Electoral Implications Research Articles

The Electoral Implications of Candidate Ambiguity

Candidates often make ambiguous statements about the policies they intend to pursue. In theory, ambiguity affects how voters make choices and who wins elections. In practice, measurement and endogeneity problems have impeded empirical research about the consequences of ambiguity. We conducted survey experiments that overcame these obstacles by manipulating a common form of ambiguity: the imprecision of candidate positions. Our data show that, on average, ambiguity does not repel and may, in fact, attract voters. In nonpartisan settings, voters who have neutral or positive attitudes toward risk, or who feel uncertain about their own policy preferences, tend to embrace ambiguity. In partisan settings, voters respond even more positively to ambiguity; they optimistically perceive the locations of ambiguous candidates from their own party without pessimistically perceiving the locations of vague candidates from the opposition. We further find, through analysis of two additional new data sets, that candidates often take—and voters frequently perceive—ambiguous positions like the ones in our experiments. The pervasive use of ambiguity in campaigns fits with our experimental finding that ambiguity can be a winning strategy, especially in partisan elections.

Made in Congress? Testing the Electoral Implications of Party Ideological Brand Names

We investigate the connection between legislative parties and election outcomes, focusing on ideological party brand names that inform voters. If the source of information conveyed by brand names is the party's aggregate roll-call record, then changes in legislative party membership should influence election returns. We formalize the argument with an expected utility model of voting and derive district-level hypotheses, which we test on U.S. House elections from 1952 to 2000. We test alternative specifications that vary with respect to the specificity of voter information and find that party positions and heterogeneity both affect vote share independently of incumbents’ positions. The results provide modest support for the expected utility model but nevertheless suggest that Congress is an important source of the public's beliefs about the parties, and this effect is clearest for challengers, rather than incumbents, who run under the party's label.

Voting By Altruists: Some Electoral Implications of Civic Virtue

This paper examines some neglected implications of altruism in deterministic voting models in settings where voters differ in their altruistic propensities. Of particular interest is the extent to which relatively small groups of altruistic voters can affect electoral outcomes by simply casting votes. Ordinarily, in deterministic electoral models one expects small groups with odd policy preferences to have little impact on electoral outcomes. This paper demonstrates that relatively small groups of altruistic voters can have substantial effects on policies entirely determined by median voter preferences.

Mobilizations against the Iraq War in Spain: Background, Participants and Electoral Implications

This paper aims to explain the nature of recent mobilizations against the Iraq War in Spain and their electoral implications. It first examines the evolution of the organizational features of Spanish peace movements since their emergence during the transition, linking them to both the broader evolution of the (leftist) social movements sector and the changing political context. The relationship between previous peace mobilization experiences and the spread among Spaniards of a peace culture is stressed. This ‘historical’ contextualization sheds light upon the nature of recent successful mass mobilizations against the Iraq War as well as their electoral relevance. The article also points out the influence of broader processes of change concerning political participation in representative democracies.

John Howard's ‘Values’ and Australian Identity

This article analyses John Howard's arguments on the relationship between ‘values’ and ‘national identity’. Some key arguments were prefigured before he became Prime Minister, when he promised not to politicise national identity. More recent arguments influenced debates over foreign policy, counter terrorism measures, industrial relations policy and the banning of same-sex marriage. In particular, the article explores the relationship between Howard's ‘values’ and Anglo-Celtic identity, social conservatism, the Christian Right and a neo-liberal ‘entrepreneurial culture’. It suggests that Howard is using his emphasis on the relationship between values and national identity to endorse and encourage particular forms of citizen identity (which also have policy and electoral implications). This is despite Howard's earlier critique of Keating for using debates over national identity to engage in social engineering.

Position-Taking and Electoral Accountability in the U.S. House of Representatives

While past research has offered some initial evidence linking patterns of position-taking behavior with incumbents’ electoral fortunes, we are left without a comprehensive study that informs us whether individual roll-call votes can be electorally consequential and lends insight into the conditions under which position-taking on roll calls may yield electoral implications. This article takes a step toward filling that void by examining the electoral implications of hundreds of House roll calls since the early 1970s. We find that, after controlling for the usual factors, a wide range of individual roll-call decisions have significant effects on incumbents’ electoral margins. We also find that the extent to which a particular roll call is controversial, salient, and a catalyst for intra-party disagreement affects whether it has electoral implications. In sum, our analysis addresses longstanding questions regarding how and when legislators are rewarded or punished at the polls for their behavior in Congress.

George W. Bush and the Environmental Protection Agency: A Midterm Appraisal

During the first 2 years of his presidential term, George W. Bush matured as a political leader and neutralized many of his harshest critics. A glaring exception to this characterization is the area of environmental policy. The Bush administration adamantly refused to advance a meaningful strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to commit the United States to the Kyoto Protocol. At the same time, a number of highly public disputes compromised the legitimacy of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This appraisal reviews the Bush administration's performance midway through its first term across three pivotal environmental concerns: air pollution, climate change, and toxics remediation. Though environmental proponents denounced the U.S. EPA's provocative policy positions, there are no indications that this criticism has had much political impact. The assessment concludes with an examination of the politics behind the Bush administration's growing anti-environmentalism and some speculation regarding its future electoral implications.

Nationalism and the rise of Muslim sentiment in Turkey

The revival of Islamic sentiment clearly constitutes the most significant development to take place within the Middle Eastern region over the past three decades. No country remains unaffected. In Turkey the success of the Refah (Prosperity) Party in nationwide local elections in March 1994 highlighted the steady growth of Muslim consciousness since the return to civilian government in 1983. The religious phenomenon is particularly significant in Turkey because the country is a secular republic and because of the strength of nationalist education since the foundation of the modern state in 1923. A broad range of factors is involved by way of explanation. Two of the most important are demographics (the continuing rural-urban drift which is fraught with cultural and ultimately electoral implications) and the continuing sanction of Muslim values from the top as well as the pull by the activists at the bottom. The common threads which link Muslim activists in Turkey to those in other countries include opposition to secularized nationalist governments in principle and practice. These governments stand accused not only of economic incompetence and corruption (and many outside the ranks of the Muslim activists would agree with them) but of facilitating the continuing domination of their societies by 'the West'. As these overlapping references indicate the present ferment in Muslim societies (however described in a more specific form) is about culture as much as politics or economics. On the one hand is the secularized model of development, largely borrowed from the West; on the other an indigenous framework of values which Muslims would argue has been validated through 1400 years of history.

Those Missing Millions: Implications for Social Statistics of Non-response to the 1991 Census

ABSTRACTThis article highlights some of the issues raised by incomplete coverage of the 1991 census in Britain, illustrating how far-reaching are its implications across the spectrum of social statistics. The origins and the current state-of-play of the debate over the distribution of the non-response are summarised and the implications then assessed. For many census variables, non-response reduces the observed variation between areas, with consequences for the distribution of resources for local services. The implications for the reliability of the most basic of health statistics are raised through mortality rates. A rough estimate is made, and supporting evidence presented, of the possible numbers of households which were missed by the census. Some implications for housing needs assessments are illustrated along with the effect of the sudden upwards revision of official estimates of the dwelling stock and the resulting overall great uncertainty over the number of vacant dwellings in the country. Finally, recent research on the electoral implications of people's choice not to be registered is discussed as this may well help to understand census non-response. Such a pervasive degree of uncertainty across almost all figures concerning people has not been experienced in Britain since the last century. There is little reason to expect this uncertainty and the importance of its social policy implications to diminish in the future, without significant changes to census procedures and to the relationship between government and governed.

Electoral Implications of Cancer Screening and AIDS Research

Electoral Implications of Cancer Screening and AIDS Research

Economic Outcomes and Political Support for British Governments among Occupational Classes: A Dynamic Analysis

The first section of the article establishes the political salience of macroeconomic issues to the British electorate, reviews the distributional consequences of macroeconomic outcomes, and suggests that unemployment outcomes in particular have strong class-related distributional effects.The second part presents a dynamic model of how rational voters evaluate the governing party, based on the idea that voters evaluate the cumulative performance of the governing party relative to the prior performance of the current opposition. Since the present relevance of prior outcomes decays over time, voters weight current performance more heavily than past performance informing contemporaneous political judgments.The empirical analyses in the third section include measures of nominal economic performance (inflation and exchange rate movements) and real economic performance (unemployment and real income fluctuations). The regression results indicate that the responses of political support among the occupational classes to macroeconomic changes are sizeable, and that the cross-class variations are consistent with the distributional consequences reviewed at the beginning of the article.The concluding section develops the electoral implications of the empirical results and presents a novel interpretation of trends in class-related political support for the parties. The evidence shows that the argument that there has been a persistent decline of class-based political alignments in Britain is erroneous.

Economic Outcomes and Political Support for British Governments among Occupational Classes: A Dynamic Analysis

The first section of the article establishes the political salience of macroeconomic issues to the British electorate, reviews the distributional consequences of macroeconomic outcomes, and suggests that unemployment outcomes in particular have strong class-related distributional effects.The second part presents a dynamic model of how rational voters evaluate the governing party, based on the idea that voters evaluate the cumulative performance of the governing party relative to the prior performance of the current opposition. Since the present relevance of prior outcomes decays over time, voters weight current performance more heavily than past performance informing contemporaneous political judgments.The empirical analyses in the third section include measures of nominal economic performance (inflation and exchange rate movements) and real economic performance (unemployment and real income fluctuations). The regression results indicate that the responses of political support among the occupational classes to macroeconomic changes are sizeable, and that the cross-class variations are consistent with the distributional consequences reviewed at the beginning of the article.The concluding section develops the electoral implications of the empirical results and presents a novel interpretation of trends in class-related political support for the parties. The evidence shows that the argument that there has been a persistent decline of class-based political alignments in Britain is erroneous.

The Anglo-French Compromise on Arms Limitation, 1928

The British General Election of May 1929 was a disaster for Stanley Baldwin's Government. The Conservatives lost 155 seats in all and in consequence became the second largest party in the House of Commons for the first time since the General Election of December 1910. The formation of a Labour Government appeared to be so unavoidable that the Prime Minister did not even wait to meet Parliament but resigned office at once, advising King George V to send for Ramsay MacDonald.In attempting to explain this Conservative failure, historians have tended to stress the persistence of the unemployment problem and the alleged folly of Baldwin in choosing “Safety First” as his campaign slogan. Even a cursory examination of the Government's record during 1927 and 1928, however, lends support to the suspicion that a succession of controversial decisions in the field of foreign affairs may also have contributed, albeit marginally, to the magnitude of the Conservative failure in 1929. Certainly more than one well-wisher thought it necessary to warn the Conservative cabinet that its conduct of foreign policy — and especially those aspects relating to international disarmament negotiations — might have significant electoral implications. For example, on October 12, 1928, the British Ambassador in Paris, Sir William Tyrrell, wrote to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Lord Cushendun:I think this question [disarmament] is going to play a great part next year in the coming election and I feel convinced that if you succeed in persuading the country that you have already done a great deal to promote disarmament and have a settled policy with regard to it you will defeat both Ramsay MacDonald and Lloyd George.