Issue Importance and Performance Voting

Issue importance mediates the impact of public policy issues on electoral decisions. Individuals who consider that an issue is important are more likely to rely on their attitudes toward that issue when evaluating candidates and deciding for whom to vote. The logic behind the link between issue importance and issue voting should translate to a link between issue importance and performance voting. Incumbent performance evaluations regarding an issue should have a stronger impact on the vote choice of individuals who find that issue important. The analysis demonstrates that there is a significant interaction between performance evaluations and issue importance. People concerned about an issue assign more weight to their evaluations of the government's performance on that issue when making up their mind.     

论信用权的内涵

信用权的产生与发展对市场经济的建立与完善有着重要的意义。因此对信用权的概念、内涵进行探讨,认为信用权为人格权。同时探讨了信用权的基本内容,包括信用的保有权、维护权和支配权。     

Policy attitudes, ideology and voting behavior in the 2008 Election

This article examines the impact of policy attitudes and ideology on voting behavior in the 2010 U.S. presidential election. The analysis uses data from the 2008 American National Election Study. The empirical results indicate that the 2008 election should not be regarded as a simple referendum on the George W. Bush presidency. At the same time, voting behavior was not particularly aligned along stark policy divisions; the direct effects of issue attitudes were confined largely to the most sophisticated stratum of the electorate. Finally, liberal-conservative orientations did affect citizens' political attitudes and candidate choices in ways that are fairly unique, compared to other recent elections.     

Ticket splitting,strategic voting and personal vote in the 2012 Mongolian elections

This article examines ticket splitting under Mongolia's new mixed-member majoritarian system used for the elections in 2012, reaching several conclusions. First, we confirm that strategic ticket splitting depends on party size, as especially candidates of larger parties receive, on average, more district votes. Second, we show that strategic voting is not a universal phenomenon under the Mongolian mixed-member majoritarian system. Finally, as personal vote rather than strategic voting generally influences electoral behaviour of Mongolian voters at the district level, we hypothesize that institutional factors alone are not sufficient to explain both ticket splitting and strategic voting.     

Getting Out the Vote With Voting Advice Applications

This article investigates the mobilization potential of online voter information tools known as “Voting Advice Applications” (VAAs). We argue that an observational approach utilizing survey data constitutes the best available method for causal inference where VAAs are popular—and we are thus most interested in VAA turnout effects—because randomized experiments are likely to run into double cross-over problems. We suggest that matching offers key improvements over existing methods to tackle self-selection into VAA use in observational studies. To improve confidence in selection on observables, we complement matching estimates with an extensive sensitivity analysis, including a placebo test. Empirically, we study the effect of smartvote, a popular VAA from Switzerland, on turnout in the 2007 Swiss federal election. We find that smartvote usage significantly increased the individual-level probability to vote. Our results suggest that smartvote was, on the aggregate, responsible for about 1.2 % points of the total tally with an estimated cost of nine Swiss Francs (7.5 U.S. dollars or 1.4 “Big Macs”) per additional vote. Promising as well, we find that the mobilization effect was more pronounced among younger voters. Our findings point to the value of VAAs compared to traditional get out the vote tactics.     

Prime ministers and the electoral cost of using the confidence vote in legislative bargaining: evidence from France

Do prime ministers pay an electoral penalty for using procedural force to pass laws? Influential theories of parliamentary governance and legislative bargaining assume that the use of the confidence vote procedure – parliamentary governments’ most powerful legislative weapon – entails an electoral cost, but evidence on this important claim has been scarce. This article provides the first estimates of how prime ministers’ public approval responds to their use of the confidence vote. Analysing time series data from France 1979–2008, it is found that prime ministers experience a considerable drop in approval after their use of the confidence vote that is not accounted for by standard economic and political covariates. The effect size is similar to a 1 per cent decline in economic growth. The findings help explain French prime ministers’ selective use of the confidence vote procedure. They also suggest that political costs constrain the bargaining power conferred by the confidence vote.     

Local candidates and voter mobilization: Evidence from historical two-round elections in Norway

What effect do candidates with local ties have on voter turnout and party support? A considerable challenge within the existing literature on the personal vote, including that part which derives from local ties, is disentangling it from the party vote using observational data. We exploit the unique institutional context of Norway’s historical two-round system, and data measured at the municipality level, to evaluate the mobilizational impact of voter attachment to parties versus (local) candidates. Under this system, entry into the second round was unrestricted, with the number and identity of candidates determined by elite coordination decisions. In municipalities where coordination at the district level between rounds resulted in the withdrawal of a candidate with local ties, we document a strong negative effect on both turnout and party support, which highlights the value of the personal vote for mobilization, and the potential trade-offs that confront parties and coalitions in nomination decisions.     

Political or Financial Benefits? Ideology,Tenure, and Parliamentarians’ Choice of Interest Group Ties

This article develops and tests a parliamentarian‐centred decision model of the collaboration between interest groups (IGs) and parliamentarians. We posit that parliamentarians face a trade‐off when deciding on IG ties that offer them either political (policy support and votes) or financial benefits (additional income). We theorise the balance in this trade‐off to be moderated by ideology and tenure because both introduce variations in IG ties’ utility across politicians. Using Swiss longitudinal data from 1985 to 2015 on 743 parliamentarians and their 5,431 IG board positions, we show that parliamentarians become more financial benefit‐seeking over time. This holds in particular if they belong to right‐leaning parties. We also find self‐imposed restrictions for new and left‐leaning parliamentarians on seeking financial benefits. This highlights that parliamentarians are responsive to their partisan constituents when building their IG tie portfolio.     

数据跨境流动规制中的“长臂管辖”——对欧盟GDPR的原旨主义考察

欧盟《一般数据保护条例》是个人数据保护的重要立法之一,而其中的“长臂管辖”条款是最有特色并颇受争议的规则。从内在视角来看,欧盟语境下个人数据的特殊含义和重要地位,是“长臂管辖”的正当性基础。而其在制度上形成内外联动的局面,是因为欧盟想扭转其在全球互联网和信息产业的劣势地位,并增强其在全球数据保护立法的话语权,同时更好地保护个人数据和国家安全。对此,中国未来的数据保护立法应结合自身数据产业的特点,明确立法旨意,形成内外联动,在国际互联网和数据治理中采取积极有为的态度,掌握该领域的话语权。     

Protesting with the ballot: Diffusion of methods of electoral protest in Spain

This paper shows the pattern of diffusion of a tool of protest – blank and null voting (BNV)– in the context of Spanish national elections. It shows how the 2004 protest mobilization by Batasuna (a Basque nationalist party) predicts null voting by identifying the relationship of this form of protest with both the level of grievance of the population and the political resources of the mobilizers. The paper then demonstrates that this large and visible use of a protest tactic is followed by a heterogeneous diffusion process after the main mobilized protest event and beyond the supporters of the original mobilizer. In the 2008 national election, across Spain, citizens with grievances toward the political system and, most importantly, with political affinity with the initiators were the ones to update their individual protest repertoire with this electoral protest tool.