Educated Voters Research Articles

Does Immigration Affect Demand for Redistribution? – An Experimental Design

Abstract Does increasing immigration lower the electorate’s demand for welfare state benefits? Results from a novel experiment suggest that such a shift in demand is unlikely to occur in the overall population. However, high income individuals lower their demand for redistribution when primed with information on immigration as they pay a large share of overall taxes. Taste effects, where voters do not desire transfer payments to ethnically different groups, seem to play a minor role. Low education individuals, on the other hand, demand more redistribution when primed. Immigration and demand for welfare are not correlated on average. However, if political systems are more responsive to highly educated voters, increased levels of immigration may lead to less redistribution.

Revisiting the Islamist–Secular divide: Parties and voters in the Arab world

Electoral politics in the Arab world are either portrayed as clientelistic affairs void of content or as highly ideological clashes between Islamist and Secular Left forces. Although both arguments are intuitively appealing, the empirical evidence to date is limited. This article seeks to contribute to the debate by investigating the extent of programmatic voter support for Islamist and Secular Left parties in seven Arab countries with data from recent surveys by the Arab Barometer, Afrobarometer and World Values Survey. Ideological congruence between voters and parties exists but is limited to the Islamist–Secular core divide with regard to the role of religion in politics and gender values. In contrast, there are virtually no differences in economic attitudes between respondents and there is no evidence of class-based voting, with Islamist and Secular Left parties sharing the same voter base of better-off, more educated voters. Core results are robust across surveys.

Brexit and Labour Migration in the United Kingdom: Transition of a Model Country into a Bulwark?

In the course of the EU’s Eastern enlargement, the United Kingdom was one of the few EU 15 countries which took advantage of the opportunities provided by the freedom of movement for workers from the beginning. Since then, the United Kingdom is prospering and still relies heavily on migrant workers. As the empirical analysis shows, labour migration from the accession countries was not a determining factor in the outcome of the Brexit vote. It was rather the less educated voters who perceive a threat to their social status and their national identity as the EU’s grows. As a result, a policy discussion on varying EU policies is advisable.

A Content Analysis of YouTube Political Advertisements: Evidence from Indian Parliamentary Elections

YouTube, a popular video-sharing platform, is being used by political parties to influence voter behavior. The present exploratory study analyses the use of YouTube as a promotional tool during the Indian Parliamentary Elections 2014—the first social media based elections in India. This study examines 92 advertisements of Indian National Congress (INC) and 55 advertisements of Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) on YouTube for the following parameters: general characteristics of each video, types of message appeal used and the dominant content of the advertisements. The findings revealed that INC emphasized more on the identity of their party while BJP stressed on their candidate. Furthermore, the YouTube advertisements were dominated by positive campaigning. The parties appealed to the voters through logic and strongly addressed various national and developmental issues. Both the parties strategically expressed the optimistic future of the country under the dynamic leadership of their respective prime ministerial candidates. The findings of the study have important implications for political parties, political marketers and lawmakers as social media has occupied a significant place among young and educated voters and acts as a stimulant to voter engagement. The article adds value to the existing studies of political advertising and communication literature by theoretically adhering to Kaid and Johnston’s (2001) concept of ‘videostyle’, integrating the functional theory of political discourse, and appending the visual culture concept to political domain.

Voting as a Signal of Education

Since the chance of swaying the outcome of an election by voting is usually very small, it cannot be that voters vote solely for that purpose. So why do we vote? One explanation is that smarter or more educated voters have access to better information about the candidates, and are concerned with appearing to have better information about the candidates through their choice of whether to vote or not. If voting behavior is publicly observed then more educated voters may vote to signal their education, even if the election itself is inconsequential and the cost of voting is the same across voters. I explore this explanation with a model of voting where players are unsure about the importance of swaying the election and high type players receive more precise signals. I introduce a new information ordering, a weakening of Blackwell’s order, to formalize the notion of information precision. Once voting has occurred, players visit a labor market and are paid the expected value of their type, conditioning only on their voting behavior. I find that in very large games, voter turnout and the signaling return to voting remains high even though the chance of swaying the election disappears and the cost of voting is the same for all types. I explore generalizations of this model, and close by comparing the stylized features of voter turnout to the features of the model.

Inequality in Party-voter Opinion Congruence: A Matter of Choices Made or Choices Given?

Studies on the agreement, or congruence, between voters and parties have often found more congruence between higher educated voters and the parties for which they vote than between lower educated voters and their party selections. The literature offers two explanations for this finding. The first argues that lower educated voters vote ‘incorrectly’, selecting less congruent parties at the ballot box, despite the presence of a better alternative. The second posits that they lack policy offers for which to vote. This paper seeks to detangle these two explanations. Based on a dataset containing the positions of Belgian voters and parties on 23 policy statements, we find that inequality in opinion congruence is primarily the result of incorrect voting by lower educated voters. However, given Belgium’s political system—which increase the likelihood of policy offers attuned to lower educated voters, the education bias in parties’ policy offers is surprisingly high.

Another Dog that didn’t Bark? Less Dealignment and more Partisanship in the 2013 Bundestag Election

Using new data for the 1977–2012 period, this article shows that dealignment has halted during the last decade amongst older and better educated West German voters, and that party identification is now more widespread than it was in the 1990s in the east. For voters who identified with one of the relevant parties at the time of the 2013 election, their vote choice was more or less a foregone conclusion, as candidates and issues played only a minor role for this group. A detailed analysis of leftist voters shows that supporters of the Greens, the Left, and the SPD have broadly similar preferences but diverging partisan identities. Even amongst western voters of the Left, most respondents claim to be identifiers. This suggests that the fragmentation of the left is entrenched, and that ‘agenda’ policies have triggered a realignment.

The decline of a dominant political monolith: understanding Fianna Fáil’s vote 1987–2016

ABSTRACTOur study explores the declining vote of Fianna Fáil, Ireland’s dominant party using a unique fusion of data from the 1989–1999 European Election Studies and the 2002–2016 Irish National Election Studies. We show the weakening of Fianna Fáil’s dominant position is due to electoral change: shifting voter identities and the growing importance of economic evaluations in deciding the vote, which became prominent in the 2000s. Today, there are fewer partisans in general and this has impacted the party, especially since the Global Financial Crisis, when the proportion of Fianna Fáil identifiers dropped substantially. Meanwhile, the party relies on the votes of the oldest generation, a declining slice of the electorate. Further, more highly educated voters have become less likely to vote for the party in the 2000s, meaning Fianna Fáil is drawing significantly less support from a growing segment of the electorate. Finally, the Fianna Fáil vote in the 2000s has been shaped by voters’ economic perceptions, whereas these mattered little before this. Although this benefitted it in 2002 and 2007, it cost the party significant support in 2011. Our findings have implications for why dominant parties are declining and for our understanding of the Irish party system.

What creates heterogeneity in ballot order effects? Evidence from Korea's local elections of education superintendent

This paper explores the gains in vote shares accrued to an election candidate listed first on a ballot and examines how the gains vary with characteristics of elections and voters. Korea's election of education superintendent and its rule determining the name order of candidates provide a rare natural experiment to study ballot order effects. This paper proposes an empirical framework that addresses the aggregation problem that is prevalent in the related literature. According to the results, being listed first gives a positive premium for a majority of candidates and the gains are notable for less educated voters and in elections without an incumbent or strong candidate. This paper has also showed that different ballot order would have changed winners in some elections.

Predicting vote choice for celebrity and political dynasty candidates in Philippine national elections

AbstractMedia celebrities and political dynasts dominate Philippine electoral politics, but little individual-level research has been done to understand who votes for them. This article studies three senatorial election cycles, and based on the theoretical argument that name recall plays a major role in vote choice in these elections, hypotheses are posed regarding associations with education, wealth status, media exposure, trust of the electoral process, and abstention rates. Tests indicate that wealthier voters and more educated ones are less likely to vote for media celebrities, and more highly educated voters are more likely to vote for dynastic candidates. No associations were found with media exposure and trust in elections. Abstention rates are highly associated with voting for media celebrity and dynastic candidates. Implications on the future of Philippine electoral politics are discussed.

Narrowing the Knowledge Gap

Using a national survey of citizens during Singapore’s general election, this study finds that alternative online media filled information gaps and narrowed the knowledge gap between social status groups. Contrary to the original knowledge gap hypothesis, lower educated voters gained knowledge more rapidly from increased alternative media use than more highly educated voters. This indicates that the press system itself influences the knowledge gap. In authoritarian press systems, where mainstream news is regulated and framed to promote ruling party’s elite perspectives, alternative online information produced from the ground up embodies greater relevance and authenticity, facilitating greater knowledge gain among lower educated voters.

Telecracy: Testing for Channels of Persuasion

We consider the long-lived slant towards Berlusconi in political information on Italian television (TV ). We exploit a shock to the slanted exposure of viewers: idiosyncratic deadlines to switch to digital TV from 2008 to 2012, which increased the number of freeview channels tenfold. The switch caused a drop in the vote share of Berlusconi's coalition by between 5.5 and 7.5 percentage points. The effect was stronger in towns with older and less educated voters. At least 20 percent of digital users changed their voting behavior after the introduction of digital TV. Our evidence is consistent with the existence of persuasion-biased viewers. (JEL D72, D83, L82, L88)

ATTRIBUTION ERROR IN ECONOMIC VOTING: EVIDENCE FROM TRADE SHOCKS

This article exploits the international transmission of business cycles to examine the prevalence of attribution error in economic voting in a large panel of countries from 1990 to 2009. We find that voters, on average, exhibit a strong tendency to oust the incumbent governments during an economic downturn, regardless of whether the recession is home‐grown or merely imported from trading partners. However, we find important heterogeneity in the extent of attribution error. A split sample analysis shows that countries with more experienced voters, more educated voters, and possibly more informed voters—all conditions that have been shown to mitigate other voter agency problems—do better in distinguishing imported from domestic growth. (JEL E3, E6)

Household Demand for Low Carbon Policies: Evidence from California

AbstractIn recent years, Californians have voted on two key pieces of low carbon regulation. One introduces a carbon cap-and-trade market and the other creates a plan to build a high-speed rail system connecting the state’s major cities. This provides an opportunity to examine the demand for carbon mitigation efforts. Household voting patterns are found to mirror the voting patterns by the US Congress on national carbon legislation. Political liberals and more educated voters favor such regulations while suburbanites tend to oppose such initiatives. By pricing carbon, suburban land becomes less valuable. We find that homeowner communities in suburban areas are more likely to vote against such regulation, while homeowners in the center city area are more likely to favor carbon pricing. Homeowner communities close to high-speed rail stops are also more likely to support this legislation.

Is Aliran Still Available? A Study on the Relationship between Party Support and Socioeconomic Backgrounds in Indonesia

By using multinomial logistic regression, this study tries to identify the socio-economic factors and cleavages which affect political preference of Indonesian electorates. It focuses on the largest four parties i.e. Democratic Party (Partai Demokrat, PD), Indonesian Democratic Party - Struggle (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia – Perjuangan, PDI-P), Golkar Party (Partai Golkar, Golkar), and Prosperous Justice Party (Partai Keadilan Sejahtera, PKS). Based on the statistical results, I argue for two points. First, I find that although the religious cleavage or aliran still exists in Indonesian party politics, contrary to conventional wisdom, aliran does not function as differentiating Islamic parties from secular parties. Instead, it divides between the secular parties. This finding implies that existing party classifications assuming an ideological difference between secular and Islamic parties should be reconsidered or adjusted. Second, whereas the religious cleavage has weakened, socioeconomic factors such as age, region, ethnicity, and the level of education have had a significant influence. In particular, the exclusive support of the highly educated voters for the PKS provides an implication on the relation between the emergence of the middle class and the moderate Islamic party.

The Valence Advantage of Presidential Persuasion: Do Presidential Candidates Use Oratory to Persuade Citizens to Vote Contrary to Ideological Preferences?

Can voters be persuaded to support a candidate based on a candidate's communication skills instead of a candidate's issue positions? Combining theoretical insights on voter decision-making drawn from valence theories of candidate-position taking with insights from theories of rhetoric and persuasion, we argue that candidate rhetoric can sway voters to a candidate's side. We examine the sophistication and style of candidate speech in U.S. presidential elections from 1976-2004 using Flesch-Kincaid grade-level measures and Diction measures of presidential speech. We find that more sophisticated campaign speech by a candidate results in a higher likelihood that a citizen will vote for that candidate, though this effect of linguistic sophistication is conditioned by voter cognition. The most highly educated voters are most likely to use the non-policy dimension of complex rhetoric in casting their vote. This finding runs contrary to the conventional wisdom that higher educated voters - because of their cognitive abilities - would be most likely to vote 'rationally' based primarily on issue preferences. We also find that candidates who present themselves using language that draws on themes of commonality, activity, and realism are more likely to win a citizen's vote in the election. These results suggest that rhetoric matters: it can sway voters, but it also suggests that soaring and powerful rhetoric can be offset when the voter perceives high ideological congruence with the rhetorically-disadvantaged candidate.

Turkey's bid for EU membership, contrasting views of public opinion, and vote choice. Evidence from the 2005 German federal election

This paper examines the effects of attitudes toward Turkey's entry into the European Union on vote choice in the 2005 federal election in Germany. Building on prior research, the paper contrasts the elitist and the policy voting view. The evidence shows that citizens' opinions about Turkey's accession to the European Union do not merely reflect group-memberships and political predispositions. They also play a role in influencing voting behaviour with support of Turkey's entry raising the likelihood to vote for the SPD or the Greens while reducing the probability to cast a vote for right-wing parties, the CDU/CSU and the FDP. Finally, low educated voters are disproportionately susceptible to rely on their attitudes toward enlarging the European Union to contain Turkey. In sum, the evidence contradicts the elitist view and lends support the policy voting view implying that there is an electoral incentive for political elites to respond to public opinion on the Turkey issue.

Who Evaluates a Presidential Candidate by Using Non-Policy Campaign Messages?

This article tests the hypothesis that low-education voters are more likely to evaluate a candidate using personalistic or non-policy campaign messages than are more educated voters. The Latino electorate in the U.S. presents an ideal case study, given that both Presidential candidates in the 2000 election directed personalistic campaign messages toward them. Latinos with low-levels of education should be the most likely to evaluate a candidate using personalistic campaign cues since processing and understanding these messages require little in stored political information. Analysis of self-reported responses from the Latino Voter Survey of 2000 indicates that low-education Latinos are more likely than are high-education Latinos to use non-policy cues when evaluating a candidate. This finding implies that vote choice is structured differently for Latinos with varying levels of education. To test this implication and to confirm the finding from the self-reported responses, I estimate a model of Latino vote choice for the 2000 Presidential election. Probit analysis shows that high-education Latinos are indeed more likely to use factors that are informationally demanding, such as candidates’ issue positions and ideology than are low-education Latinos.

Buying a Lottery Ticket to Help the Poor

A core problem of rational-actor models for politics is the seeming irrationality of voting, namely, that it is irrational for voters to vote and to be informed about politics. A simple cost-benefit analysis indicates that the probability of one's vote being decisive is so small that the costs of voting exceed the benefits. Some authors propose that civic duty or expressive voting explain why individuals vote. However, these explanations are not completely satisfactory. Five facts characterize American voting behavior: (1) the costs of voting, e.g. registration, etc. affect the probability of voting; (2) turnout varies substantially according to the type of election. In the United States, turnout for presidential elections is about 50%; for off-year elections it is about 35%; and for state and local elections it is about 25%; (3) more educated voters have a higher probability of voting; (4) individuals have a tendency to abstain from voting for races appearing lower on the ballot (the roll-off phenomenon); and (5) voters often vote strategically when their most preferred candidate has no chance of winning. Neither civic duty nor expressive voting can explain all five of these facts of voting. I argue that any successful analysis of voting must not only explain the positive turnout in elections, but also these five facts of voting. I expand the basic voting calculus model by incorporating both a pure altruistic motive and a more extensive incomplete-information component. The incorporation into the standard rational-actor model of voting of a low-grade sense of altruism is essential. The resulting analysis allows me to explain the five facts of American voting behavior.

Political support for reforms: Economics of voting in transition countries

I analyze the relationship between economics and politics across eight parliamentary elections in four transition countries, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. I argue that support for reform reflects the balance between positive and negative effects of the reform. Accordingly, I identify economic groups that support or oppose the reform. The former are private entrepreneurs, white collar workers and university educated voters. The latter are the unemployed, retirees, and blue collar and agricultural workers. This general pattern holds both within countries and across countries, and across tenures of different governments. In contrast with the responsibility hypothesis, voters in the transition countries are found to be forward looking, not retrospective.