Electoral Prospects Research Articles

Institutions or ideology? Cross-party and cross-country analysis of factors contributing to the election of women to the European Parliament

Abstract The article examines the key factors influencing women’s electoral success in European Parliament (EP) elections. We present a new conceptual approach and a novel model that simultaneously incorporates trends in party characteristics, institutional and socio-economic factors and cross-country trends in women’s representation. The model provides a comprehensive analysis of the relationships between party-level and Member State-level factors and the election of women to the EP. The study is based on an original dataset of 450 observations on national political parties from all Member States, spanning four European elections from 2004 to 2019. Our results show that party characteristics such as incumbency rates, party size and ideological orientations (i.e. the party’s position on the GAL-TAN scale or its attitude towards European integration) play a key role in shaping women’s representation. This article provides novel insights into the unique features of Central and Eastern Europe, elucidating divergent patterns of women’s electoral prospects in conservative and progressive parties in Western democracies and Central and Eastern European post-communist EU Member States.

How Did Medicare for All Influence Trump’s Electoral Prospects Across Different Levels of COVID-19 Perceived Political Engagement?

Background The 2020 US presidential election was a pivotal moment in American politics, with the healthcare system taking center stage as a critical issue. The COVID-19 pandemic significantly raised public awareness about the deficiencies of the US healthcare system, leading to increased support for comprehensive healthcare reforms, such as Medicare for All. Methods This study examines the relationship between the pandemic, support for Medicare for All, and voting choices in the 2020 presidential election. Logistic regression analyses were conducted using data from the Collaborative Multi-Racial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) 2020 to explore the impact of support for Medicare for All on voting behavior. The analysis controlled for variables such as partisanship, race, gender, age, education, economic anxiety, and COVID-19 exposure. Results The findings indicate a negative relationship between support for Medicare for All and voting for Donald Trump. This relationship holds true across different levels of perceived COVID-19 political engagement. The analysis demonstrates that increased support for Medicare for All is associated with a decreased likelihood of voting for Trump. This effect is more pronounced among individuals who reported minimal impact of the pandemic on their political engagement. Conclusions The COVID-19 pandemic brought healthcare issues to the forefront of public discourse, reinforcing existing health policy preferences rather than altering them. The study provides insights into how major crises like the COVID-19 pandemic can influence public attitudes and political outcomes. These findings have significant implications for future healthcare policies and electoral strategies, emphasizing the need to consider both enduring health policy preferences and the situational effects of crises.

Mode of candidacy, electoral prospects, and the ideological deviation of candidacy-seeking politicians from their party leadership

Politicians who seek their parties' nomination as candidates for public office start communicating their ideological profile to the selectorate months before the party decides on who will run as candidates. However, some politicians tend to steer away from their party leadership, while others stick closer to the party line. We argue that not only the mode of candidacy but one's expected chances of winning the election during the candidate selection period are defining factors in understanding why some candidates deviate further from their party leadership position than others. We use novel data on the degree of intra-party competition among the main German parties in all 299 electoral districts and on the ideological positions of candidates, measured using their Twitter statements in the run-up to the 2021 Bundestag election, to evaluate our expectations. In line with existing studies, we find that candidates who seek only their party's nomination via lists deviate less from party leadership than candidates who seek nomination as a district candidate. In contrast to our expectations, candidates who seek their nomination in an electoral district do not deviate more ideologically from their party when they can expect to win the district seat on election day based on published polls during the candidate selection period.

Inflation in 2022 did not affect congressional voting, but abortion did

This study examines voting in the 2022 United States congressional elections, contests that were widely expected to produce a sizable defeat for Democratic candidates for largely economic reasons. Based on a representative national probability sample of voters interviewed in both 2020 and 2022, individuals who changed their vote from one party's congressional candidate to another party's candidate did not do so in response to the salience of inflation or declining economic conditions. Instead, we find strong evidence that views on abortion were central to shifting votes in the midterm elections. Americans who favored (opposed) legal abortions were more likely to shift from voting for Republican (Democratic) candidates in 2020 to Democratic (Republican) candidates in 2022. Since a larger number of Americans supported than opposed legal abortions, the combination of these shifts ultimately improved the electoral prospects of Democratic candidates. New voters were especially likely to weigh abortion views heavily in their vote-shifting calculus. Likewise, those respondents whose confidence in the US Supreme Court declined from 2020 to 2022 were more likely to shift from voting for Republican to Democratic congressional candidates. We provide direct empirical evidence that changes in support for the Supreme Court, a nonpartisan branch of the federal government, are implicated in partisan voting behavior in another branch of government. We explore the implications of these findings for prevalent assumptions about how economic conditions influence voting, as well as for the relationship between the judiciary and electoral politics.

Auction politics: Party competition and expansionary election promises

AbstractParty competition sometimes resembles an auction, where parties seek to ‘buy’ elections through promises of economic largesse. In this article, I argue that whether parties engage in this practice will depend on political circumstances, such as the level of ideological competition. Incentives to promise more to voters will also vary depending on a party's electoral prospects: for parties that expect a significant level of government responsibility, promising too much is a risky strategy. I test these arguments by focusing on the spending commitments in party manifestos from 20 countries over the period 1945–2017. In line with expectations, parties tend to make more expansionary election pledges when ideological competition is more muted. In addition, left‐wing parties’ spending commitments are found to be influenced by their projected seat shares (based on opinion polls from before the start of the election campaign) relative to their competitors. Specifically, the stronger a left‐wing party's electoral prospects, the more fiscally conservative it tends to be, and vice versa.

Electoral Rewards and Punishments for Trade Compensation

abstract: When globalization harms a community, voters are expected to demand compensation programs. Why, then, would incumbents fail to provide additional compensation following an economic shock? The authors argue that in addition to offering material assistance, government compensation also informs voters about the costs of globalization, generating consternation in the electorate. As a result, providing compensation can hurt incumbents' electoral prospects. This article studies this consternation effect in the United States during the China shock period (1990–2007). The authors use an administrative instrument for access to the US Trade Adjustment Assistance (taa) program, the longest-standing compensation system for workers displaced by international trade. The analysis shows that compensation electorally backfires when distributed to low-shocked regions in which the informational value of compensation is high. The consternation effect can explain why governments often underinvest in compensation programs.

When do agents deliver the vote? A vote-popularity function in electoral manipulation

ABSTRACT Existing research primarily delves into the demand side of electoral manipulation, focusing on the conditions prompting political elites to rig the process. Recent studies have shifted focus towards the supply side, employing the principal-agent approach to investigate how agents engage in election tampering based on their principals' likelihood of success. While this perspective has highlighted the role of agents in determining manipulation intensity, gaps remain in understanding how they predict their principals' victory and strategically decide on active or passive manipulation. Our argument centres on agents using the economy as a critical indicator of their principals' electoral prospects. A strong economy boosts incumbents' chances of success and their vote share, prompting agents to be more blatant in engaging in electoral misconduct, leading to heightened manipulation. Analysing 1278 multiparty elections across 94 countries since the 1900s, our findings suggest that incumbent electoral prospects correlate with economic indicators and significantly influence the scale of electoral manipulation.

«Союз Сары Вагенкнехт – благоразумие и справедливость» и раскол левой партийной оппозиции в ФРГ: кризис или обновление?

The paper is devoted to the emergence of a new German political party “Sarah Wagenknecht Union – Reason and Justice” (party “SWU”). The relevance of the study lies in the fact that the stated scientific problematic is of particular interest in the context of the current geopolitical situation, which dictates the need to take into account the positions of new groups through the prism of Russian national and foreign policy interests. The object of this study is the political party “SWU”. The aim of the research is to view the new party and the political consequences of its emergence for the left-wing party opposition. To attain the goal comparative and structural-genetic methods were used, allowing us to trace the dynamics of formation and development of left-wing groups in united Germany. The research tasks include the analysis of the political and ideological prerequisites for the SWA emergence; a study of the organizational and structural features of its formation; the identification of the political consequences of a new grouping both for the left-wing party opposition and the party system as a whole. The research results embrace the reasons for the emergence of the party “SWU”; the origins of the internal conflict in the Left party which led to the formation of a new political grouping; the program settings of the SWA and its electoral prospects; the consequences of the formation of a new party both for left-wing political forces and the party system as a whole. The research conclusions underline the following ideas. The emergence of a new party on the German political scene such as the party “SWU” marks a new stage in the development of both the left movement and its party system as a whole. For the Left, this means that the phase of their consolidation has been replaced by a phase of disintegration, which has taken the form of a party split. For the German party system, the creation of the party “SWU” can have two consequences. On the one hand, the emergence of a new left-wing party indicates further fragmentation and pluralization of the political system. On the other hand, it is becoming obvious that the impact of existing parties, primarily the “Alternative for Germany” and the “Left” is decreasing. For the “Left”, the activity of the party “SWU” is an existential threat and may lead to its disappearance as a pan-German parliamentary grouping. The prospects for the influence of the party “SWU” is related to the relevance of the political agenda that the new party will offer to voters as well as to its organizational stability.

How Ethnic Discrimination Shapes Political Reintegration After War: Insights From a Conjoint Experiment in Colombia

The reintegration of former armed group affiliates into formal politics is a fundamental challenge for post-conflict societies. Arguably, this challenge is even more difficult in settings where ethnic discrimination is pervasive, since discrimination implies comparatively higher barriers to political reintegration for racialized ex-combatants. In this paper, we explore how ethnicity and armed group affiliation interact to shape electoral prospects. Specifically, we investigate whether participants in a conjoint experiment in Colombia discriminate between political candidates of European and African descent and whether politicians of different ethnic identities are differentially punished for ties to armed groups. We find that participants display a strong aversion toward politicians with armed group affiliations and that they discriminate against Afro-Colombian candidates. Furthermore, we demonstrate that biases are additive, in the sense that Caucasian and Afro-Colombian candidates are equally punished for associating with armed groups. Finally, we explore heterogeneous treatment effects to shed light on sources of ethnic discrimination and aversion toward former armed group affiliates.

Weaponizing post-election court challenges: Assessing losers’ motivations

Globally, losing candidates have increasingly relied on courts to settle post-electoral disputes. However, scholars have not systematically explored candidates' motivations to mount legal challenges and their impact on democracy. We argue that, while overturning electoral results motivates most candidates, many also use courts for other strategic reasons, such as to bolster future electoral prospects or negotiate government jobs. Post-electoral litigation that is not responsive to fraud and irregularities can threaten democracy by eroding judicial legitimacy and increasing courts' vulnerability to political interference. We develop a classification scheme to highlight candidates' multiple motivations for filing electoral petitions. Using an original database of sub-national court challenges after the 2013 Kenyan general elections, we code only ten of the seventy-one cases as ‘high probability’ attempts to overturn election outcomes. Meanwhile, the majority of Kenyan candidate petitioners seemingly ‘weaponized’ the courts by pursuing challenges that reflected multiple motivations other than overturning their election.

Gender equality policies in Turkey’s opposition municipalities: factors that impact policy-making according to gender advocates

ABSTRACT The article explores gender equality policy processes in Turkey’s opposition-controlled municipalities faced with a national government that has an anti-gender equality stance in an authoritarian populist context. Based on interview data and documentary review, we identify four factors that facilitate and hinder gender equality policies and argue that the interaction between political party ideology and mayors’ individual perceptions creates spaces for gender mainstreaming processes in which gender experts play a key role. Gender mainstreaming plays an enabling role by improving policy capacity, diffusing gender awareness and in some cases changing politicians’ perceptions of electoral prospects; however, adversarial inter-governmental interactions hinder transformative actions although the latter carry the potential for future politicisation in feminist terms.

The impact of sovereign credit ratings on voters’ preferences

We investigate the political power of credit rating agencies by building a theoretical model that illustrates how heterogeneous voters change their political preferences after receiving credit signals which infer the quality of their governments. We empirically test this hypothesis using a rich dataset of daily sovereign ratings, outlook and watch signals assigned by S&P, Moody's and Fitch to EU countries from 2000 to 2017, along with a unique dataset measuring public support for governments. We find that negative rating signals lead to a significant decrease in government support, therefore influencing the electoral prospects of political parties. Both sociotropic and egocentric voters’ preferences are affected by sovereign ratings. Our results are confirmed across a battery of robustness tests and various modelling approaches, including fixed effects and difference in differences models and propensity score matching. Our findings offer wide-ranging implications for policy makers, political parties, governments, and the rating industry.

A second chance elsewhere. Estimating the effect of winning (vs. being the runner-up) on future electoral prospects

The effect of being the winner (vs. being the runner-up) on winning subsequent elections has been estimated across a series of countries using regression discontinuity design. We contribute to this literature by incorporating politicians who move across constituencies. The US and the UK are our case studies. UK–US differences are not apparent when comparing estimates of the individual incumbency advantage, i.e., winning the same office in the same constituency. UK–US differences in the career advantage of winning office are almost entirely driven by the ability of the UK’s close-race runners-up to win elsewhere subsequently. Runners-up are more likely to move to safer seats. Marginal winners become locked-in to their seat. In the US, we observe negligible movement across constituencies.

Top-Four Primaries Help Moderate Candidates via Crossover Voting: The Case of the 2022 Alaska Election Reforms

Abstract Concerns about polarization and the difficulty moderate candidates have in winning primary elections have driven several electoral reform efforts in recent decades. In this article, we leverage reforms prior to the 2022 elections in Alaska to assess whether the top-four primary is likely to help moderate candidates succeed. We evaluate three mechanisms by which the top-four might help moderates: by allowing them to advance from the primary and compete for votes from the more moderate general electorate, by changing the composition of the primary electorate and/or by facilitating crossover voting during the primary. Our analysis suggests that the top-four primary creates opportunities for cross-party voting that can enhance the electoral prospects of moderate candidates.

Diversity Matters: The Election of Asian Americans to U.S. State and Federal Legislatures

Despite substantial research on descriptive representation for Blacks and Latinos, we know little about the electoral conditions under which Asian candidates win office. Leveraging a new dataset on Asian American legislators elected from 2011 to 2020, combined with pre-existing and newly conducted surveys, we develop and test hypotheses related to Asian American candidates’ ingroup support, and their crossover appeal to other racial and ethnic groups. The data show Asian Americans preferring candidates of their own ethnic origin and of other Asian ethnicities to non-Asian candidates, indicating strong ethnic and panethnic motives. Asian candidates have comparatively strong crossover appeal, winning at higher rates than Blacks or Latinos for any given percentage of the reference group. All else equal, Asian American candidates fare best in multiracial districts, so growing diversity should benefit their electoral prospects. This crossover appeal is not closely tied to motives related to relative group status or threat.

How Priming Fairness and Priming Constitutionality Impact the Effect of Partisan Self-Interest on Citizen Support for Election Reforms

Abstract Prior research suggests that citizen attitudes toward electoral laws and reforms derive from how individuals weigh two competing considerations: the rule’s procedural fairness and one’s partisan self-interest (or how they perceive the policy affects their party’s electoral prospects). Recent experimental work shows that despite a role for fairness concerns, policy support levels shift (at least to a degree) based on its anticipated impact on who votes. We examine how the presentation of the trade-off between fairness and partisan advantage influences election reform opinions. Using two sets of survey experiments, we find that priming fairness reduces, but does not eliminate, the effect of partisan self-interest in shaping policy evaluations. Priming a reform’s constitutionality so as to provide cover to infringe upon fairness considerations, however, does not exacerbate the impact of partisan self-interest on support for adoption. These results expand our understanding of how citizens weigh different factors when assessing electoral policies.

Recasting the Villain in the Communitarian American Dream: Obama in Osawatomie and the 2012 Election

Abstract President Barack Obama faced very difficult electoral prospects in the summer of 2011. A slow economic recovery, along with Republican efforts to block his agenda, had undercut his message of hope and change. Obama's speech in Osawatomie, Kansas has been widely recognized as a crucial moment in his successful 2012 campaign. Obama's speech was important not because he supported new policies but because it corrected a major flaw in the community-oriented narrative at the core of his message. Obama reenergized his retelling of the American Dream by shifting the villain in his narrative from partisanship to the greedy rich.

Voter responses to female candidates' voice pitch: experimental evidence from Japan

AbstractPoliticians' voice pitch is known to affect voters' evaluation of the candidates in the US. But to what extent is this true outside of the American context? To address this question, we conducted an original survey experiment in Japan. Our findings are threefold. First, in contrast to previous studies, voters in Japan do not systematically prefer lower-pitched over higher-pitched female politicians. Second, our findings suggest heterogeneity in the effect of voice pitch by voters' gender – while Japanese women are indifferent as to female candidates' pitch levels, men are more likely to prefer female candidates who speak at lower pitch. Third, preliminary analyses reveal limited evidence that female candidates' political experience conditions the effect of voice pitch over voters' willingness to vote for that candidate. Our findings suggest that lowering pitch is likely to increase female candidates' electoral prospects by attracting male voters without backlash from female voters.

Boris Johnson: the moral case for government resignations in July 2022.

Although comparatively rare, political resignations are essential for the health of democracy and political institutions. Protagonists risk their political careers when resigning but can hold governments to account and make real the Nolan principles of public life. In July 2022, an unprecedented 62 resignations ended Boris Johnson's time as British prime minister to be replaced first by Liz Truss and then, 44days later, by Rishi Sunak, the second minister to resign. An inductive, qualitative, content analysis of the resignation letters elucidates the reasons for the resignations and highlights the ethical dilemmas that confronted would be resignees. Events lessened the effectiveness of government, triggered fears for the electoral prospects of the Conservative Party and separately challenged individuals' personal integrity. Considerations that prevented resignees acting earlier-promises that things would change, competing loyalties, fear of reprisal, love of job, attachment to status and allegiance to ideological faction-may partially explain why much of government remained in post in July.

How have secularisation and educational expansion affected support for the mainstream right in Western Europe?

While the electoral decline of Social democracy has received considerable attention in the literature, much less is known about how the structural changes experienced by advanced capitalist societies in the past decades have affected support for the mainstream right. In order to fill this gap, this article examines the relationship between secularisation, educational expansion and support for Conservative and Christian democratic parties in 18 West European democracies since the 1960s. The analysis reveals that secularisation is negatively associated with support for the mainstream right, but the effect is only significant for Christian democratic parties. Moreover, the findings support the expectation that social conservatism tends to damage the electoral prospects of mainstream right parties in highly educated societies. This suggests that, although engaging in cultural wars might sometimes seem like a winning strategy in the short term, it is unlikely to produce long-term positive electoral returns for the centre-right in post-industrial contexts.