Candidates Win Research Articles

تقييم أساتذة الإعلام لأداء الفضائيات المصرية في تغطية انتخابات الرئاسة الأمريكية لعام 2016

This study examines and analyzes the opinions and views of media professionals in Egypt of the coverage of the 2016 US Presidential Election by satellite channels in Egypt and the Arab Region. It identifies and ranks these channels as a source of obtaining information about the elections, therefore identifying and determining the success of the identified satellite channels in providing comprehensive and object coverage of the elections. The study found agreement among the majority of those surveyed that Egyptian satellite channels focused mainly on the potential repercussions for Egypt and the Arab world should either candidate win. The study also noted that Arab satellite channels excelled at complying with performance standards and providing good analysis when compared to Egyptian channels, where the Egyptian channels require development in best practices for coverage of important events, particularly elections, for the future.

Reevaluating Runoffs in Latin America

Since the 1960s, the most common rule used for electing presidents worldwide has shifted from plurality (first-past-the-post) to majority runoff (a requirement for a second round between the top two candidates if no candidate wins 50 percent of the vote). Between 1990 and 2016 in Latin America, levels of democracy improved in most countries under runoff but plummeted in most countries under plurality. Runoff lowered barriers to entry for new parties. It also ensured that the president had majority support and enticed candidates toward the political center. While the concerns many scholars have expressed about the proliferation of political parties under runoff is not unwarranted, this issue can be mitigated through additional institutional innovations.

Bayesian sensitivity analysis for causal effects from $2\times2$ tables in the presence of unmeasured confounding with application to presidential campaign visits

Presidents often campaign on behalf of candidates during elections. Do these campaign visits increase the probability that the candidate will win? While one might attempt to answer this question by adjusting for observed covariates, such an approach is plagued by serious data limitations. In this paper we pursue a different approach. Namely, we ask: what, if anything, should one infer about the causal effect of a presidential campaign visit using a simple cross-tabulation of the data? We take a Bayesian approach to this problem and show that if one is willing to use substantive information to make some (possibly weak) assumptions about the nature of the unmeasured confounding, sharp posterior estimates of causal effects are easy to calculate. Using data from the 2002 midterm elections, we find that, under a reasonable set of assumptions, a presidential campaign visit on the behalf of congressional candidates helped those candidates win elections.

Critical noise can make the minority candidate win: The U.S. presidential election cases.

A national voting population, when segmented into groups such as, for example, different states, can yield a counterintuitive scenario in which the winner may not necessarily get the highest number of total votes. A recent example is the 2016 presidential election in the United States. We model the situation by using interacting opinion dynamics models, and we look at the effect of coarse graining near the critical points where the spatial fluctuations are high. We establish that the sole effect of coarse graining, which mimics the "winner take all" electoral college system in the United States, can give rise to finite probabilities of events in which a minority candidate wins even in the large size limit near the critical point. The overall probabilities of victory of the minority candidate can be predicted from the models, which indicate that one may expect more instances of minority candidate winning in the future.

Targeted campaign competition, loyal voters, and supermajorities

We consider campaign competition in which candidates compete for votes among a continuum of voters by engaging in persuasive efforts that are targetable. Each individual voter is persuaded by campaign effort and votes for the candidate who targets more persuasive effort to this voter. Each candidate chooses a level of total campaign effort and allocates his effort among the set of voters. We completely characterize equilibrium for the majoritarian objective game and compare that to the vote-share maximizing game. If the candidates are symmetric ex ante, both types of electoral competition dissipate the rents from office in expectation. However, the equilibria arising under the two electoral objectives qualitatively differ. In majoritarian elections, candidates randomize over their level of total campaign effort, which provides support for the puzzling phenomenon of the emergence of supermajorities in majoritarian systems. Vote-share maximization leads to an equilibrium in which both candidates make deterministic budget choices and reach a precise fifty–fifty split of vote shares. We also study how asymmetry between the candidates affects the equilibrium. If some share of the voters is loyal to one of the candidates, then both candidates expend the same expected efforts in equilibrium, but the advantaged candidate wins with higher probability for majoritarian voting or a higher share of voters for vote-share maximization.

Your voice in U.S. science policy

Did your preferred candidates win your local, state, and national elections? No matter who won, it’s always challenging to communicate with lawmakers about science-related legislation, actions, and policies we care about. In C&EN, American Chemical Society President Allison A. Campbell ( Jan. 2, page 33) and Immediate Past-President Donna J. Nelson ( Jan. 9, page 34) have emphasized the critical role the society and our members play in advocacy. In fact, through its 1937 national charter, ACS is expected to advise policy-makers on a range of issues. So how does ACS make itself heard in Washington, D.C., and how can you participate? As individual members, some of us speak directly with government officials and our own representatives. We also speak with a collective voice through ACS government affairs, previously in the Office of Public Affairs and recently merged into the External Affairs & Communications unit of the Office of the

Do CEOS Affect Employees' Political Choices

We analyze whether CEOs influence their employees’ political choices whether this influence has implications for firm value. We find that employees donate three times more money to CEO-supported political candidates than to other candidates. This relation also holds around CEO departures, including plausibly exogenous departures due to retirement or death. Equity returns are significantly higher when CEO-supported candidates win elections than when employee-supported candidates win. Further, CEO influence is strongest in firms with the largest potential benefits from political participation and firms that explicitly advocate for political candidates. Our results suggest that CEOs are a political force that benefits shareholders

Консерваторы о консерваторах

In this critical review of the issue of the almanac Essays on Conservatism (Institute of Socio-economic and Political Research, ISEPR), which offers a deep insight in the contemporary history of conservatism, the author analyzes the current state of conservatism as a political movement in the United States on the basis of the Essays devoted to this subject, and of the recent presidential elections in the USA. The author proceeds from the fact that, existing in a competitive political environment, conservatism faces challenges of a changing public demand for policies, due to both the socio-economic situation and changing demographic composition of the population. The author shows how radicalism increased in response to frustration of the society and analyzes the roots of the radical and powerful demand for right populism in the United States in general. For decades, democratic political regimes provided stability both in politics and economics: population of these counties profited from integration, globalization, “open economy”: therefore, dominant position of establishment – the political “center”, left- and center-right parties was accepted without doubt. However, the last decades changed this trend. American conservatism, on the one hand, found a new base of support that helped Republican candidates win in the elections; on the other hand, conservatism deepened the divisions and contradictions in American society, and thus came into a conflict with a number of other traditional settings of conservatism. The author concludes that after the presidential elections of 2016, American conservatism faces serious top-down redefinition.

Targeted Campaign Competition, Loyal Voters, and Supermajorities

We consider campaign competition in which candidates compete for votes among a continuum of voters by engaging in persuasive efforts that are targetable. Each individual voter is persuaded by campaign effort and votes for the candidate who targets more persuasive effort to this voter. Each candidate chooses a level of total campaign effort and allocates their effort among the set of voters. We completely characterize equilibrium for the majoritarian objective game and compare that to the vote-share maximizing game. If the candidates are symmetric ex ante, both types of electoral competition dissipate the rents from office in expectation. However, the equilibria arising under the two electoral objectives qualitatively differ. In majoritarian elections, candidates randomize over their level of total campaign effort, which provides support for the puzzling phenomenon of the emergence of supermajorities in majoritarian systems. Vote-share maximization leads to an equilibrium in which both candidates make deterministic budget choices and reach a precise fifty-fifty split of vote shares. We also study how asymmetry between the candidates affects the equilibrium. If some share of the voters is loyal to one of the candidates, then both candidates expend the same expected efforts in equilibrium, but the advantaged candidate wins with higher probability for majoritarian voting or a higher share of voters for vote-share maximization.

The Effects of Electoral Rules on Parliamentary Behavior

Do different types of preferential-list PR systems create different incentives for how Members of Parliament vote? To examine this, we compare the quasi-list system of Poland, where only preference votes determine which candidates win seats, to the flexible-list system in the Czech Republic, where the 5 percent preference vote threshold required to override the party ranking of candidates gives the party greater power in influencing which candidates become MPs. We analyze roll call votes in the 2007–2011 Sejm and the 2010–2013 Czech Chamber of Deputies and, after controlling for party and MP characteristics, we find that in both countries, MPs with lower preference vote shares are more likely to vote along with their party. But, when we compare the strength of this relationship, we observe substantial differences. The magnitude of this relationship in the Czech Republic is ten times stronger than in Poland, which can be attributed to the more prominent role Czech electoral rules give to the party.

Condorcet meets Ellsberg

The Condorcet Jury Theorem states that given subjective expected utility maximization and common values, the equilibrium probability that the correct candidate wins goes to one as the size of the electorate goes to infinity. This paper studies strategic voting when voters have pure common values but may be ambiguity averse -- exhibit Ellsberg-type behavior -- as modeled by maxmin expected utility preferences. It provides sufficient conditions so that the equilibrium probability of the correct candidate winning the election is bounded above by one half in at least one state. As a consequence, there is no equilibrium in which information aggregates.

Approval elections with a variable number of winners

Multi-winner elections, for example, the election of members to a committee, are now quite common, and include the interesting subclass of elections with a variable number of winners, or VNW elections. In VNW elections, voters determine how many winners there are, as well as which candidates win. Common VNW elections include elections to bestow honorary status, such as enshrinement in a hall of fame, and elections to determine a shortlist of, say, job candidates for interviews. Such elections are VNW elections whenever the number of winners is not specified in advance. Multi-winner elections are often conducted by adapting standard procedures for single-winner elections. Approval balloting is particularly appropriate for multi-winner elections, as every ballot, and the set of winners, are subsets of the set of all candidates. Many methods of counting approval ballots appropriate to VNW elections are reviewed and illustrated, and their properties—desirable and undesirable—discussed.

Party Control of Party Primaries: Party Influence in Nominations for the US Senate

Scholarship on primary election outcomes has largely ignored the ability of political parties to shape outcomes and influence the decisions of candidates to compete for the party’s nomination. Only recently have theories of parties as networks of policy demanders suggested that parties influence the candidate nomination process. Previous attempts to document party control of primaries, however, have only tested these theories on small or unrepresentative samples of primary races or have looked at general election results after the party’s nominee has already been selected. Using a simple and easily understood measure of party support, I show that candidates who are less connected to the party are less likely to win and also less likely to remain a candidate in the primary. I find that parties not only are effective in helping candidates win but also are influential in excluding certain electoral options from being presented to primary voters.

Aggregate Uncertainty in Runoff Elections

I develop a model of strategic entry by candidates for oce in runo↵ elections under aggregate uncertainty. I introduce aggregate uncertainty by making candidates unsure of the distribution of voter preferences in the electorate. The set of three candidate equilibria expands and equilibrium platforms become more diverse. These results provide a theoretical basis for Duverger’s Hypothesis, the claim that runo↵s encourage entry by more than two candidates. Three candidate equilibria also feature three common empirical phenomena that existing literature fails to generate. First, some candidates choose to enter despite losing with certainty in equilibrium. Second, in some equilibria, a Condorcet winning candidate fails to win the election, and a Condorcet losing candidate wins with positive probability. Finally, some candidates who reach the second round may receive fewer votes than they receive in the first round.

Does party support help candidates win?

The parties’ congressional campaign committees have made it their business to strategically provide contributions to candidate campaigns in order to help their candidates win. However, the effectiveness of these contributions in terms of increasing the competitiveness of party-sponsored candidates remains untested. Using contribution data from the U.S. Federal Election Commission in a series of mixed effects models as well as a matching analysis, the receipt of direct party contributions and coordinated support is shown to significantly improve the competitive position of challengers but not open seat candidates in races for the House. Further, independent expenditures by the parties do not significantly increase candidates’ competitiveness. The implications of these results for future party strategies are explored.

Why Voters May Have Failed to Reward Proximate Candidates in the 2012 Top Two Primary

An experiment conducted by the authors (2014) found that the top-two primary first used in California in June 2012 failed to achieve its sponsors’ goal of helping ideologically moderate candidates win. This paper explores why. A primary reason is that voters are largely ignorant about the ideological orientation of candidates, including the moderates they would choose if proximity voting prevailed. We document this in congressional races, focusing on competitive contests with viable moderate candidates. Our results have a straightforward implication: for the top-two primary to mitigate polarization, moderate congressional candidates would have to inform voters about their moderation to a far greater degree.

Does a Least-Preferred Candidate Win a Seat? A Comparison of Three Electoral Systems

In this paper, the differences between two variations of proportional representation (PR), open-list PR and closed-list PR, are analyzed in terms of their ability to accurately reflect voter preference. The single nontransferable vote (SNTV) is also included in the comparison as a benchmark. We construct a model of voting equilibria with a candidate who is least preferred by voters in the sense that replacing the least-preferred candidate in the set of winners with any loser is Pareto improving, and our focus is on whether the least-preferred candidate wins under each electoral system. We demonstrate that the least-preferred candidate never wins under the SNTV, but can win under open-list PR, although this is less likely than winning under closed-list PR.

Campaign promises as an imperfect signal: How does an extreme candidate win against a moderate candidate?

This study develops a political competition model in which campaign platforms are partially binding. A candidate who implements a policy that differs from his/her platform must pay a cost of betrayal, which increases with the size of the discrepancy. I also assume that voters are uncertain about candidates’ policy preferences. If voters believe that a candidate is likely to be extreme, there exists a semi-separating equilibrium: an extreme candidate imitates a moderate candidate, with some probability, and approaches the median policy with the remaining probability. Although an extreme candidate will implement a more extreme policy than a moderate candidate, regardless of imitation or approach, partial pooling ensures that voters prefer an extreme candidate who does not pretend to be moderate over an uncertain candidate who announces an extreme platform. As a result, a moderate candidate never has a higher probability of winning than an extreme candidate.

Condorcet Completion Methods that Inhibit Manipulation through Exploiting Knowledge of Electorate Preferences

This paper attacks a problem like the one addressed in an earlier work (Potthoff, 2013) but is more mathematical. The setting is one where an election is to choose a single winner from m (> 2) candidates, it is postulated that voters have knowledge of the preference profile of the electorate, and preference cycles are limited. Both papers devise voting systems whose two key goals are to select a Condorcet winner (if one exists) and to resist manipulation. These systems entail equilibrium strategies where everyone votes sincerely, no group of voters sharing the same preference ordering can gain by deviating given that no one else deviates, and the Condorcet candidate wins. The present paper uses two unusual ballot types. One asks voters to rank the candidates with respect both to their own preferences and to their discerned order of preference of the entire electorate. The other just asks voters for their own preference ranks plus approval votes. Novel mathematical elements distinguish this paper. Its Condorcet completion methods examine all candidate triples, sometimes analyze loop(s) of some of those triples, and order candidates in a set by first determining the last-place candidate. Its non-manipulability proofs involve mathematical induction on m.

Campaign Promises as an Imperfect Signal: How Does an Extreme Candidate Win against a Moderate One?

This study develops a political competition model in which campaign platforms are partially binding. A candidate who implements a policy that differs from his/her platform must pay a cost of betrayal, which increases with the size of the discrepancy. I also assume that voters are uncertain about candidates' policy preferences. If voters believe that a candidate is likely to be extreme, there exists a semi-separating equilibrium: an extreme candidate imitates a moderate candidate, with some probability, and approaches the median policy with the remaining probability. Although an extreme candidate will implement a more extreme policy than will a moderate candidate, regardless of imitation or approach, partial pooling ensures that voters prefer an extreme candidate who does not pretend to be moderate over an uncertain candidate who announces an extreme platform. As a result, a moderate candidate never has a higher probability of winning than does an extreme candidate.