Analysis Of Electoral Data Research Articles

The Guatemalan National Revolutionary unit: the long collapse

ABSTRACT The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit (URNG) fought one of the longest and bloodiest civil wars in recent Latin American history. In 1996, the URNG and the Government of Guatemala signed a Firm and Lasting Agreement ending the country’s civil war and initiating the URNG’s post-war life as a political party. After finishing third in its initial electoral competition, the URNG has since been unable to capture more than 4% of the vote, on its own or in coalition, leaving it a minor political party. What explains the poor electoral performance of the URNG as a political party? Based upon fieldwork, elite interviews, and analysis of electoral data, I argue that the URNG’s minor party performance was caused by both organizational and institutional factors.

A Note on Close Elections and Regression Analysis of the Party Incumbency Advantage

Much research has recently been devoted to understanding the effects of party incumbency following close elections, typically using a regression discontinuity design. Researchers have demonstrated that close elections in the United States may systematically favor certain types of candidates, and that a research design that focuses on close elections may therefore be inappropriate for estimation of the incumbency advantage. We demonstrate that any issues raised with the study of close elections may be equally applicable to the ordinary least squares analysis of electoral data, even when the sample contains all elections. When vote share is included as part of a covariate control strategy, the estimate produced by an ordinary least squares regression that includes all elections either exactly reproduces or approximates the regression discontinuity estimate.

A Note on Close Elections and Regression Analysis of the Party Incumbency Advantage

AbstractMuch research has recently been devoted to understanding the effects of party incumbency following close elections, typically using a regression discontinuity design. Researchers have demonstrated that close elections in the US House of Representatives may systematically favor certain types of candidates, and that a research design that focuses on close elections may therefore be inappropriate for estimation of the incumbency advantage. We demonstrate that any issues raised with the study of close elections may be equally applicable to the ordinary least squares analysis of electoral data, even when the sample contains all elections. When vote share is included as part of a covariate control strategy, the estimate produced by an ordinary least squares regression that includes all elections either exactly reproduces or approximates the regression discontinuity estimate.

Politica senza partiti? Il voto per Bassolino e De Magistris a confronto

After the introduction of the direct election for the ltalian mayors in l993, the comune of Naples has become one of the most relevant example of the so called "metro politan spring". Antonio Bassolino obtained a quasi plebiscitary consensus thanks to his ambition program of radical change. After about twenty years from that experience, the local election of 20ll is also the first to follow the long Bassolino's government. Yet it provides significant common elements to the post-Tangentopoli municipal consultation, starting from the diffuse anti-party mood and the adverse criticism against past admini strations. The two elections are both cases for the construction of personal leadership and for the spread of a direct relationship between candidate and citizenship, in the fra mework of the dismissal of the traditional political parties. ln this article a comparison wil be proposed through an analysis of electoral data and newspapers articles, in order to underline similarities between the Bassolino's and De Magistris' victories and to re construct the context in which they occurred.

Models of representation, Mobilization and Turnout: The Election of the Foreign Citizens' Council of the Province of Bologna

The Foreign Citizens' Council of the Province of Bologna is a consultative, elected body that the Province has implemented to give representation to the non-EU population, given the absence of local voting rights for these migrants in Italy. This work analyses the models of political representation implicit in the electoral rules of the council and in the organization of the main competing lists in the election, and, through the analysis of electoral data and 32 in-depth interviews with the candidates, the effect the different models had. While the vote seems to have been mostly intra-national, cross-national lists were the most successful. The different levels of turnout among the electorate suggest that the vote was based on mobilization rather than on trust in the political system, and that the analyses that link associational density with electoral participation pose some theoretical and methodological problems in this field. Policy Implications Migrants' participation policy is always based on implicit political models of participation that should always be made explicit and examined before implementation. There is always a plurality of political preferences for different models of participation in the migrant population, that should be explored and accommodated. The number of associations in existence should not be used as an indicator of a strong civil society as largely as it is presently.

IndElec: A Software for Analyzing Party Systems and Electoral Systems

<b>IndElec</b> is a software addressed to compute a wide range of indices from electoral data, which are intended to analyze both party systems and electoral systems in political studies. Further, <b>IndElec</b> can calculate such indices from electoral data at several levels of aggregation, even when the acronyms of some political parties change across districts. As the amount of information provided by <b>IndElec</b> may be considerable, this software also aids the user in the analysis of electoral data through three capabilities. First, <b>IndElec</b> automatically elaborates preliminary descriptive statistical reports of computed indices. Second, <b>IndElec</b> saves the computed information into text files in data matrix format, which can be directly loaded by any statistical software to facilitate more sophisticated statistical studies. Third, <b>IndElec</b> provides results in several file formats (text, CSV, HTML, R) to facilitate their visualization and management by using a wide range of application softwares (word processors, spreadsheets, web browsers, etc.). Finally, a graphical user interface is provided for <b>IndElec</b> to manage calculation processes, but no visualization facility is available in this environment. In fact, both the inputs and outputs for <b>IndElec</b> are arranged in files with the aforementioned formats.

People, Places and Regions: Exploring the Use of Multi-Level Modelling in the Analysis of Electoral Data

There has been considerable recent debate about the importance of local context as an influence on political attitudes and voting behaviour in Great Britain. Resolution of that debate has been difficult, because analytical methods have not been available with which to evaluate the relative importance of both individual voter characteristics and the characteristics of their milieux as independent correlates of attitudes and behaviour. The technique of multi-level modelling has been developed by educational researchers to do just that. It is introduced here and illustrated using data for the 1987 British general election. The preliminary results suggest that place clearly does matter as a component of the processes that influence voters' choices.