Individual and contextual variation in EU issue voting: The role of political information

Increasing politicization in EU member states about European issues can be expected to strengthen the impact of attitudes towards Europe on vote choice in European Parliament (EP) elections. At the same time this impact is likely to vary between voters and contexts as a function of political information. This study explores the role of political information in explaining individual and contextual heterogeneity in the degree of EU issue voting. Using a two-step hierarchical estimation procedure to explore both individual and contextual variation, we show that while EU issue voting in the 2009 EP elections is only slightly more pronounced among the politically sophisticated, it is clearly more extensive in contexts that provide higher levels of political information on European matters.     

The continued salience of religious voting in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain

Conventional wisdom on party systems in advanced industrial democracies holds that modern electorates are dealigned and that social cleavages no longer structure party politics. Recent work on class cleavages has challenged this stylized fact. The analysis performed here extends this criticism to the religious-secular cleavage. Using path analysis and comparing the current electorates of the United States, Germany, and Great Britain with the early 1960s, this paper demonstrates that the religious-secular cleavage remains or has become a significant predictor of conservative vote choice. While the effects of the religious-secular cleavage on vote choice have become largely indirect, the total of the direct and indirect effects is substantial and equivalent to the effects of class and status.     

Rationing Consumption of Private Goods that Produce Collective Bads

This article looks at collective decisions over the limits to consumption of a private good that produces a collective bad and studies the way in which these decisions are affected by changes in the distribution of wealth. It shows that a democratic voting program reduces the maximum permissible consumption of the good, whereas a benevolent planner, and a voting program dominated by the rich, will increase this level. It also shows that, under all programs, production of the bad is driven down by increases in inequality.     

论股东大会的概念

股东大会作为由公司全体股东组成的对公司重大事务进行决策的机制在本质上并不是＂机构＂,而是一种制度,是股东民主的制度形式。股东大会与政治国家中的立法机关（议会）具有本质性的差别,在理论上不能将其类比为立法机关（议会）,而应当将其视为一种类似于＂全民公决＂的重大事项决策机制。股东大会作为股东民主的制度形式只能采用多数决的规则,决定了股东大会制度面临着与政治民主制度同样的问题,即如何保护少数派（股东）的利益。     

Doubling Down: Inequality in Responsiveness and the Policy Preferences of Elected Officials

Is bias in responsiveness to constituents conditional on the policy preferences of elected officials? The scholarly conventional wisdom is that constituency groups who do not receive policy representation still obtain some level of responsiveness by legislators outside of the policy realm. In contrast, we present a theory of preference‐induced responsiveness bias where constituency responsiveness by legislators is associated with legislator policy preferences. Elected officials who favor laws that could disproportionately impact minority groups are also less likely to engage in nonpolicy responsiveness to minority groups. We conducted a field experiment in 28 US legislative chambers. Legislators were randomly assigned to receive messages from Latino and white constituents. If legislators supported voter identification laws, Latino constituents were less likely to receive constituency communications from their legislators. There are significant implications regarding fairness in the democratic process when elected officials fail to represent disadvantaged constituency groups in both policy and nonpolicy realms.     

Ideological Congruence: Illusion or Imperfection?

Paul Warwick ( 2016 ) argues that much of the research on ideological congruence leaves the erroneous impression that a close match of median left‐right voter opinions and government ideological positions usually emerges from elections. I propose further clarifications. I offer a “natural metric” based on the average distances from the median voter of the most distant and the closest parties competing in all these countries’ elections. I suggest that by these standards average ideological congruence in the Western liberal democracies in the last 20 years has been fairly successful, but not as successful as it could be.     

Strategic Behaviour in Parliament

Most research on roll call votes considers each voting decision by members of parliament (MPs) as an independent observation. Only recently have scholars (for example, Clinton, 2012, American Journal of Political Science, 56, 355–372; Clinton & Meirowitz, 2004, American Journal of Political Science, 48, 675–689) started to assess how knowledge about the sequence of votes may help us to understand the legislative process in more detail. Many of these analyses are, however, predicated on quite important assumptions regarding the forward-looking capacities of MPs. In this paper, this more recent literature is drawn on and brought to bear on an analysis of two bills adopted in the Swiss parliament. Having detailed information available on MPs’ preferences over various options voted upon, it is possible to test whether MPs behave strategically, and to what degree they are capable of anticipating the way forward through the agenda tree. Evidence is found that MPs behave strategically, but their foresight is not as perfect as one would expect from theoretical models.     

Political Star Power and Political Parties

Abstract

Political parties, and more specifically public interest groups, budget extensive amounts of time and money to use celebrity endorsers for their candidate. Do celebrities bring forth enough value to warrant the time, effort, and money expended to make their endorsements public? Using a sample of first-time voters from the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election, the authors examine the extent to which celebrities influence voting while specifically assessing whether celebrity influence is greater for Republicans or Democrats. Implications and recommendations for future research are discussed.     

The regional outcome of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement five years down the road: Are external forces playing a progressive role?

ABSTRACT

The Sudan's Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of January 2005 is the outcome of regional and international mediation led by the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD)1 and the IGAD Partners’ Forum broadened to include the United States of America, Norway, the Netherlands, Canada, Italy and the United Nations. Five years into its implementation the peace agreement appears to have transformed the war between North and South Sudan into a series of engagements of conflicting nature. Numerous contradictory actions by both the Sudanese People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) and the National Congress Party (NCP) (the main political forces behind the CPA) have been noted during the ongoing implementation process (Grawert forthcoming 2010; Grawert and El-Battahani 2005; Wassara 2008). Although internal Sudanese forces are the key actors in implementing the CPA, external forces are critical in providing the support and pressure needed for a complete realisation of the peace deal. The New Regionalism Approach (NRA), as advanced by Grant and Soderbäum (2003), is instrumental in understanding this dynamic. This article is based on the result of a study that seeks to examine why positive engagements of external forces are needed for a timely implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement.     

A typology of communication functions in ballot issue campaigns

The increased importance of ballot issue campaigns creates a need for communication and political science scholars to study the rhetorical strategies employed in such campaigns. This essay presents a typology of four communication functions employed in successful ballot issue campaigns: education, trust development, development of a positive message, and neutralization of the opposition. The typology is applied to an analysis of the 1986 campaign for liquor‐by‐the‐drink in Kansas.