voting in one election increases one's propensity to vote in the future. It remains unclear, however, whether this pattern holds when voting is compulsory – as is the case in a quarter of all democracies. Is compulsory voting habit-forming? I address this question using a regression discontinuity design and administrative turnout data from Brazil, where voting is voluntary at age 16 and compulsory at age 18. I find no evidence that compulsory voting instils voting habits. Instead, the evidence points to a first-time compulsory voting boost, which gradually dissipates as voters grow older. I show that targeted mobilisation of first-time compulsory voters is a plausible mechanism behind the turnout boost. Alternative explanations find less support in the data. The results clarify the scope conditions of prior research on voting habits, and have important implications for the debate over the second-order effects of compulsory voting.     

“Do perceptions of EMU alter clarity of responsibility? A comparison of German and Greek electorates”

The goal of this paper is to understand whether perceptions of supranationalisation of economic policy mitigate economic voting in the Eurozone. We focus on two countries with divergent performances in the Eurozone: Germany and Greece, and make use of a novel dataset, which contains all necessary items to test this hypothesis. Our comprehensive vote model shows that in both countries economic voting occurs. However, once we interact perceptions of EU responsibility with perceptions of economic performance, we obtain diverging results: in Germany, the weight of economic perceptions on vote increases when citizens assign a higher responsibility to the EU for the country's economic situation. This is the opposite of what the “blurring of responsibility” posits. On the contrary, Greek electors are in line with expectations of our main hypothesis. Moreover, in this country we also found support for the idea that only citizens with a high level of political sophistication are able to incorporate the distribution of responsibilities for the economic policy in their vote calculus. Our results suggest that the blurring of responsibility effect on the vote may not be systematic across the Eurozone.