A Tale of Three Cities: Electoral Accountability in Indonesian Local Politics

In Indonesia, local government is endowed with important policy prerogatives and local politics is key to advance social welfare. The literature on Indonesian local politics has convincingly exposed serious limitations in local democratic practices, and it has questioned the ability of local democracy to promote genuine political change. This work, however, predominantly focuses on elite politics and specific forms of accountability based on patronage and clientelism. In this paper, we study democratic accountability in Indonesia from a different perspective. Drawing from the comparative literature on voting behavior, we hypothesize that Indonesian voters evaluate local politicians for their performance, and that they vote to reward or punish them for what they do in office. The analysis of three original surveys conducted in the cities of Medan, Samarinda and Surabaya offers partial support for this argument. While there is a positive relationship between evaluations of local government performance and support for incumbents, the strength of this link varies substantially across individuals and cities. The results shed new light on voter-politician linkages in Indonesia, suggesting that forms of accountability different from clientelism may emerge in this large and diverse country.     

Two elections and a political regime in crisis: Turkish politics at the crossroads

Turkey had its fourth National Assembly elections on 7 June 2015 in the twenty-first century and this time they resulted in a hung parliament. The efforts at establishing a coalition government failed and the country moved to a snap, ‘repeat’ election on 1 November 2015. This paper focuses on how the voters registered their party preferences almost 5 months apart in the same legislative general elections and why. Using the same sample and interviewing those who lived at the same addresses as those in the ISSP Citizenship survey conducted February to April 2015 and again in October 2015, a panel data-set was constructed. A theoretical framework for voting behaviour that uses party identification, political ideology, ethnic, religious, social class identities and perceptions of the performance of the economy of the respondents to understand what factors help to influence the party preferences of the same respondents 5 months apart. A multivariate (binary logistic regression) analysis of the pre-June and October 2015 data sets revealed that economic voting had been the predominant factor in the June elections, but security concerns also interacted with popular economic evaluations in the November 2015 elections to reinstall the AKP to power.     

How Do We Write the History of Brexit?

The vote to leave the European Union in 2016 and the political crisis that followed offer obvious subjects for the political historian. Yet, the study of Brexit raises serious challenges for academic writing, concerning method, the political preferences of the historian and the implication of history as a discipline in the European debate. This article explores some of the dilemmas and opportunities confronting the historian of Brexit, focussing, in particular, on the challenges to be addressed, the utility of conventional political methods and the insights that might be drawn from allied fields. It argues for a greater emphasis on the imaginative resources on which the different campaigns could draw, urging greater attention to conventional wisdoms, languages of class, collective memory and the forging of cultural or exceptionalist identities.     

Blind spots in the party system: Spatial voting and issue salience if voters face scarce choices

Drawing on spatial models of political competition, this research investigates whether decision weights vary across groups of voters defined by their policy positioning in a two-dimensional space. Our analyses of electoral survey data from England, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland reveal that the economic and cultural dimensions of electoral competition are salient for the vote choice of most groups of voters. However, those voters who hold economically right and culturally libertarian preferences weigh their preferences on the economic dimension more and discount parties’ position on cultural issues when no party represents their configuration of preferences. Consequently, left parties are less able to attain votes of economically right but culturally libertarian voters for cultural policy reasons, when electoral choices are scarce, while right parties are successful in attaining votes based on both dimensions. As a result, significant representation gaps can occur.     

Who's favored by evaluative voting? An experiment conducted during the 2012 French presidential election

Under evaluative voting, the voter freely grades each candidate on a numerical scale, with the winning candidate being determined by the sum of the grades they receive. This paper compares evaluative voting with the two-round system, reporting on an experiment, conducted during the 2012 French presidential election, which attracted 2340 participants. Here we show that the two-round system favors “exclusive” candidates, that is candidates who elicit strong feelings, while evaluative rules favor “inclusive” candidates, that is candidates who attract the support of a large span of the electorate. These differences are explained by two complementary reasons: the opportunity for the voter to support several candidates under evaluative voting rules, and the specific pattern of strategic voting under the two-round voting rule.     

A communotropic theory of economic voting

Within the social sciences, there is a long and storied history of the effect of economic conditions on vote choice. The traditional arguments are that voters have personal (egotropic) and/or other-regarding (sociotropic) preferences and that they reward and punish politicians electorally based on economic conditions at these levels. However, there is a third option. As industries, employment, and economic conditions are not uniformly distributed across the country, preferences may be locally based. This project combines unique survey data with Metropolitan Statistical Area unemployment numbers and finds evidence of distinct preferences at a third “communotropic” level.     

A Social Democratic Future? Political and Institutional Hurdles in Scotland

The Nordic model has long been admired in Scotland, and has featured prominently in aspects of the Scottish independence referendum debate. This article explores the difficulties in instituting a similar system here, identifying two significant barriers: the institutional setting (the powers available to Scottish politicians) and the partisan nature of competition between the two parties that might be able to deliver upon such a commitment. It concludes that the prospects of moving towards a Nordic‐style social investment model are slight, given the political, institutional and attitudinal barriers in place.     

Economic voting in Latin America: A general model

Economics and elections have been much-studied in the highincome democracies of North America and Europe. However, little is known, especially comparatively, about economic voting in low-income democracies, such as those of Latin America. Here we offer the first comparative election study of the economic vote in this region. We apply a series of ever-more demanding statistical tests to an election survey pool of 12 Latin American nations, measured at three time periods (total N > 7000). Unambiguously, the finding is of highly significant, even strong, sociotropic retrospective economic effects on the incumbent vote. In Latin America, as in other democratic nations studied thus far, governments are rewarded or punished, according to the economic performance they command.     

How the Bush and Gore Campaigns Conceptualized and Used the Internet in 2000

Abstract

Political scientists and campaign professionals have been intrigued by the potential of the Internet as a tool for accessing and conveying political information since the mass marketing of the first Web browser in 1993. Optimists have pointed to the possibility for more expansive participation and more substantive, in-depth issue discussions. Pessimists have countered that universal access to the Internet is still years down the road, pointing out there is little reason to believe campaigns will use the Internet either to spice up or to elevate the national political conversation. Such long-term assessments are premature, but we can offer preliminary assessments of how candidates conceptualize and use the Internet. Relying on surveys of online registered voters and interviews with campaign operatives and Webmasters, I examine how the online electorate was perceived and approached by the Bush and Gore campaigns in 2000.1 find that (1) voters were unlikely to seek political information from candidate or party Web sites, (2) voters were skeptical of information presented on these sites, and (3) the campaigns understood this and therefore saw the Internet primarily as a vehicle for internal communication and grassroots activation.