论异议股东股份回购请求权

异议股东股份回购请求权,是指当公司股东大会基于多数表决,就有关公司合并、分立、重大资产出售、换股计划、公司章程修改等公司重大事项作出决议时,持异议的少数股东拥有要求公司对其所持股份的价值进行评估,并由公司以公平价格予以购买的权利。从基础理论、具体内容方面对异议股东股份回购请求权进行研究,通过对我国目前回购请求权立法现状的分析及对存在弊端的检讨,在分析我国构建回购请求权的必要性的基础上,提出完善我国异议股东股份回购请求权制度的具体设想。     

Designing preference voting

Electoral systems in which voters can cast preference votes for individual candidates within a party list are increasingly popular. To the best of our knowledge, there is no research on whether and how the scale used to evaluate candidates can affect electoral behavior and results. In this paper, we analyze data from an original voting experiment leveraging real-life political preferences and embedded in a nationally representative online survey in Austria. We show that the scale used by voters to evaluate candidates makes differences. For example, the possibility to give up to two points advantages male candidates because male voters are more likely to give ‘zero points’ to female candidates. Yet this pattern does not exist in the system in which voters can give positive and negative points because male voters seem reluctant to actively withdraw points from female candidates. We thus encourage constitution makers to think carefully about the design of preference voting.     

Prepaid postage using pre-stamped envelopes to affect turnout costs

Voter participation in elections is important for representational reasons but also because it helps to support the legitimacy of the election outcome. In a recent paper, Schelker and Schneiter (2017) show with data from only one Swiss canton that a small policy intervention (return envelopes with prepaid postage) can lead to substantially increased voter turnout rates. We revisit this finding and extend the analysis to all cantons that allow municipalities to offer free return postage. We find that a credible estimate of the effect is somewhat smaller but still positive and significant. We also document that this effect is not constant but stronger for larger municipalities than for smaller municipalities. Our interviews point to a likely mechanism. These results show that return envelopes with prepaid postage are an effective policy to increase participation, but mostly for large municipalities.     

Political polarization,voting and democratic representativeness: Too much or too little?

This contribution evaluates the mediating role of different political contexts and levels of democratic consolidation on the effect of party system polarization on ideological vote and discusses how this relationship enhances democratic representativeness. The influence of party system polarization on ideological voting is analyzed in two areas: the voters' competence in identifying parties' ideological positions; and the voters’ tendency to vote for the most ideologically proximate party, which is one of the key features of the spatial theories of voting. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) from 1996 to 2019 and multilevel modelling techniques, the paper compares how those features vary across different types of countries, particularly older and newer democracies, and different regions of the world.     

The practice and implications of legislative proxy voting in Ukraine

Governing parties often face the challenge of coordinating the behavior of legislators to pass bills and achieve their policy goals. Solutions to this collective action problem vary, but generally involve a combination of inducements and punishments to encourage legislators to toe the party line. “Ghost voting,” a form of proxy voting in which legislators record roll-call votes in place of their absent co-partisans has been noted over time in many representative institutions. This article addresses the process of proxy voting in Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada, empirically demonstrating that proxy voting has been widespread and essential to the success of crucial legislation. At the same time, proxy voting creates impediments to measures of legislative unity and undermines accountability.     

Internet voting and turnout: Evidence from Switzerland

Internet voting (i-voting) is often discussed as a potential remedy against declining turnout rates. This paper presents new evidence on the causal effect of i-voting on turnout, drawing on trials conducted in two Swiss cantons: Geneva and Zurich. Both Geneva and Zurich constitute hard cases for i-voting, given that i-voting was introduced in the presence of postal voting. However, this setting allows us to test some of the more optimistic claims regarding i-voting's ability to increase turnout. Empirically, we exploit the advantageous circumstance that federal legislation created a situation coming close to a natural experiment, with some of Geneva's and Zurich's municipalities participating in i-voting trials and others not. Using difference-in-differences estimation, we find that i-voting did not increase turnout in the cantons of Geneva and Zurich.     

Economic evaluations vs. ideology: Diagnosing the sources of electoral change in Turkey, 2002–2011

Turkish elections reflect two competing influences. One concerns a long-term increasingly conservative ideological orientation; the other, more short-term pragmatic evaluations primarily on the economic policy front. This article uses three nationwide representative surveys from 2002, 2007 and 2011 to assess the relative merits of these competing hypotheses. The findings indicate that the critical election of 2002 is not shaped by economic performance evaluations but rather by indicators of ideology at large and left–right ideology in particular. The influence of ideology appears to rise from 2002 to 2007 and 2011. Economic performance evaluations increase in salience from 2002 to 2007 but seem to have somewhat lost their power for 2011. Implications of these findings for the Turkish party system and further research questions are discussed in the concluding section.     

Revitalizing the United States‐Japanese alliance

Abstract

While the notion that subjective economic perceptions as well as objective economic conditions affect electoral outcomes has long been explored in advanced democracies and new democracies, evidence of the link between the economy and elections has been rarely found in East Asian countries. As economic issues have become salient since the 1997 financial crisis, political leaders’ capacity to manage the economy has become one of the most important criteria in electoral choice in East Asia. This paper examines how economic issues influenced the results of the 2007 presidential election in South Korea. By making use of the 2007 Presidential Election Panel Study, this study examines the continuity of and changes in the Korean voters’ electoral behavior. This study describes the political situation in the post-1997 financial crisis period under two liberal governments in Korea and introduces the processes and characteristics of electoral campaigns in the 2007 presidential election. This paper then explores the link between the economy and vote choice, focusing on whether economic issues were salient among the electorate, whether retrospective or prospective economic voting was prevalent among Koreans, and how the voters supported Lee Myung Bak across age groups, regions, and parties in the 2007 presidential election.     

Elections as instruments for punishing bad representatives and selecting good ones

Many theories of democracy point out that voters make their choices based on two goals: the retrospective assessment of incumbents and the prospective choice between incumbents and challengers. Do voters react to malfeasance on the part of their elected representatives? If they abandon corrupt incumbents, are they able to select more virtuous replacements? In this paper, we assess the effects of corruption on voter loyalty and, conversely, of voter defection on subsequent malfeasance. We examine these relationships with data drawn from 169 elections across 72 countries. Our results show that malfeasance does indeed provoke voter defection, but that electoral volatility is not followed by lower levels of perceived corruption. We conclude by discussing the appropriate interpretation of our results, the future research they suggest, and their meaning for related, emerging literatures.     

Making wasted votes count: Turnout,transfers, and preferential voting in practice

Proponents of electoral reform champion the single transferable vote (STV) or aligned forms of preferential voting (AV, IRV, RCV) as a method to improve participation among and representation of the general public. Voters provide an ordinal ranking among alternatives on the ballot, and ballots not used to elect a candidate are transferred to another favored alternative. Preferential voting is intended to encourage both citizen participation in an election and sincere voting. Yet the empirical evidence about the effects of preferential voting in the scholarly literature is scant. Elections of members to the Dáil Éireann, the lower house of national parliament in Ireland, provide a wealth of data on preferential voting. Data from four recent Irish elections (1997, 2002, 2007, and 2011) are analyzed to assess the effectiveness of STV on reducing wasted votes. The number of nontransferable ballots, votes not used for any candidate, is large and increases as the need for lower level preferences (that is, later counts or rounds) grows. Voter turnout does not correspond to preferential voting in predictable ways; turnout declines as the number of candidates elected increases. Although preferential voting systems have much to offer, their effects need to be evaluated.