Registrants,Voters, and Turnout Variability Across Neighborhoods

Although political participation has received wide-ranging scholarly attention, little is known for certain about the effects of social and political context on turnout. A scattered set of analyses—well-known by both political scientists and campaign consultants—suggests that ones neighborhood has a relatively minor impact on the decision to vote. These analyses, however, typically rely upon data from a single location. Drawing on official lists of registered voters from sixteen major counties across seven states (including Florida) from the 2000 presidential election, we use geographic/mapping information and hierarchical models to obtain a more accurate picture of how neighborhood characteristics affect participation, especially among partisans. Our research shows that neighborhoods influence voting by interacting with partisan affiliation to dampen turnout among voters we might otherwise expect to participate. Most notably, we find Republican partisans in enemy territory tend to vote less than expected, even after accounting for socioeconomic status. Our findings have implications for campaign strategy, and lead us to suggest that campaign targeting efforts could be improved by an integration of aggregate- and individual-level information about voters.     

Political knowledge about electoral rules: Comparing mixed member proportional systems in Germany and New Zealand

Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral systems are considered by some to be “the best of both worlds” because they combine single member district representation with proportional outcomes. Critics, however, maintain that such systems cause voter confusion leading some voters to cast misinformed votes. Survey data from Germany and New Zealand are used to investigate voter's political knowledge of the electoral system and their voting behavior. The findings suggest that knowledge about the electoral system is similar in New Zealand and in Germany. Although some may very well find the system complex, there is no evidence to suggest that a lack of knowledge about the electoral system influences voting behavior. The results undermine the claims made by skeptics who fear that misunderstanding threatens the legitimacy of electoral outcomes.     

Partisanship and Incumbency in Presidential Elections

Party identification is a standard part of our understanding of presidential voting, but the effects of presidential incumbency on presidential voting have not been recognized in most voting models. Democratic candidates in the twentieth century received 10 percent more of the two-party vote when Democratic incumbents were running for reelection than when Republican incumbents were running. National Election Studies surveys show that the effect of incumbency varies with individual partisanship, with the greatest effect, as expected, among independents. Opposition party identifiers defect at a higher rate than incumbent party identifiers when the incumbent is running for reelection. Even after controlling for retrospective and prospective economic voting, a 6 percent effect is found for incumbency. Incumbency thus conditions the impact of partisanship on presidential voting.     

Is Consensual Politicizing Being Punished in Switzerland?

Over the last decade, Switzerland has been characterized by both a radicalization of its political system and the relative success of the SP and SVP parties, which tend to adopt a strategy of permanent campaigning. Because of this, it is often argued that politicians are held accountable for their behaviour and that their electoral successes depend on their voting behaviour in parliament. We thus explore whether the voting behaviour of representatives, or citizens' evaluations of parties' ideological positions had an impact on their electoral success in the 1995, 1999, and 2003 national elections. More precisely, we assess how far the proximity and directional models explain the electoral success of incumbents and parties using roll call data for the National Council as well as the Selects surveys at the individual level. The results at both levels suggest that voters' choice is largely consistent with what is predicted by the spatial models of electoral behaviour. Swiss voters form their party preference on both proximity and direction, which supports a mixed model of electoral behaviour.     

White Voters and African American Candidates for Congress

The vast majority of African American officeholders are elected from jurisdictions with sizable numbers of African Americans. The most common explanation for this phenomenon locates the cause among white voters who are reluctant to vote for black candidates, which thereby limits the electoral prospects of black candidates in white constituencies. This study analyzes exit poll data from the 1996 and 1998 House elections in order to test the notion that white voters are averse to black candidates. Despite theoretical expectations that predict the existence of white voter discrimination against African American candidates, remarkably little is apparent. Thus, other explanations for patterns of African American officeholding in the United States need to be pursued.     

Remote Electronic Voting: Free,Fair and Secret?

Most of the debate surrounding remote electronic voting has focused on technical issues such as security and feasibility. This article examines the equally important issue of whether voting outside the context of the supervised polling place meets the legal and normative standards required of democratic elections. Our conclusion is that if voting that takes place in an unsupervised context, it is virtually impossible to guarantee that it will be carried out in secret, and that lack of secrecy constitutes a serious violation of the principles of freeness and fairness that govern elections in democratic states. This argument also has implications for postal voting, which are discussed in brief.     

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。     

Democracy Beyond Secrecy: Assessing the Promises and Pitfalls of Collective Voting

This paper assesses collective voting as a specific mode of democratic decision‐making and compares it to secret voting. Under collective voting, voters gather in one place and decide by the show of hands. We theorise two potential advantages and two disadvantages of collective voting so defined. We then draw on original survey data from one of the largest polities practising collective voting, the citizen assembly of the Swiss canton of Glarus. We find that both the promises and pitfalls of non‐secret voting are exaggerated. Non‐secret voting’s suspected pitfalls – social pressure and abstention – do not generally materialise in our sample, although for women they do appear to be relevant to some extent. However, the promises of collective voting – enabling cue‐taking and discursive bridging and bonding – are equally realised to a limited extent only.     

The empirical application of the spatial theory of voting in multiparty systems with random utility models

Spatial models of voting predominate in the formalization of political decisions and continue to be a growth industry in political science. But strict empirical applications of this theory have been rare. Only recently, conditional discrete choice models have been proposed to fill the gap between formal and empirical models and to predict the individual voting decision in multi-candidate/multiparty contests on the basis of the spatial model. This article highlights several flexible features of these models that are well known in transportation economics and applied marketing science but not yet discussed in the electoral studies community. Empirical illustrations are provided on the basis of (nested) multinomial logit.     

Economic voting in provincial elections: Revisiting electoral accountability in the Canadian provinces

ABSTRACT

We examine the outcomes of the provincial elections having been held in Canada since the Great Recession and compare them with outcomes from past decades. Given the severity of the 2008 financial crisis, we test for whether provincial governments’ electoral fortunes over the recent period have been negatively impacted by this important economic shock. Our analyses of aggregate-level provincial electoral outcomes: (1) confirm that provincial incumbent parties are held accountable for provincial economic conditions; (2) show that this provincial economic voting pattern has been heightened during the financial crisis; and (3) demonstrate that provincial incumbents also incur vote share losses when national economic conditions worsen and their respective family party is in power at the federal level, although this referendum voting pattern appears to have been unaffected by the financial crisis.