The Effect of Personal Idealism,Relativism, and Machiavellianism on Voting Tendency: A Turkish Study

This study examined the relationship between Turkish voters’ ethical characteristics and voting tendencies to the political left, right, or center by applying the Ethics Position Questionnaire (EPQ) and Mach IV to the collection of data for analysis from 500 voters in a national election in Turkey. The most significant finding is that there was no statistically meaningful relationship among levels of idealism, relativism, or Machiavellianism and voting tendencies to the political left, right, and center. However, results generated by EPQ and Mach IV questionnaire found that voting tendencies were affected by personal relativism (0.10), followed by Machiavellianism (?0.03) and idealism (?0.03). Results show that respondents’ voting tendency was most affected by the level of their personal relativism, but the magnitude of the effect was not statistically significant. The mean scores for Machiavellianism and relativism attributes were on average in the mid-range of the scale, while mean scores for idealism show that the participating voters agreed most strongly with the statements relating to the idealism and could be characterized as absolutist by their low relativism and high idealism. The results demonstrate a positive linear relationship, linking both idealism and relativism to Machiavellianism and indicate statistically significant positive correlations among the three variables.     

Conceptualizing Usage in Voting Behavior for Political Marketing: An Application of Consumer Behavior

Political marketing has borrowed and adapted many terms from mainstream marketing, such as image management (segmentation, targeting, and positioning) and consumer (voter). In marketing, the terms “user” and “usage” have been established, yet their application to political marketing is less clear. This paper analyzes the feasibility and usefulness of usage in the political context. Drawing from the literature on usage, a model is developed and applied to four voting environments: Britain, Australia, Russia, and Belarus. One critical factor that emerges is the concept of choice, whereby the voter may chose to indicate their preference for one party yet be forced to use a different party as chosen by collective choice. Another issue is the potential for habitual voting behavior to limit decision making. It is concluded that usage needs to be contextualized specifically for political marketing.     

The electoral consequences of two great crises

Who benefits from deep economic crises: the left, the right or neither? On the basis of evidence from elections in 1929–1933 and 2008–2013 in all states that were democracies in both periods, it is argued in this article that the electoral consequences of the Great Depression and the Great Recession were surprisingly similar: in both periods, right‐wing parties were at first more successful than left‐wing parties, although this effect only lasted for a few years. The manner in which a crisis develops over time should be taken into account when examining the effects of deep economic downturns on the electoral fortunes of the left and the right.     

Economic vote instability: Endogeneity or restricted variance? Spanish panel evidence from 2008 and 2011

While the economic vote exists in Western democracies, the question of its stability remains a subject of controversy. This article focuses on two possible factors behind the instability observed: the endogeneity problem and the restricted variance problem. The former concerns the influence of partisan thinking on economic perception, while the latter concerns the influence of economic crisis, when virtually all voters may perceive a bad economy. These problems are examined using panel data from the Spanish national elections of 2008 and 2011. After various causality tests, it is concluded that the economic vote was influential in both contests, but apparently less so in 2011. It is shown in the article that the initial 2011 result misleads because of the statistical artifact presented by the restricted variance problem. Thus, an alternative strategy for exogenising economic perceptions is developed using aggregate economic measures in a pooled cross‐sectional design whereby it is demonstrated that the economy mattered greatly under the economic crisis of 2011. This estimation strategy could be applicable to other Western democracies experiencing such economic crisis.     

Temporary migration projects and voting rights

Theorists have recently argued that in order to protect migrants from vulnerability and domination, host countries should grant voting rights to all residents, including those who are present on the territory on a temporary visa. Although we endorse the inclusive and egalitarian rationale of this approach, we argue that it is based on the presumption that all migrants aim at permanent inclusion and is therefore inadequate in the case of those who are engaged in ‘temporary migration projects’. We suggest that in order to provide these migrants with a form of political voice that fits their life plans, we need to look at different institutional tools than conventional voting rights, and we point to trade unions and migrant organizations as promising alternatives. We also show that, contrary to what may be thought of other forms of temporary mobility, temporary migration projects and the institutional solutions we propose in order to address the needs of the migrants involved are not disruptive of liberal-democratic institutions.     

Polls,coalition signals and strategic voting: An experimental investigation of perceptions and effects

Polls and coalition signals can help strategic voters in multiparty systems with proportional representation and coalition governments to optimise their vote decision. Using a laboratory experiment embedded in two real election campaigns, this study focuses on voters' attention to and perception of polls and coalition signals. The manipulation of polls and coalition signals allows a causal test of their influence on strategic voting in a realistic environment. The findings suggest that active information acquisition to form fairly accurate perceptions of election outcomes can compensate for the advantage of high political sophistication. The theory of strategic voting is supported by the evidence, but only for a small number of voters. Most insincere vote decisions are explained by other factors. Thus, the common practice to consider all insincere voters as strategic is misleading.     

African states,global migration,and transformations in citizenship politics

Over the past three decades, relations between African emigrants and their home-states have been changing from antagonism to attempts to embrace and structure emigrant behaviors. This transformation in the conception of emigration and citizenship has hardly been interrogated by the growing scholarship on African and global migrations. Three of the most contentious strategies to extend the frontiers of loyalty of otherwise weak African states, namely dual citizenship or dual nationality, the right to vote from overseas, and the right to run for public office by emigrants from foreign locations are explored. Evidence from a wide range of African emigration states suggests that these strategies are neither an embrace of the global trend toward extra-territorialized states and shared citizenship between those at ‘home’ and others outside the state boundaries, nor are they about national development or diaspora welfare. Instead, they seem to be strategies to tap into emigrant resources to enhance weakened state power. The study interrogates the viability and advisability of emigrant voting and political participation from foreign locations, stressing their tendency to destabilize homeland political power structures, undermine the nurturing of effective diaspora mobilization platforms in both home and host states, and export homeland political practices to diaspora locations.     

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.     

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.     

Emigrant external voting in Central-Eastern Europe after EU enlargement

The European Union's Eastern Enlargement of 2004–2007 triggered a large wave of migration. While the influence of Central-Eastern European (CEE) migrants on Western European politics has been studied, the impact of outward migration and political remittances “sent” by expatriates remain unexplored, despite the salience of democratic backsliding and populist politics in the region. We ask how external voting among migrants differs from electoral results in homelands over time, drawing on an original dataset gathering voting results among migrants from six CEE countries in fifteen Western European host countries. Using models estimated with Bayesian ordinary least squares regression, we test three hypotheses: two related to the disparity of diaspora votes from homeland party systems over time; and one to the ideological leanings of diasporas. We observe a growing discrepancy and note that diaspora votes follow the ideological fluctuations in the country of origin but distort it, with CEE migrants voting for more liberal and more economically right-wing parties than voters ‘at home’.