Electoral Environment Research Articles

The Impact of the Australian Ballot on Member Behavior in the U.S. House of Representatives

Katz and Sala linked the development of committee property rights in the late-nineteenth-century U.S. House of Representatives to the introduction of the Australian ballot. If, as they posited, members sought personal reputations to carry them to reelection in the new electoral environment, the current article argues that behaviors with more immediate political payoffs also should have changed in ways their theory would predict. The article examines whether committee assignments, floor voting behavior, and the distribution of pork barrel projects changed in predicted ways and finds supportive outcomes, but usually only when the office bloc ballot, and not the party bloc ballot, was in use.

İSí Se Puede! Latino Candidates and the Mobilization of Latino Voters

Traditional studies of political participation assume an electoral environment in which voters decide between two White candidates, and find Latino citizens less politically engaged. Given the growth in the number of Latino candidates for office over the past 20 years, this article tests whether ethnicity impacts Latino voting behavior. I argue that the presence of a Latino candidate mobilizes the Latino electorate, resulting in elevated voter turnout and strong support for the co-ethnic candidates. Although some research provides a theoretical basis for such a claim, this article brings together a comprehensive body of empirical evidence to suggest that ethnicityissalient for Latinos and provides a coherent theory that accounts for the empowering role of co-ethnic candidates. Analysis of recent mayoral elections in five major U.S. cities reveals that Latinos were consistently mobilized by co-ethnic candidates.

Challenger Entry and Voter Learning

We develop a model of strategic interaction between voters and potential electoral challengers to sitting incumbents, in which the very fact of a costly challenge conveys relevant information to voters. Given incumbent failure in office, challenger entry is more likely, but the threat of entry by inferior challengers creates an incentive for citizens to become more politically informed. At the same time, challenges to incumbents who perform well can neutralize a voter's positive assessment of incumbent qualifications. How a voter becomes politically informed can in turn deter challengers of different levels of competence from running, depending on the electoral environment. The model permits us to sharpen our understanding of retrospective voting, the incumbency advantage, and the relationship between electoral competition and voter welfare, while pointing to new interpretations of, and future avenues for, empirical research on elections.

Challenger Entry and Voter Learning

We develop a model of strategic interaction between voters and potential electoral challengers to sitting incumbents, in which the very fact of a costly challenge conveys relevant information to voters. Given incumbent failure in office, challenger entry is more likely, but the threat of entry by inferior challengers creates an incentive for citizens to become more politically informed. At the same time, challenges to incumbents who perform well can neutralize a voter's positive assessment of incumbent qualifications. How a voter becomes politically informed can in turn deter challengers of different levels of competence from running, depending on the electoral environment. The model permits us to sharpen our understanding of retrospective voting, the incumbency advantage, and the relationship between electoral competition and voter welfare, while pointing to new interpretations of, and future avenues for, empirical research on elections.

Building Careers and Courting Constituents: U.S. Senate Representation 1889–1924

From 1788 to 1913, the basic model for the election of U.S. senators was based on state legislatures serving as intermediaries between the people and their senators. The Framers' intent in constructing indirect elections to the U.S. Senate was to help insulate senators from sudden and drastic shifts of public opinion that could lead to senators enacting detrimental national policies (Federalist 63). Underlying this “insulation” was the supposition that indirect elections, combined with a six-year term, would create a different electoral environment for senators than for their counterparts in the House, and would thus produce a legislator who would not be directly responsive to individual constituents.

Delegating Disenfranchisement Decisions

Most empirical analyses of felon disenfranchisement and other voting rights laws focus on the implications of the laws on potential voters and political outcomes as if they are fully implemented. However, the administrative structure used by states to implement these laws varies as well as the extent that the implementation is monitored and the competitiveness of the electoral environment. We formally model the process by which states choose voting rights measures such as felon disenfranchisement laws. We

La mutation du vote protestataire : partis tribuniciens, partis de gouvernement et sentiment antiparti

The increase of« negative » vote is gernerally explained by the success of blackmail parties (populist or marginal) the last twenties years. This vote seems effectively represent a new electoral age of political modernity. Moreover, the party system on the whole is touched by the protest phenomenon whatever the electoral environment. The political parties at large electorally benefit to « negative » attitude development. Therefore, this vote appears to be as a moment of anti- party sentiment not as a democracies functions criticism.

Success and Failure of New Parties in Taiwanese Elections

This paper examines the development of new parties in Taiwan's post martial law era. After outlining the electoral records of the main attempts to challenge the electoral domination of the established parties, the variables determining new party success and failure are discussed. It is shown that if a new party has a convincing political platform, sufficient resources and can exploit its electoral environment, it can win seats in multi-party Taiwan.

Insurance for Good Losers and the Survival of Chile's Concertacion

In the transition from military rule to democracy, the government of Augusto Pinochet bequeathed to Chile a unique electoral law by which all legislative seats are contested in two-member districts. A key implication of this rule is that in order to secure legislative majorities, coalitions have to put their strongest candidates in the most precarious electoral list positions. This generates a divergence of interests between coalitions and politicians. Chile's largest coalition, the Concertacion, has resolved the dilemma by providing appointed posts to unsuccessful congressional candidates who accept personal political risk on the coalition's behalf. This study argues that this insurance system has provided the critical glue to hold the coalition together since Chile's transition to democracy in 1990. Recent changes in the electoral environment could threaten the Concertacion's control over the appointed posts that have sustained this informal institution. This could jeopardize the Concertacion's cohesion during the process of negotiating coalition candidate lists for the 2005 legislative elections.

Insurance for Good Losers and the Survival of Chile's Concertación

Abstract In the transition from military rule to democracy, the government of Augusto Pinochet bequeathed to Chile a unique electoral law by which all legislative seats are contested in two-member districts. A key implication of this rule is that in order to secure legislative majorities, coalitions have to put their strongest candidates in the most precarious electoral list positions. This generates a divergence of interests between coalitions and politicians. Chile's largest coalition, the Concertación, has resolved the dilemma by providing appointed posts to unsuccessful congressional candidates who accept personal political risk on the coalition's behalf. This study argues that this insurance system has provided the critical glue to hold the coalition together since Chile's transition to democracy in 1990. Recent changes in the electoral environment could threaten the Concertación's control over the appointed posts that have sustained this informal institution. This could jeopardize the Concertación's cohesion during the process of negotiating coalition candidate lists for the 2005 legislative elections.

'The Record of the 1950s is irrelevant': The Conservative Party, Electoral Strategy and Opinion Research, 1945-64

After 1945 the Conservative Party endeavoured to understand the reasons for defeat and how they might return to government. Central to Conservative understanding of the electoral environment was the party's adoption of opinion research in 1949, techniques which became integral to electoral strategy. Opinion research was used to understand electoral behaviour, target voters and identify the reasons for Conservative success and decline. Despite the importance attached to them, Conservative strategists remained sceptical about what these techniques could achieve, which lead to a review of their utility in 1960. By 1964 polls were an established part of Conservative electoral strategy.

Southern Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. By Stanley P. Berard. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. 250p. $22.95.

The rise of partisanship in Congress has been one of the most conspicuous features of American politics during the 1990s. David Rohde's (1991) Parties and Leaders in the PostReform House demonstrated that much of this rise in partisanship could be attributed to the convergence in congressional voting between Northern and Southern Democrats. Since the New Deal, the latter had traditionally allied with Republicans on many issues in a bipartisan conservative coalition that generally dominated both Houses of Congress and constrained liberal legislative outcomes. While Rohde and Barbara Sinclair (Legislators, Leaders and Lawmaking, 1995) have emphasized how institutional rule changes in the 1970s created a much greater incentive for party loyalty among member of Congress, relatively little attention has been paid to the extent to which enhanced partisanship in Congress has been driven by “bottom-up” electoral imperatives. Stanley Berard's new book on Southern Democrats in the House convincingly shows that major changes in the southern electoral environment were equally important in promoting convergence in the voting records of Northern and Southern Democrats, leading to a more partisan House overall.

The Contemporary Presidency: The Presidential Election of 2000: A Great Civics Lesson?

As the 2000 postelection period wore on, media commentators began to refer to it as a great civics lesson. Unfortunately, too much of the commentary focused on the dramatic story unfolding in Florida and the voting systems used by some Florida communities. More important, the 2000 election provides an opportunity to relearn some old lessons about elections and serves to remind us that elections are not simply exercises in preference ordering but responses to an electoral environment defined by state and local jurisdictions. Issues of ballot design, the voting mechanisms used, and the efforts to make voting more convenient are questions of great political importance–questions that cannot be solved by technological fixes alone. Reform is needed, but reform efforts must to be guided by a better understanding of how voters actually relate to the voting process.

Electoral Context, Issues, and Voting for Women in the 1990s

Abstract This research hypothesizes that, because of the particular stimulation provided by the focus on candidate sex and gender-related issues in the electoral environment, there was a unique set of demographic and attitudinal variables related to voting for a woman candidate for the House of Representatives in 1992. Because the environments of the elections of 1994 and 1996 were relatively “gender-free,” these variables were not related to voting behavior in these years. The analysis supports the hypothesis that the determinants of support for women congressional candidates are different in 1992 than in subsequent elections. It also suggests that the differing environments of the three elections may be a contributing factor to these differences.

Blind spots in democratization: Sub‐national politics as a constraint on Mexico's transition

This article argues that Mexico, after nearly seven decades of highly centralized, presidentialist rule, is moving toward a political system in which power is contested actively and continuously between centre and periphery. State governors and other sub‐national political actors have become more assertive in national politics, and they have greater financial resources under their control, due to fiscal decentralization. Now operating in an increasingly competitive electoral environment, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has switched to a primary system for selecting its presidential candidate that inevitably rewards the state and local PRI machines that deliver the vote for the winning candidate. Under these circumstances, the very different sub‐national political regimes that coexist inside Mexico may function more as obstacles to the completion of the democratic transition than as breeding grounds for further democratizing advances, as the ‘periphery’ is often viewed in the contemporary Mexican politics literature. Drawing on evidence from five types of centre‐periphery confrontations during the presidency of Ernesto Zedillo, it is argued that the re‐emergence in the 1990s of strong, sub‐national political regimes that are resistant to control by the President and other central political actors is likely to prolong Mexico's democratic transition and increase its unevenness.

An Exploration of the Stability of Partisan Stereotypes in the United States

In this paper I argue that party stereotypes are a manifestation of partisanship that can inform the current debate about the stability of partisan identity in the United States. I provide a theory for understanding the stability of partisanship using the self-categorization theory developed by John Turner and his colleagues. This provides firmer theoretical ground for the prevalent view that partisanship instability should follow partisan dealignment and realignments. Its most important contribution, however, is its prediction that partisanship instability can be traced to the character of the categories that the electoral environment makes available for stereotyping the parties. When the electoral environment makes available a set of partisan categories that are more heterogeneous in content, as is the case in the USA since the 1970s, greater partisanship instability is a natural result. I explore this hypothesis using the party likes/dislikes questions in American National Election Study (ANES) panel surveys. I find that the self-categorization theory of partisanship offers a good explanation for an evident decline in the stability of party stereotypes starting in the 1970s and a curious rise in US partisanship stability between 1992 and 1994.

Campaign Communication and Strategic Responses to Change in the Electoral Environment

This study presents a priming model of party competition which proposes that broad-based parties adapt their campaign communication to respond strategically to changes in their electoral environment. Party competition during election campaigns is seen as the struggle to `prime' the electorate; i.e. to set the electorate's agenda and the criteria for which the electorate will evaluate the parties. This model is used to analyze the strategic responses of the two broad-based parties in Germany - the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) - to the changes in their electoral environment after reunification. Survey data are used to analyze differences in the East and West German electorate after reunification and a content analysis of the television commercials broadcast by the two parties is used to discern the changing content (i.e. issue dimensions, candidate-orientated appeals) and form (i.e. degree of attack, issue differentiation technique and temporal reference) of campaign communication. This analysis indicates that the nature of party competition in a given party system is not fixed but changes as parties make strategic responses to their electoral environment.

Structural constraints on partisan bias under the efficient gerrymander

Partisan bias occurs when the translation of the popular vote into legislative seats differs between competing parties. This paper contains a theoretical and empirical analysis of the consequences of an efficient gerrymander for the partisan bias of an electoral system. Under partisan apportionment, bias is shown to depend on some structural features of the electoral environment; namely, the size of the voting population and the number of single-member districts within a political jurisdiction. A statistical analysis reveals the predicted relationships in data on Congressional elections across states in the 1950–1984 period. This paper highlights the importance of some measurable features of the electoral environment for determining bias and provides an indirect test of partisan gerrymandering in congressional apportionment processes.

The Role of Gender in Open-Seat Elections for the U.S. House of Representatives

ABSTRACT A substantial amount of literature exists examining the under-representation of women in the United States House of Representatives. By examining open-seat elections from 1982 through 1994, the author tests the assumption that male and female candidates receive equivalent returns for campaign resources. The research finds that a differential return for campaign expenditures does exist during this time period. Women candidates in the 1980s suffered from a diminished return for campaign resources; hence, simple parity of resources in this time period was not sufficient to ensure competitiveness. The disadvantage evidenced in the 1980s has largely disappeared in open-seat elections in the 1990s supporting the contention that the electoral environment is changing and becoming more supportive of women candidacies. Additionally, the research demonstrates that the aggregate model (which is dominant in the literature) overestimates the effect of women's campaign expenditures because it fails to make pair...

Party Competition and Institutional Change

A wave of plebiscitary reforms has swept the German states in the past decade. This study uses explanations for cartel party failure as a starting point for investigating why the biggest German parties defected from their long-held consensus against direct democracy. The article shows that, in an increasingly competitive electoral environment, parties were willing to sacrifice long-term benefits in hopes of making short-term electoral gains. More generally, it suggests that the course of institutional reform cannot be understood merely by looking at distributions of party interests and voter preferences. Instead, it is also necessary to examine why political actors come to see their interests in a different light.