Measuring the strength of voter turnout habits

Voting in one election makes a person more likely to vote in future elections. Researchers often interpret the over-time turnout persistence as evidence of psychological habit formation. But there are few theoretically motivated or empirically validated measures of voter turnout habit. This study contributes by clarifying the concept of turnout habit and developing and validating a seven-item measure of the concept. The paper describes turnout habit as a durable disposition to vote determined by an ability to automatically initiate voting and self-identify as a frequent voter. The new measure is validated using U.S. and UK survey data. Turnout data are from both voter files and self-reports. Varied methodological approaches, including a confirmatory factor analysis and receiver operator characteristic curve analysis, provide evidence of the measure's validity. Habit predicts future turnout independent of election-specific considerations, self-predictions, and age. The habit measure discriminates between eventual voters and abstainers as well as respondents' own self-predictions. Self-report voting habit measures appear valuable for answering theoretical questions about why people vote and practical questions about how best to identify likely voters in survey data.     

Are city elections unique? Perceptions of electoral cleavages and social sorting across levels of government

A long tradition of scholarship has argued that the cleavages that animate urban politics are distinct from those that structure regional or national politics. More recent scholarship has challenged this view, demonstrating the relevance of cleavages that apply at higher levels of government, such as partisanship and ideology, for urban elections. We contribute to this debate by investigating the perceptions of urban residents themselves. Using survey data from a major Canadian city, we use a novel survey question battery to compare how urban residents understand municipal and provincial electoral cleavages. We consider two questions that speak to the distinctiveness of local politics: (1) How do electors perceive coalitions of support at the two levels of government, and do perceptions of coalitions differ across levels? (2) How do perceptions compare to actual electoral coalitions at the two levels? We find little evidence to support the view that local electoral cleavages are unique.     

The Calculus of Voting in Compulsory Voting Systems

Compulsory voting laws have consistently been demonstrated to boost electoral participation. Despite the widespread presence of compulsory voting and the significant impact these laws appear to have on voting behavior, surprisingly little effort has been devoted to analyzing how mandatory voting alters the decision-making calculus of individual voters in these systems. Moreover, studies that investigate the influence of compulsory voting laws on electoral participation generally treat these policies monolithically, with scant attention to the nuances that differentiate mandatory voting laws across systems and to their consequences for voting rates. Analyses that explicitly and empirically examine the effects of penalties and enforcement are surprisingly rare. This study aims to fill that void by adapting rational choice models of participation in elections for compulsory voting systems. I find that the level of penalties countries impose for non-compliance and the degree of penalty enforcement impact turnout rates. Voters in mandatory voting systems abstain least when both the penalties and the likelihood of enforcement are high, and abstain most when both meaningless.

Estimating voter migration in Canada using generalized maximum entropy

As voters switch political preferences from election to election, understanding the magnitude of voter flows among parties and transitions between voters and non-voters is an essential element of political analysis. As exit polls are uncommon in Canada, voter migration can also be estimated using suitable statistical techniques. Backing out micro-level voter migration probabilities from macro-level election data is a problem of ‘ecological inference.’ This paper uses the method of generalized maximum entropy (GME) to estimate voter migration patterns for the two most recent Canadian federal elections (2004 and 2006) and two most recent provincial elections in British Columbia (2001 and 2005). The estimation results answer important questions about voter behaviour in Canada. These results will be of interest to political scientists, historians, and politicians, as well as econometric practitioners who wish to estimate voter migration.     

Discussants that mobilise: Ethnicity,political discussion networks and voter turnout in Britain

Political discussion networks significantly influence citizens' political behaviours and attitudes. They promote political information and facilitate mobilisation and conformity to social norms (Fowler, 2005; Huckfeldt and Sprague, 1995). It has been suggested that ethnicity plays an important role in shaping the composition and impact of these networks (Leighley and Matsubayashi, 2009). In this paper, we employ discussion network data to contribute to this debate and explore the relationship between co-ethnic discussants and their political characteristics, which we refer to as mobilisation value; how these relationships vary across ethnic minority/majority groups; and the implication of these phenomena for voter turnout in Britain. We find that, for White British, co-ethnic discussants have greater mobilisation value. However, overall, for Asians and other ethnic groups have higher mobilisation value than White British or Black respondents. In turn the mobilisation value of discussants has a positive effect on turnout regardless of a citizen's own ethnicity.     

Type of education and voter turnout – Evidence from a register-based panel

The relationship between education length and voter turnout has been one of the most studied in the political participation literature in recent decades. However, few studies focus on education type, and most of the existing research on this topic relies on cross-sectional data. In the current study, we utilize a large register-based panel dataset to investigate the effect of education type. We find no effects of education type when investigating overall types of education, but we find substantial effects when examining a specific type of education program with a particularly high civic content.     

The virtuous circle of representation

Theoretical and empirical research shows that political representation is a dynamic process repeatedly connecting citizens and political elites. However, less is known about how citizens alone experience the process of political representation and connect electoral participation with representation. This article combines different literature pertaining to the representative process in a dynamic framework. It explores causality between electoral participation and perceived responsiveness in citizens' minds using unique panel data. By arguing for two-way causality and the existence of a virtuous circle, the paper refines the concepts’ relationship beyond traditional conceptions that currently dominate the literature on electoral behaviour and participatory democracy. The results indicate that the representative process may be a self-sustaining experience for citizens over time.     

Voting for extreme right parties in Israel: Evidence from the 2009 elections

In recent years, extreme right parties have received considerable electoral support in Europe. Accordingly, many scholars have examined the factors attracting voters in many Western democracies to extreme right parties. In this study, we sought to determine what factors are responsible for the support of extreme right parties in Israel. Using Israel National Election Studies micro-data for the 2009 elections, we found evidence that political dissatisfaction and security issues significantly contribute to support for extreme right parties. In contrast to other countries where economic issues are more salient, our results suggest that economic views do not significantly explain one's support for extreme right parties.     

Towards a pattern in mass violence participation? An analysis of Rwandan perpetrators' accounts from the 1994 genocide

In this article, I focus on the logic whereby a group of eight Hutu became involved in mass violence during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. This process is considered as a sequence of meaningful events that progressively shaped the actors' frame of analysis. As such, each sequence brings a new qualitative reality which, in turn, constitutes the platform upon which the involvement in, and the perpetration of, mass violence become acceptable and legitimate in the eyes of the perpetrators. Based on both Howard S. Becker's notion of career and Roger Petersen's analysis of resistance and rebellion, I disaggregate the entire process of participation in mass violence into a sequence of six mechanisms, generating two main phases. The first one, mobilisation, refers to the movement from a neutral state to a mobilised state. The second phase, collective action, covers the drift from mobilisation to action, namely, killings.     

Electoral context,habit-formation and voter turnout: A new analysis

Drawing on the concept of habitual voting (Plutzer, 2002), Franklin (2004) argues that the effects of electoral context on voter turnout will be largely limited to the cohorts who have experienced few elections in their lifetime. Those with more electoral experience would thus remain unaffected. Testing the above hypothesis is a way of a feasible indirect examination of the concept of habitual voting. Such tests have so far focused primarily on the impact of electoral competitiveness on turnout. I propose a new superior analysis of Franklin's hypothesis that, I claim, approaches the standards of a natural experiment. My test – focusing on the national election cycles as a contextual trait of the European Parliament elections – delivers new evidence supporting this hypothesis.