Campaign civility under preferential and plurality voting

We present reasons to expect that campaigns are less negative under preferential voting. We then examine if preferential voting systems affect how people perceive the conduct of elections. This paper reports results from surveys designed to measure voters‘ perceptions of candidates’ campaigns, comparing places with plurality elections to those that used preferential voting rules. Our surveys of voters indicate that people in cities using preferential voting were significantly more satisfied with the conduct of local campaigns than people in similar cities with plurality elections. People in cities with preferential voting were also less likely to view campaigns as negative, and less likely to respond that candidates were frequently criticizing each other. Results are consistent across a series of robustness checks.     

Political polarization in retrospective economic evaluations during recessions and recoveries

Retrospective economic evaluations are politically biased: across a broad range of democratic countries, supporters of the party that controls the executive provide evaluations that are systematically more positive than those of the rest of the electorate; similarly, ideological distance from the ruling party predicts more negative evaluations. Yet, during economic downturns, citizens of different ideological persuasions and partisan affiliations tend to agree that the state of the economy is dire. During recoveries, on the other hand, evaluations are polarized along partisan and ideological lines. Due to the psychological phenomenon of negativity bias, retrospective evaluations respond to economic downturns more strongly than to recoveries. As a consequence, the extent of polarization in public opinion varies dramatically between good and bad economic times.     

Proximity and directional theory compared: Taking discriminant positions seriously in multi-party systems

This paper tackles the problem of comparison between proximity and directional voting in 27 European multi-party systems. This is a previously unaddressed aspect of European spatial issue voting. We focus on the spatial voting theories as predictors of vote intention, evaluating the extent of proximity and directional voting. We describe the influence of identical predictions on the comparison of these theories. Our multilevel analysis of the 2009 European Election Study data shows more empirical support for proximity voting than directional voting in the countries analyzed. It does this by clearly differentiating between those cases where it is possible to compare proximity and directional voting and where this is impossible. Nevertheless, the prevalence of proximity theory decreases in more polarized party-systems.     

Voter perceptions of agenda power and attribution of responsibility for economic performance

In two recent experiments (one in the lab and one over the internet) concerning collective decision making we determined that individuals mainly assign responsibility to the decision maker with agenda power and with the largest vote share (Duch et al., 2012). We found rather weak evidence that responsibility is assigned to decision makers with veto power or allocated proportional to weighted voting power. Our conjecture then is that individuals in our online experiment who recognized the importance of proposal power in the embedded experiment will be those more likely to exercise an economic vote for the Conservative PM Party (since they are the agenda setter in the governing coalition) and for the opposition Labour Party. The conjecture is confirmed. Essentially, the data show that economic voting at the individual level is confined to individuals who understand the value of proposal power. This in turn suggests that the economic vote itself is motivated by a coherent attempt to punish or reward parties that actually deserve it in the specific sense that they were mostly responsible for choosing the policies that were implemented. Further, the strong reliance on proposal power as the workhorse of this mechanism of accountability, tells us that simple heuristics can do a lot of the work that cold rationality and complex calculation have done in much of the previous discussion of economic voting.     

From political conflict to partisan evaluations: How citizens assess party ideology and competence in polarized elections

Recent comparative electoral research shows that both ideological and competence voting are influenced by the degree of party system polarization. However, while the former association is uncontroversial, investigations on the latter have led to contradicting results. This study takes one step back, arguing that polarization rather affects how voters perceive party ideological positioning and competence. Building on literature linking elite polarization to mass partisanship, the study argues that party identification is a strong moderator of party evaluations in polarized elections. Hypotheses are tested with multilevel logit models on a pooled data set of European Election Studies from 1994 to 2009. Results show that partisans are more likely to view their preferred party as the most competent and ideologically close when the environment is polarized, while there is no such effect for non-partisans.     

A Regulation of Bids for Dual Class Shares. Implication: Two Shares—One Price

This paper examines the consequences of a specific regulatory restriction on bids for dual class shares. Shares of different classes are often argued to have different prices because a premium will be paid to the superior voting shares in the case of a tender offer. This paper assumes a setup where regulations require that a tender offer pays the same relative premium to both classes of shares. In this setup, it is shown that both classes will sell at the same price as long as there is a strictly positive probability that either the current management is sufficiently strong or that a sufficiently strong rival will show up. Furthermore, under this weak condition the regulation is socially optimal in the sense that the management that provides the highest total firm value will be the management of the firm. Finally, the regulation is shown to favor (or protect) the holders of restricted voting shares and this is not necessarily at the expense of the holders of superior voting shares.The practical interest of this paper derives from the fact that some European countries have adopted different regulatory restrictions on bids for dual class shares. This has more or less occurred due to proposed EU Directives. The regulation examined in this paper applies to tender offers in Denmark. Empirical results on the voting premium in Denmark are shown to be consistent with the theoretical results in this paper.     

论表决权信托——以小股东利益保护为背景展开的研究

公司控制权的存在,使控制股东可获得大于其股权比例的收益,转移、减少其相应的风险,实现其利益的最大化。表决权是争夺控制权的基本工具,中小股东的表决权往往只是一种抽象的存在,在控制权争夺中其表决权的作用不能充分实现,其利益容易受到损害。表决权信托通过对表决权的重新安排,为中小股东利益保护提供了一个较好的外部机制。     

村民选举中的制度困境及出路

村民选举是村民之间各种利益的博弈过程,由于政治市场固有的内在缺陷及各种非理性因素的影响,使得这一过程并没有产生国家与村民所预期的理性结果。因此,国家在宏观上提供矫正这些非理性结果的机制时,也有待于村民公共意识的提高。     

“For They Knew What They Did” – What Swiss Voters Did (Not) Know About The Mass Immigration Initiative

After the vote of 9 February 2014, many attributed the surprising result to voter ignorance. The basic claim was that the majority of those voting in favour of the initiative possessed only a weak understanding of what the likely outcome(s) would be if their choice prevailed. However, the analysis of the voters' knowledge level shows that they were comparably well aware of what the proposal at hand was about. Moreover, most voters voted their true preferences. They were also well aware about the possible economic ramifications acceptance could have for the relationship between Switzerland and the European Union and they were willing to take the risk. However, what should give the initiative's opponents a glimmer of hope is the fact that a majority believed that the principle of free movement would somehow be negotiable. Given the ongoing refusal of the EU to renegotiate that principle, these voters might have become less confident about its negotiability than they were before the vote.     

Voter Engagement,Electoral Inequality and First‐Time Compulsory Voting

This paper reviews the problem of declining turnout and proposes as a solution a system whereby each elector would be legally obliged to vote in the first election for which they were eligible. Popular attitudes toward first‐time compulsory voting are measured and probed by means of UK data. The main findings of the paper are that first‐time compulsory voting is a politically and administratively feasible proposal that appears tentatively to command popular support and has the potential to help address a number of the problems associated with declining turnout, and in particular low rates of electoral participation among younger citizens.