Elections Project Research Articles

Nonresponse in name generators across countries and survey modes

Past research indicates interviewer effects lead to an underestimation of network size and higher nonresponse to the “important matters” name generator. Self-administered surveys offer a potential solution, but evidence is mixed and context-specific. We employ a logistic multilevel regression, estimated using a Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach, to analyze nonresponse to this name generator from 33 post-electoral surveys across 21 countries in the Comparative National Election Project. We find higher nonresponse in interviewer-administered surveys compared to self-administered surveys, particularly among specific demographic groups. Finally, we discuss the trade-offs in selecting survey modes for collecting ego-network data using this instrument.

Divining Elections: Religious Citizens’ Political Projections and Electoral Turnout in Israel and France

Abstract How do religious citizens’ election projections influence voter turnout? While previous studies have demonstrated the significant impact of religious orientation on individuals’ general future outlook, little is known about the influence of religion on voters’ electoral expectations and how these expectations affect voter turnout. In this paper, we employ a nuanced conceptual framework of election projections and examine the impact of religion on both the affective and probabilistic aspects of citizens’ expectations regarding election outcomes. Our analysis draws upon original panel survey data collected in two countries, focusing on the 2021 Israeli general elections and the 2022 French presidential elections. The findings reveal a mobilizing effect of religious citizens’ election projections in both Israel and France. Specifically, religious voters tend to have more positive affective forecasts about their projected election outcomes, consequently resulting in increased voter turnout. While affective forecasting plays a significant role in religious citizens’ turnout, probabilistic certitude does not have a similar effect. We discuss the contribution and implications of these findings for research on religion and political behavior.

Fairness beyond the ballot: A comparative analysis of failures of electoral integrity, perceptions of electoral fairness, and attitudes towards democracy across 18 countries

Trust in the integrity of the electoral process is essential for a functioning democracy. However, doubts about the legitimacy of electoral processes have increased in established and emerging democracies. We analyzed electoral integrity perceptions and related variables across 26 elections and 18 countries using post-election surveys conducted between 2004 and 2021 as part of the Comparative National Elections Project. We found that citizens' experiences of electoral integrity failures, such as bribery and intimidation, are crucial in shaping their perceptions of electoral integrity. Additionally, we found that autonomous electoral offices have little effect on citizens’ perceptions of integrity and freedom in the electoral process. Finally, electoral integrity perceptions significantly impact attitudes towards democracy. Our results emphasize the importance of well-functioning electoral processes and institutions in upholding the legitimacy of democracies.

“You’d be Right to Indulge Some Skepticism”: Trust-building Strategies in Future-oriented News Discourse

ABSTRACT This paper explores trust-building strategies in future-oriented news discourse, marked by a high degree of uncertainty. While current research mainly focuses on audiences’ perceptions of news credibility, this study addresses news trust from a production standpoint. We examine the trust-building efforts of media actors, focusing on their discursive labor within the context of election projections. Drawing on rich data from five election rounds in Israel and the US, we qualitatively analyzed 400 news texts and 400 tweets that were produced by 20 US and 20 Israeli media actors. This textual analysis was supplemented by 10 in-depth interviews with Israeli journalists. Our findings demonstrate three types of journalistic trust-building rhetoric in election coverage: facticity, authority, and transparency. These strategies result in a two-fold form of trust, which re-affirms traditional notions of accuracy and validity, while also challenging the ability of newspersons to obtain them in contemporary political and media cultures. Overall, these strategies hold unique opportunities and challenges for sustaining public trust in journalism and illuminate the complex communicative labor involved in building trust with news audiences. Our findings also highlight the importance of studying trust not only in relation to the past and the present, but also in future-oriented discourse.

Failure to launch? The lack of populist attitudinal activation in the 2019 South African elections

ABSTRACTDo South Africans hold strong populist attitudes? If so, who is the ‘populist citizen’ and have these attitudes been activated in the electoral arena? In this article, we make use of 2019 Comparative National Elections Project (CNEP) data to answer these questions. We find that populist attitudes tend to vary across levels of education, geographic location and racial groups. Given the constant supply of populist rhetoric from the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), we expected this party to marshal electoral support from citizens holding the strongest populist attitudes. However, we contend that the party's racialised populism and radicalism ultimately handicapped it at the ballot box. The EFF ultimately suffered from citizens’ mistrust, its lack of credibility and savvy political moves by the ANC ahead of the election.

Stakeholder views on the design of National Health Service perinatal mental health services: 360-degree survey.

At the start of a new community perinatal mental health service in Scotland we sought the opinions and aspirations of professional and lay stakeholders. A student elective project supported the creation of an anonymous 360-degree online survey of a variety of staff and people with lived experience of suffering from or managing perinatal mental health problems. The survey was designed and piloted with trainees and volunteer patients. A rich variety of opinions was gathered from the 60 responses, which came from a reasonably representative sample. Respondents provided specific answers to key questions and wrote free-text recommendations and concerns to inform service development. There is clear demand for the new expanded service, with strong support for provision of a mother and baby unit in the North of Scotland. The digital survey method could be adapted to generate future surveys to review satisfaction with service development and generate ideas for further change.

Demographic and Systematic Factors Affecting Student Voter Turnout: An Empirical Study For Africa’s Largest Distance Higher Education Institution

Public HEI’s in South Africa conducts the Student Representative Council elections yearly, however, there is a paucity of studies to determine factors that affect voter turnout. This descriptive quantitative study conducted an empirical analysis of factors influencing student’s voter participation at Africa’s largest Open Distance eLearning (ODeL) institution. An electronic survey instrument was distributed amongst the sampled students and yielded a final response count of 6 851. A joint descriptive statistical analyses and a binary logistic regression model were applied to analyse data. Regression analysis revealed that there was a significant relationship between students having encountered one or more of marketing initiatives employed in the election project and voter participation. This positions marketing as a significant predictor of student voting given that respondents who encountered the SRC election marketing initiatives were seven times more likely to vote, as shown by the Odds Ratio of [OR=7.9 (95% CI:6.6-9.3), p=0.001]. The second-highest predictor of voting in this study was the closing date impact; students respondents who indicated that the voting period was long enough were two times more likely to vote compared to those who did not believe it was long enough [OR=2.2 (95% CI: 1.9-2.7), p-value <0.001]. Other significant predictors of SRC voting include gender, employment status and qualification level.Wherease study reveals a fair balance between the influence of demographic and systematic factors on SRC electoral process; institutions need to pay close attentention to systematic factors as they have great potential to constrain voter participation.

HPB P25 Incidence of pancreatitis induced vascular complications in a tertiary care hospital

Abstract Background Pancreatitis (AP) is a common cause of hospital admission, which can lead to vascular complications such as splanchnic venous thrombosis (SpVT), pseudoaneurysm and haemorhage. These complications can happen with both acute and chronic pancreatitis and can be associated with high morbidity and mortality. The aim of this study was to assess incidence of vascular complications in acute pancreatitis patients in a tertiary care hospital. Secondary aims included describing patient demographics, length of hospital stay, critical care admission, mortality, and assess the association between SpVT and pancreatic necrosis and mortality. Methods This study was done as part of year five elective project in University of Aberdeen Medical School. A retrospective study of acute pancreatitis patients who stayed in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary (ARI) or Dr. Gray's Hospital for ≥2 weeks and cases of mortality from acute pancreatitis irrespective of hospital stay between January 2018 to December 2019. Cases were identified from Health intelligence central data as per local governance protocol. Hospital electronic system (TrackCare) was used to review the clinical and radiological details and data was entered in SPSS software version 27 for analysis. Frequencies and percentages were shown for the categorical data and chi square test was used to compare the variables. A p value less than 0.05 was taken as statistically significant. Results Total 293 patients were admitted with acute pancreatitis during the study period. 52 patients met the inclusion criteria for our study. Of the 52 patients, 50 patients had a CT scan. There were 12 patients (24%) with evidence of vascular complications. 22% of patients had SVT and pseudoaneurysm was seen in 2% of cases. There was no case of haemorrhage. The overall mortality from AP during the study period was 6.5%. There was no statistically significant association between SVT and pancreatic necrosis or mortality. Conclusions Splanchnic venous thrombosis was a more frequent complication compared to pseudoaneurysm and haemorrhage in AP. There was no association between SVT and necrosis or mortality.

WhatsApp, Polarization, and Non-Conventional Political Participation: Chile and Colombia Before the Social Outbursts of 2019

Chile and Colombia are two South American countries with political and economic similarities that, during 2019, faced strong social outbursts, which translated into massive street protests and the weakening of their governments. Using data collected in the period immediately prior to the start of this social unrest, this study seeks to establish the role played by strong-tied social media—which are generally homogeneous, formed by close people, and with a high potential for influencing their members—in three phenomena associated with political conflict: (a) perceived political polarization, (b) affective polarization, and (c) non-conventional political participation. To estimate this influence, information collected through surveys in Chile in 2017 and Colombia in 2018 was used within the framework of the Comparative National Elections project. In both countries, probabilistic samples were employed to do face-to-face interviews with samples of over 1,100 people. In both countries, the results show that the use of social media with strong ties, specifically WhatsApp, tends to be related to two of the studied phenomena: perceived political polarization and non-conventional participation. An interaction is also observed between WhatsApp use and political ideology that amplifies the degree of perceived political polarization, affective polarization, and participation in one or both of the countries studied. We conclude by arguing that this dual phenomenon of polarization and participation can be problematic for democracy, since polarized groups (or groups that have the perception that there is ideological polarization in the political elite) tend to consider the position of the rest of the citizens to be illegitimate, thus undermining collective problem-solving.

Motivated reasoning: Election integrity beliefs, outcome acceptance, and polarization before, during, and after the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.

The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election required voters to not only form opinions of leading candidates, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but also to make judgments about the integrity of the election itself and what—if anything—to do about it. However, partisan motivated reasoning theory (Leeper and Slothuus, Political Psychology, 35(Suppl 1): 129–156; Lodge and Taber, The rationalizing voter, Cambridge University Press, 2013) suggests judgments are often strongly influenced toward affectively desirable conclusions. Before, during, and after election projections were announced, partisan supporters of Trump and Biden rated: judgments about voter fraud and foreign interference, their acceptance of the results, and their support for recourse against the outcome (e.g., legal challenges, legislative overhauls, violence). Before the election, partisans were mildly concerned about election integrity but willing to accept the outcome without recourse. However, during vote counting, and especially after Biden was projected to be the winner, partisans dramatically changed their judgments in opposite directions, consistent with the affectively desirable conclusions relevant to each group. Biden supporters affirmed the election’s integrity and accepted the results whereas Trump supporters disputed the integrity, rejected the results, and began to support recourse against the outcome. Data are consistent with partisan motivated reasoning. Discussion highlights the practical implications.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11031-022-09983-w.

Ideological extremism, perceived party system polarization, and support for democracy

AbstractDoes ideological polarization undermine or strengthen people’s principled support for democracy? In this study, we suggest that different manifestations of ideological polarization have different implications in this respect. Using data from 11 surveys conducted with representative samples of the adult populations of a group of liberal democratic countries, part of the Comparative National Elections Project, we look at how people’s level of ideological extremism and their perceptions of ideological polarization in their countries’ party systems are related with their support for democracy. We show that citizens who hold more extreme ideological positions are indeed less supportive of democracy and that such a negative relationship is strengthened as citizens’ extremism increases. However, we also show that the citizens who display higher levels of principled support for democracy are those who perceive parties to be neither too distant nor too close to each other in ideological terms. In other words, while a very polarized partisan supply seems to undermine popular commitment with democracy, very low polarization may have similar consequences.

What Drives Religious Politicking? An Analysis of 24 Democratic Elections

AbstractWhy do clergy talk with congregants about elections to a greater extent in Mozambique than Indonesia, or in the United States than Taiwan? Arguing that context shapes religious actors' micro-level incentives to discuss or avoid electoral politics, we seek to explain variation in religious politicking—religious leaders' and organizations' engagement in electoral campaigns. Our framework integrates individual-level and country-level approaches, as well as theories of modernization, secularism, and religious competition. Drawing on survey data from 24 elections in 18 democracies in the Comparative National Elections Project, we find that human development depresses religious politicking, while secularism and religious pluralism boost it. However, “civilizational” differences in levels of religious politicking are muted and inconsistent. Finally, at the individual level, across the globe, citizens with higher levels of education are consistently more likely to receive political messages. Our results suggest the insights obtained from an approach emphasizing individuals embedded in contexts.

Perspectives on Research Internships for Medical Students and Young Doctors in Ghana: An Opportunity to Replenish the Stock of Physician Investigators?

The corona virus pandemic undoubtedly demonstrates the growing need for research in medical science. However, with the decline in physician scientists world-wide, innovative ways are needed to engender interest in research among medical students and young doctors to replenish the stock of physician investigators. One way of doing this is to create compulsory and elective projects for them. We describe research internships created for medical students at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research to expose them to the rudiments of biomedical research and proposal development. We also describe research internships for doctors waiting for house job postings or keen to do research who needed mentorship. Though the response has been positive, the full impact will be realized with time. The recognition that training should be backed with a supportive environment, mentorship and clear career paths for physician scientists is also mentioned.

Volunteering ethically - tips for selecting an elective project abroad

Volunteering ethically - tips for selecting an elective project abroad

Comparative Corrective Action: Perceived Media Bias and Political Action in 17 Countries

AbstractThe corrective action hypothesis predicts that people will take political action in response to media content they perceive to be biased against them, and evidence has accumulated in favor of it. However, research has not yet investigated the hypothesis in comparative context. This study fills that gap in the literature, relying on the Comparative National Election Project (N = 23,527), and analyzing data from 17 countries. Results show evidence of an overall positive relationship between perceived media bias and political action, and they also show evidence that this relationship varies in strength between countries. Moreover, press freedom partially explains this variation. Results are discussed in light of the theory of corrective action and recent trends in political participation worldwide.

Las elecciones parlamentarias chilenas de 2017: características de los votantes y factores de voto

Este trabajo explora las razones de voto a coaliciones en las elecciones parlamentarias celebradas en Chile en noviembre de 2017. Para ello, hemos empleado la encuesta postelectoral realizada por la Universidad Diego Portales (UDP) y que forma parte del Comparative National Elections Project (CNEP). Tras un repaso del contexto en el que las elecciones tuvieron lugar, hemos analizado los perfiles de los votantes de Chile Vamos (CV), Fuerza de la Mayoría (FM) y Frente Amplio (FA), así como de los abstencionistas, y hemos estimado un modelo multinomial, para comprobar el efecto de distintas variables en las probabilidades de voto a cada coalición.

Gender and geography in the Netherlands: from separation to integration

This article reports on the development of feminist geography in the Netherlands in the past forty years. In response to critical feminist students, feminist geography originally developed in a strategy of separation with the appointment of university lecturers specialized in ‘women’s studies’, the introduction of elective courses and research projects, and the creation of national networks. Gender is currently more and more integrated in core geography teaching and mainstream geographical research and separate networks are dissolved. Although feminist geographers in the Netherlands are successful in teaching, publishing and acquisition of research funding, gender issues and perspectives are still not firmly rooted in geography curricula and research programs. Integration is highly dependent on the feminist commitment of individual lecturers and researchers and gender perspectives are at risk of marginalisation or disappearance. Feminist geographers in the Netherlands must still be vigilant to preserve the achievements of forty years of Dutch feminist geography.

Social Networks, Predispositions and Split-Ticket Voting: The Case of the 1990 German Unification Election

When casting a split-ticket ballot, voters in established democracies have strong political predispositions and electoral experience that influence their decision. However, voters in a new democracy, lacking long-term party attachment and experience with democracy, may instead be informed and motivated by their social networks. Using the 1990 Cross-National Election Project German Unification study, I examine which factors predict split-ticket voting for East and West Germans. I find that political disagreement within a social network is more influential for East Germans, while partisan predispositions, particularly party supporter type, play a greater role for West Germans. These findings indicate that, in absence of competition between long-term partisanship and democratic experience, network characteristics may have a profound impact on political decision-making.

Intellectual immunity in architecture

Architectural thought is defined as a final result of all principles and cognitive visions, which stored in human mind as a mental image, and reconfigured it to be fitting with all changes happened, that exposure the thought to all cognitive impurities (intellectual viruses), which may have a weakness and vulnerability. So immunity of thought protected it from such these impurities, when the research aims to enhance the immunity concept, and its levels of intellectual architectural process, while The research problem represented with a cognitive ambiguity of the immunity concept in the intellectual architectural process, that make the research follow an analytical method in two steps :theoretical one, is to define the concept of immunity, and the role of immunity levels in promote architectural output immunity. The research assumed is the immunity of designing productions increased when, the intellectual levels of the process (the design process) increase). Another step (practical step) is to analysis all Elective projects, leading to the immune architectural production, is a production which is compatible with the surrounding environment, whatever intellectual changes have taken place and acquired through that the continuity and longevity..

Enhancing dental electives through participatory research

Completion of an elective project at the University of Glasgow Dental School is a progression requirement that entails a period of self-directed and enquiry-led learning. This study sought to uncover students’ expectations and perspectives of their elective experience as there is a scarcity of supporting literature to determine if this activity has significant educational value. This qualitative study utilised a participatory research methodology,ensuring that students were at the centre of the enquiry process. Three student co-researchers analysed data collected from their peers, using a questionnaire and a focus group meeting. The findings support maintaining autonomous, enquiry-led, independent learning-focused electives and also highlight aspects of the elective which students particularly valued. This has allowed a deeper understanding of students’ perceptions of, and motivations for, particular elective projects, enabling the elective programme to respond to changing environments in education and global health. The outcomes of this study have informed the redesign of the dental elective study programme and the associated quality assurance process.