The primary runoff as a remnant of the old South

During the Jim Crow era, the American South developed a distinctive one-party political structure. One important feature of that structure was the primary runoff, which was adopted to require candidates to generate majority support in the nomination process and to stimulate competition within the Democratic Party (thus keeping the Republican Party irrelevant). In this piece, I argue that although the South has become a two-party region and the runoff has lived beyond its original purposes, it continues to do many of the things it was put into place to do. As in decades past, the runoff still has an impact on such things as candidate emergence, the competitiveness of primaries, and the ability for voters to reevaluate their choices.     

Elite-public interaction on twitter: EU issue expansion in the campaign

Why do some issues receive more interest from the public, while others do not? This paper develops a theoretical and empirical approach that explains the degree to which issues expand from the elite to the public. We examine how candidates in the 2014 European Parliament elections talked about EU issues, in comparison to other political issues. We rely on data collected from Twitter and use a combination of human coding and machine learning to analyse what facilitates interactions from the public. We find that most political actors did not try to engage with the public about EU issues, and lack of engagement results in less interactions from the general public. Our findings contribute to understanding why EU issues still play a secondary role in European politics, but at the same time highlight what low-cost communicational tools might be useful to overcome this expansion deficit.     

The electoral roots of unequal representation. A spatial modelling approach to party systems and voting in Western Europe

For a number of Western democracies, it has been observed that the preferences of poor and rich citizens are unequally represented in political institutions and outcomes. Yet, the causes of this phenomenon are still under debate. We focus on the role of elections in this process, by disentangling biases towards different income groups that stem from the party system and from voters’ behaviour. Our aim is to uncover whether elections as selection mechanisms contribute to unequal representation by analysing factors of the supply and demand sides of the electoral process. On the supply side, we focus on the congruence of parties’ policy offers and voters’ preference distributions. This shapes citizens’ possibilities to express their policy preferences. On the demand side, we are interested in the extent to which citizens from different income groups base their vote decisions on their policy preferences. The empirical analysis relies on the European Social Survey and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and covers 13 Western European countries. Our results indicate, first, that the economic and cultural preferences of poor and rich citizens differ significantly, and second, that party systems in the countries under investigation represent the lowest income groups the worst, and the middle income groups the best. This makes it difficult for citizens at both the lower and the higher end of the income distribution to voice their preferences in elections. Additionally, we show that low income citizens tend to take policy less into consideration when making an electoral choice than richer citizens. Thus, while the rich make up for their representation bias by taking policy more into account in their voting behaviour, the electoral stage poses another obstacle for the poor to overcome the representation bias. In summary it can be said that already on the supply side there is an unbalanced disadvantage in terms of representation for the very poor and the very rich, but the pattern leads to an even more asymmetrical misrepresentation of the poor due to the election act.     

Going Postal: How All-Mail Elections Influence Turnout

We examine the question of whether or not reducing the costs of voting by conducting elections entirely through the mail rather than at the traditional polling place increases participation. Using election data from Oregon, we examine whether or not elections conducted through the mail increase turnout in both local and statewide elections. Using precinct-level data merged with census data we also examine how postal voting may alter the composition of the electorate. We find that, while all-mail elections tend to produce higher turnout, the most significant increases occur in low stimulus elections, such as local elections or primaries where turnout is usually low. The increase in turnout, however, is not uniform across demographic groups. Voting only by mail is likely to increase turnout among those who are already predisposed to vote, such as those with higher socioeconomic status. Like other administrative reforms designed to make voting easier, postal voting has the potential to increase turnout. However, the expanded pool of voters will be limited most likely to those already inclined to vote but find it inconvenient to go to the polling place. This conclusion is consistent with the growing body of research that suggests that relaxing administrative requirements is not likely to be the panacea for low turnout among the disenfranchised.     

Winning at the polls and in the polls: the incumbency advantage in surveys of U.S. house voters

The success of House incumbents at the polls is well known and has been studied extensively. This paper focuses on the incumbents' success in the polls: the support bestowed upon incumbents by survey respondents is substantially higher than that received from the voters. The incumbency advantage at the polls, estimated at about 10% in the most recent elections, is almost doubled when measured in the polls. The data, drawn from the 1982–1996 National Election Studies, show that respondents do not reward all winners; candidates elected to open seats have not benefitted from the kind of bounce consistently enjoyed by winning incumbents. In addition, the pattern of respondents' misreports appears to be inconsistent with earlier explanations based on instrument effects. Respondent bias should be accounted for in order to reach correct estimates of the incumbency advantage in individual-level data.     

Party Polarization and Party Structuring of Policy Attitudes: A Comparison of Three NES Panel Studies

The conventional wisdom in the partisan change literature predicts that increasing party conflict on one issue agenda leads to a decline in party conflict on another agenda—a process called conflict displacement. We have argued that recent party politics in the United States has experienced conflict extension, with the Democratic and Republican parties in the electorate growing more polarized on cultural, racial, and social welfare issues, rather than conflict displacement. Here, we suggest that the failure of the literature to account for conflict extension results from incomplete assumptions about individual-level partisan change. The partisan change literature typically considers only issue-based change in party identification, which necessarily leads to the aggregate prediction of conflict displacement. This ignores the possibility of party-based change in issue attitudes. If party-based issue conversion does occur, the aggregate result can be conflict extension rather than conflict displacement. Our analysis uses data from the three-wave panel studies conducted by the National Election Studies in 1956, 1958, and 1960; in 1972, 1974, and 1976; and in 1992, 1994, and 1996 to assess our alternative account of individual-level partisan change. We show that when Democratic and Republican elites are polarized on an issue, and party identifiers are aware of those differences, some individuals respond by adjusting their party ties to conform to their issue positions, but others respond by adjusting their issue positions to conform to their party identification.     

Agribusiness,Legislative Elections and Party Fragmentation in Brazil

The article explores the impact of agribusiness on the politics of legislative elections in Brazil. The central argument is that social contexts dominated by agribusiness tend to amplify the number of right-wing micro-parties, due firstly to the economic interests prevalent in such regions and secondly given the ‘catch all’ nature of Brazil's traditional right and centre-right political parties. By showing how agribusiness favours the proliferation of small parties, we may also reveal one of the main reasons behind the ‘hyperfragmentation’ of Brazil's party system.     

The Fiji Election of 2014: Rights,Representation and Legitimacy in Fiji Politics

Abstract

Fiji’s 2014 election was its first in eight years, first under the 2013 constitution, and first using a common roll of electors with proportional representation. In the new parliament of 50 seats, the coup leader of 2006, Frank Bainimarama, emerged triumphant. His FijiFirst Party won 32 seats, with the Social Democratic Liberal Party, a successor party to earlier indigenous Fijian parties, winning 15 and the National Federation Party three. The election of the new parliament marked the end of Fiji’s longest period under a military government since independence. How should the significance of these elections be judged in the context of Fiji’s history? Do they represent the breakthrough to democratic stability that so many Fiji citizens have wanted for so long? Or are they just another phase of Fiji’s turbulent politics, a democratic pause before another lurch into authoritarian government?     

Social Media and the 2014 Elections in Fiji

Abstract

After seven and half years Fiji returned to parliamentary democracy with elections on 17 September 2014. For the first time there was a ‘one’-day election, with the results confirmed a few days later. Reactions to the election results were swift, thanks to the media, particularly social media. While reactions to such events have often been sought from or dominated by political commentators and academics, a new trend emerged in post-election Fiji. Ordinary people through social media were actively participating in this process, extending conversations beyond their immediate family and community environments. Social media has been touted as a valuable tool for public participation. In Fiji the infancy of social media raises questions regarding whether it facilitates public participation and engagement, whether it has a place in Fiji’s new democracy and if it does, how it affects public discourse that, since December 2006, has been one-dimensional.     

An assessment of Botswana's electoral management body to deliver fair elections

Botswana has regularly held general elections since 1965 and in October 2014 held her 11th general election. All these elections have so far been won by the ruling party. The regularity of elections in Botswana has persuaded some observers to present Botswana as an exemplar of democracy and good governance in Africa. This perception is reinforced by the formal existence of an electoral management body, the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), whose mandate is to ensure that elections are conducted efficiently, properly, freely and fairly. Although the Constitution enjoins the IEC to ensure that elections are conducted fairly, this article reveals that, in effect, the IEC has neither the authority nor the power to level the electoral playing field, and ensure that elections are also fair, in addition to being conducted efficiently, properly and freely. This inability by Botswana's electoral management body to ensure that elections are conducted fairly emanates from the narrow legal and political framework within which the IEC operates, and exposes the weaknesses of Botswana's much vaunted democracy.