Electoral outcomes versus voters' preferences: on the different tales the data can tell

Estonia has used e-voting since 2005, and because e-voting is more accessible, more flexible and saves time, the result has been an increase in voter turnout. Compared with traditional voting in which a person must go to the polling station, a process that takes about 44 minutes, e-voting requires only 6 minutes. So far, supporters of right-wing parties and the Reform Party (Liberals) are more likely to use e-voting, with the result that Isamaa and ResPublica Liit (Conservatives) gained the majority of e-votes during the last parliamentary elections in 2011.

This article analyses the performance of the political parties in each of the 103 general elections staged in the five Nordic states between 1944 and 2011. It follows the work of Jan Sundberg by initially focusing on the three ‘pole parties’ that emerged from the struggle between labour and capital (Social Democrats versus Conservatives) on the one hand and between rural and urban economies (Agrarians versus Conservatives) on the other and considers the continuing validity of his conclusion that there has been ‘a remarkable stability among the three pole parties’. This leads Sundberg to characterise Scandinavia as ‘an enduring party system’. Whilst the evidence continues to point to significant ‘core persistence’, there have been a number of ‘big bang’ elections and a striking rise in support for parties in the ‘Others’ category (presently over two-fifths of the active electorate in Norway and Finland and over three-fifths in Iceland). The central question therefore is: What does the significant growth in this category indicate about the nature of electoral party system change in Scandinavia? The argument advanced is that significant core persistence (based on the pole-party vote share) should not conceal significant support for new parties, support which has vested the party systems on mainland Scandinavia with increased polarisation and an added dimensionality.

Department of Political Science at Alexander Dubcek University in Trencin prepared its own exit poll during election day on March 5, 2016. The survey asked seven questions that were aimed at determining the preferences of the respondents concerning not only the current but also past general elections. Interviewers surveyed the choice of political party or movement in parliamentary elections in 2016 as well as preferences in past elections. Followed by questions concerning motivation to vote - when did the respondents decide to go to vote and what or who inspired this decision. The survey also tried to found out how many preferential votes did the voters give to the candidates of political parties and movements. Final question asked about expectations for the future of individual respondents. This article is the information output of the survey. The interviewers were 124 university students and its return was 1,612 sheets. The aim of this paper is to communicate the findings of this unique survey, which is unprecedented in the Slovak political science.

Which Preferences Can Democracy Serve?

The presented study analyses preferential voting in the 2023 parliamentary elections in Slovakia.Preferential voting is the only option for Slovak voters to change the personal shape of the parliamentary caucuses of political parties.Despite the relatively high willingness of voters to participate in preferential voting, it has had a rather complementary form until 2023.In the parliamentary elections under review, the situation is beginning to change.The aim of this study is to show that preferential voting in the 2023 elections was not an insignificant aspect of the electoral system for the National Council of the Slovak Republic and was able to influence the personal shape of the parliamentary caucuses, especially of those political parties whose gains in the elections were between 5% and 7%.In addition to conceptualizing the theoretical framework of preferential voting and systematizing the development of the current legislation in Slovakia, this study analyses in particular the preferential voting of the voters of political parties and coalitions that entered the parliament after the elections.Based on the results of the data analysis analysis from the Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic, we can conclude that the influence of preferential voting in Slovakia is increasing.

The Indonesian parliamentary elections in April 2009 have been characterized as peaceful, free, and fair. All in all, the young democracy has been stabilized. The PD (Partai Demokrat, Democratic Party), the electoral vehicle of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, won with 20.8%. It is mostly secular parties, that is the PD, Golkar (Partai Golongan Karya, Party of Functional Groups) and the PDI-P (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia – Perjuangan, Indonesian Democratic Party – Struggle), which now dominate the party system. Support for the Islamic parties has dwindled; only the Islamist PKS (Partai Keadilan Sejahtera, Prosperous Justice Party) was able to gain slightly. The rapid rise of the PD and two smaller new parties is testimony to the fluidity of the party system. The results corroborate a trend of a weakening of socio-political “streams” ( aliran). This development is due to the increasing personalization and commercialization of politics and the impact of mass media. Moreover, electoral reforms (the introduction of an “open list”) seem to have strengthened local politicians vis-à-vis party headquarters in Jakarta.

The Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale (RWA; Altemeyer, 1988) was translated into Hebrew to test for cross-cultural validity in an Israeli context and to evaluate Ray's (1985) claim that the RWA measures only conservatism. Seven hundred eight Jewish Israeli undergraduate students (42.9% men and 57.1% women) whose mean age was 24 years, completed the RWA and a demographic questionnaire that included items on political affiliations and religiosity. The supporters of religious parties scored highest, followed by the supporters of right-wing parties, the Labour party, and the left-wing parties, with statistically significant differences between the four groups. The differences between the last three groups remained statistically significant when analysis was performed only on the secular subjects. The secular participants scored the lowest, followed by the traditional participants, and the orthodox participants. These findings confirmed the construct validity of the RWA with respect to Israeli culture.

The notion that political orientation is linked to prosociality has been voiced by many, suggesting that supporters of left-wing parties and ideologies may favor prosociality more than supporters of right-wing parties and ideologies. However, evidence for this proposition is inconclusive. We conducted a large-scale, preregistered analysis of the relation between political orientation and prosociality in a heterogeneous German sample (189 ≤ n ≤ 1,836) using five different measures of political orientation, six incentivized economic game paradigms to measure prosocial behavior, and 10 measures of trait prosociality. Whereas we found only weak support for left-wing political preferences to be associated with more prosocial behavior, stronger evidence for said link was apparent for trait prosociality. Overall, our study suggests that political orientation and prosociality are indeed linked, thus supporting theoretical arguments. However, this link is relatively weak and depends on the way prosociality is measured.

Despite international concern about the resurgence of right-wing authoritarianism and xenophobic prejudice throughout Central and Eastern Europe, researchers have argued recently that rightists may be less cognitively rigid and system-justifying than liberals and leftists in the context of Hungary (Kelemen, Szabó, Mészáros, László, & Forgas, 2014; Lönnqvist, Szabó, & Kelemen, 2019). We identify shortcomings of the research on which these claims are based and provide evidence that "rigidity-of-the-right" does indeed characterise contemporary Hungarian politics. Specifically, we hired professional survey firms to administer measures of personal needs for order and structure, system justification and political orientation to two large, nationally representative samples in Hungary. Results revealed that self-identified rightists scored higher than leftists on needs for order and structure and system justification (Study 1, N= 1005) and that supporters of right-wing parties (Fidesz and Jobbik) scored higher on both general and economic system justification than supporters of liberal and leftist parties (Study 2, N= 886). In exploratory analyses, we also observed that rightists expressed more intolerance than leftists toward groups that are commonly mistreated in Eastern Europe, including the Roma, religious minorities and sexual minorities.

The study investigated the correlates of attitudes toward the army and pro-nuclear activism among students in Australia, N. Ireland and (white) South Africa. Results showed the South Africans to be most favorably disposed toward the army and also to be most favorably disposed toward the deployment of nuclear weapons. Across the three groups those with positive attitudes toward the army were authoritarian in their attitudes, had positive attitudes to those in positions of authority and voted for right-wing parties. In addition, N. Irish militarists were Protestant, had little personal experience of political violence, and were not anxious, while South African militarists were found to be con-formers. With regard to pro-nuclear activism, the cross-cultural correlates were authoritarianism, positive attitudes to those in authority and support of right-wing parties. Pro-nuclear activists in N. Ireland were older and had not experienced political violence, while South African activists were female.

Italy's Christian Democratic party has an unenviable record of association with corrupt and inefficient government. On the other hand its hold on Italian voters is tenacious. The literature of political science is strewn with unfulfilled predictions of the DC's demise. One potential clue to an explanation of the DC's persistent level of pluralities may lie in the party electorate's use of preference voting for favored individual candidates and the relative lack of turnover in candidates. After examination of ballots from 1948 through 1979 it appears that DC voters, in comparison with the rival Communist party's voters, use preference voting more; DC candidates are more competitive with one another. This suggests the hypothesis that the DC may derive nationwide benefits from a kind of local party primary and from incumbency effects the PCI is unwilling to employ. DC voters may be more concerned about local personalities that about the national record of the party.

The article represents an analytical review of existing approaches in foreign literature to conceptualize and operationalize the role of subnational political actors in Brazilian national politics. The electoral cycles of 2018 and 2022 in Brazil demonstrated significant heterogeneity in voting results at the federal and subnational levels. In 2018, the victory of the leader of the far-right political forces, Jair Bolsonaro, was not fully supported by the results of the regional elections. On the contrary, the victory of the founder of the center-left party, Inacio Lula da Silva, in the national elections was associated with the absence of a majority in parliament for the president and the victory of right-wing parties, including the Liberal Party of Jair Bolsonaro. These forces have also won regional elections, and most of the current governors are also supporters of right-wing parties. Reliance on classical institutionalism in the case of Latin American countries does not represent current interaction of political forces at the federal and regional levels, which forces researchers to turn to the analysis of the role of subnational actors in the Brazilian political system. The article identifies three main groups of approaches, each of which reveals the role of subnational actors in Brazil’s national policy. The first group includes studies examining the influence of subnational actors on the characteristics of the national party system. The second group includes works analyzing the influence of subnational actors on the choice of a certain policy course by executive authorities. The third one is devoted to the analysis of the role of the states in decision-making by legislative authorities. For the analysis, we selected studies published since the beginning of the 21st century, which focused on the relationship between the central authorities of Brazil and the political actors of the states. The choice is due to the current heterogeneity of approaches to conceptualizing and operationalizing the role of the states in shaping Brazil’s national policy.

The preferential voting system used in Australia has received limited attention there in recent times, but considerably more interest internationally, where it is often known as the ‘alternative vote’. While the academic literature also usually refers to the ‘alternative vote’, this article will follow the local nomenclature of most of the countries cited — including Australia, Papua New Guinea and Sri Lanka — where the terms ‘preferential vote’ and ‘preferential voting’ are invariably used. The article begins by giving a brief overview of the history of preferential voting in Australia (where it has been a feature of national elections to the House of Representatives since 1918) and the abortive attempts to introduce the system in Great Britain and New Zealand. It examines the ‘political engineering’ potential of the preferential vote, including the claims made for preferential voting with regard to the new South Africa and the robust debate on the merits of preferential electoral systems that has taken place in Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka and Fiji. It concludes by identifying a range of possible advantages that preferential voting may have in comparison to other majoritarian electoral systems such as first-past-the-post, particularly for divided societies.

Party assistance in Bosnia and Herzegovina has focused on encouraging multi-ethnic and moderate mono-ethnic parties by placing funding and political restrictions on ethnonationalist parties while providing technical assistance and public support to those parties with less nationalist agendas. However, multi-ethnic parties have met with very limited electoral success and moderate mono-ethnic parties have found electoral success primarily by radicalizing their political discourse to match that of nationalist parties. This study provides evidence for the effect of international intervention drawn from patterns of electoral support for multi-ethnic and moderate mono-ethnic parties in canton, entity and national elections from the 2006 general elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The analysis shows that even voters who are predisposed to vote for multi-ethnic parties are much less likely to choose non-nationalist parties in elections where parties representing other ethnicities also compete. As a result, there is a clear trade-off between promoting Bosnia's integration and promoting parties and candidates who refrain from using often incendiary nationalist rhetoric.

The paper presents some consequences of using semi-open lists, including the preferential vote mechanism, in parliamentary elections in Poland. The Authors discuss whose role in assigning parliamentary seats is greater: that of party organizations’ leaders, who decide on the order of candidates on electoral lists, or that of citizens who cast preferential votes. The paper focuses in the elections in the years 2001–2011, in which, according to poll data, party voting dominated over personal voting. The results of parliamentary elections in Poland show that ballot position effects are persistently present and that people tend to vote for list leaders in their constituencies. However, a simulation of a closed-list mechanism shows that in 2001–2011, ca 20 per cent of parliamentary seats were assigned as a result of the interventionist impact of the preferential vote on the candidate lists established by parties. The ability to vote for a specific candidate is rather important for Poles. The Authors also point out that the candidates from the top of party lists may obtain such good results because voters resort to simple reasoning and vote for those from the top of a list, irrespective of the nature of the list itself. (However, the effect does not seem to be very significant).