Electoral Settings Research Articles

Knowledge, deception, and freedom of expression: a critical examination of Ireland’s approach to disinformation under the Electoral Reform Act 2022

ABSTRACT Ireland’s Electoral Reform Act introduces several key provisions under Parts 4 and 5 which are designed to curtail the spread of misleading electoral communications. This article’s focus is on how these provisions enable divergence from established EU standards surrounding intermediary liability for harmful online communications. Identifying how the application of these provisions may undermine the right to freedom of expression under EU law, this article further distils the applicable principles which should inform how online platforms limit access to misleading information in electoral settings. This article filters these principles from applicable case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Drawing from the analytical approaches of these courts to false electoral communications, this article not only assesses how Ireland’s Electoral Reform Act may undermine the right to freedom of expression but also provides a template for how EU and Member State legislation in the disinformation field can promote compatibility with human rights.

What determines the vote-seeking behavior of legislators in South Korea?

Pre-existing studies suggest that legislators in small districts tend to be more responsive to the electorate than those in large districts, as accountability is typically clearer in a smaller setting. However, it is not clear whether the relationship between district size and legislators' constituency-oriented spending holds in other electoral settings (e.g., South Korea), where pork barrel benefits tend to be determined at the administrative unit, not the electoral district. The present study hypothesizes that as the number of legislators in an administrative unit increases, they are less likely to try to appeal to the voters. Additionally, this study examines the moderating effects of partisan homogeneity and legislators' seniority. The results from the statistical analysis of data from Korean National Assembly members confirm our hypothesis: the number of legislators in an administrative unit turns out to be negatively associated with their vote-seeking behavior. Such a relationship tends to be strong in administrative units co-represented by multiple parties and weak among newly elected legislators.

Non-Religious Identity Salience for Candidate Choice

Religion is on the decline in the United States. Americans increasingly report low religiosity, have less attachment to religion, and a rapidly growing number identify as nonreligious. In Congress, the story is different. While a quarter of the public identifies as nonreligious, only one member of Congress does. Why are the nonreligious vastly underrepresented in government? I use a conjoint candidate choice experiment to causally link religious voters’ bias against nonreligious candidates to reduced support for them in electoral settings. I demonstrate that bias against the nonreligious affects electoral decisions and is causally linked to the exclusion of the nonreligious from government. Furthermore, I show that nonreligious voters only exhibit in-group support for candidates who explicitly identify as Atheists, not agnostic or candidates that merely lack a religious identity.

The Effect of Sustained Transparency on Electoral Accountability

AbstractTransparency is expected to strengthen electoral accountability. Yet, initiatives disseminating politician performance information directly prior to elections have reported mixed results. We argue that to be effective, transparency needs to be sustained: The dissemination of politician performance information needs to occur early, regularly, and predictably throughout the term. Using a formal model of electoral accountability under nonprogrammatic and uneven party competition, we study how sustained transparency affects a string of decisions by various actors in advance of elections: incumbents' running choices, parties' nomination strategies, and potential challengers' entry decisions. We show how these effects shape the candidate slate and ultimately electoral outcomes, conditional on incumbent performance and the incumbent party's relative strength. We test our theory using a field experiment involving 354 subnational constituencies in Uganda, and find robust support for the idea that sustained transparency can improve electoral accountability even in weakly institutionalized electoral settings.

Conceptual Replication of Four Key Findings about Factual Corrections and Misinformation during the 2020 US Election: Evidence from Panel-Survey Experiments

AbstractIn the final two months of the 2020 US election, we conducted eight panel experiments to evaluate the immediate and medium-term effects of misinformation and factual corrections. Our results corroborate four sets of existing findings: fact-checks reliably improve factual accuracy, while misinformation degrades it; effects of fact-checks on belief accuracy endure, though they fade with time; effects on attitudes are minuscule; and there are important partisan asymmetries. We also offer one new empirical finding suggesting that effect heterogeneities by personality type and cognitive style may reflect attention paid to treatments. Our study confirms that the fundamental push and pull of misinformation and factual corrections on political beliefs holds even in electoral settings as saturated with mistruths as the 2020 US election.

Local News and the Electoral Incentive to Invest in Infrastructure

Despite broad public support, investment in US infrastructure has not kept pace with growth, population shifts, and rising exposure to climate change risks. One explanation lies in politicians’ electoral incentives: because, in the short term, voters see only the costs of investment and not its benefits, politicians have incentive to pander and spend less than what they or their fully informed constituents would prefer. Local newspapers could help reduce this constraint by increasing politicians’ confidence that voters will receive information that justifies higher spending. In a survey experiment, we found that informing US city and county elected officials about news coverage of infrastructure failures increased support for a costly investment for those in competitive electoral settings. When motivated by reelection, politicians need the benefits of investment to be visible in order to justify its costs. Our results demonstrate the political importance of the nonpolitical news covered in local newspapers.

The heterogeneous price of a vote: Evidence from multiparty systems, 1993–2017

What is the impact of campaign spending on votes? Does it vary across election types, political parties or electoral settings? Estimating these effects requires comprehensive data on spending across candidates, parties and elections, as well as identification strategies that handle the endogenous and strategic nature of campaign spending in multiparty systems. This paper provides novel contributions in both of these areas. We build a new comprehensive dataset of all French legislative and UK general elections over the 1993–2017 period. We propose new empirical specifications, including a new instrument that relies on the fact that candidates are differentially affected by regulation on the source of funding on which they depend the most. We find that an increase in spending per voter consistently improves candidates’ vote share, both at British and French elections, and that the effect is heterogeneous depending on candidates’ party. In particular, we show that spending by radical and extreme parties has much lower returns than spending by mainstream parties, and that this can be partly explained by the social stigma attached to extreme voting. Our findings help reconcile the conflicting results of the existing literature, and improve our understanding of why campaigns matter.

Bayesian Analysis of Finite Populations under Simple Random Sampling.

Statistical methods to produce inferences based on samples from finite populations have been available for at least 70 years. Topics such as Survey Sampling and Sampling Theory have become part of the mainstream of the statistical methodology. A wide variety of sampling schemes as well as estimators are now part of the statistical folklore. On the other hand, while the Bayesian approach is now a well-established paradigm with implications in almost every field of the statistical arena, there does not seem to exist a conventional procedure—able to deal with both continuous and discrete variables—that can be used as a kind of default for Bayesian survey sampling, even in the simple random sampling case. In this paper, the Bayesian analysis of samples from finite populations is discussed, its relationship with the notion of superpopulation is reviewed, and a nonparametric approach is proposed. Our proposal can produce inferences for population quantiles and similar quantities of interest in the same way as for population means and totals. Moreover, it can provide results relatively quickly, which may prove crucial in certain contexts such as the analysis of quick counts in electoral settings.

The Heterogeneous Price of a Vote: Evidence from Multiparty Systems, 1993-2017

What is the impact of campaign spending on votes? Does it vary across election types, political parties or electoral settings? Estimating these effects requires comprehensive data on spending across candidates, parties and elections, as well as identification strategies that handle the endogenous and strategic nature of campaign spending in multiparty systems. This paper provides novel contributions in both of these areas. We build a new comprehensive dataset of all French legislative and UK general elections over the 1993-2017 period. We propose new empirical specifications, including a new instrument that relies on the fact that candidates are differentially affected by regulation on the source of funding on which they depend the most. We find that an increase in spending per voter consistently improves candidates' vote share, both at British and French elections, and that the effect is heterogeneous depending on candidates' party. In particular, we show that spending by radical and extreme parties has much lower returns than spending by mainstream parties, and that this can be partly explained by the social stigma attached to extreme voting. Our findings help reconcile the conflicting results of the existing literature, and improve our understanding of why campaigns matter.

Policy or person? The electoral value of policy positions and personal attributes in the Finnish open-list system

Under open-list proportional representation (OLPR), individual candidates compete for personal votes and representation has a distinctly individualistic dimension. This article provides a unique analysis of this individualistic representational dimension, by comparing the effects of policy positions with personal vote-earning attributes on individual electoral success within the context of the Finnish OLPR. The study confirms that personal attributes related to experience, locality and celebrity status have a strong positive effect on candidates’ ability to attract personal votes. On a more novel account, it also demonstrates that even under decidedly complex electoral settings, policy positions matter for candidates’ electoral fortunes, and that candidates who take on moderate positions within the context of their respective party are more successful than candidates who deviate from the party-median.

Digital Representation in an Electoral Campaign Influenced by Mainland China: The 2017 Hong Kong Chief Executive Election

Widely known by the public, the Chief Executive of Hong Kong is selected not by universal suffrage but by a 1,200-member Election Committee (EC). While candidates Carrie Lam, John Tsang, and Kwok-hing Woo all ran in the Chief Executive Election of 2017, only Lam received the blessing of authorities in the Mainland. Though Tsang had led the polls throughout the entire campaign and was popular on several social media platforms, a majority of EC members still cast their vote for Lam as Chief Executive. This was the first time that EC members voted against popular opinion in the Chief Executive Election. This paper analyzes the limited power of social media under elections that are under the influence of Mainland China. It also examines the problem of legitimacy in such electoral settings and the way in which authorities in the Mainland have influenced electoral outcomes through defects in the institutional systems of Hong Kong. The 2017 Chief Executive Election affirmed the tightened control of Mainland authorities over the affairs of Hong Kong.

Estimating Incumbency Effects Using Regression Discontinuity Design

In recent years, research on the incumbency effect using a regression discontinuity design has flourished. Although the regression discontinuity design has allowed scholars to examine the incumbency effect in various electoral settings, previous studies have not measured what has traditionally been defined as the incumbency (dis)advantage. In this paper, I bring together methods from previous research, provide a consistent exposition thereof, and highlight some of the challenges of estimation and interpretation by applying these methods to election data from 10 different electoral settings.

The effect of incumbency in national and local elections: Evidence from South Korea

In this paper, we investigate the effect of incumbency in three different electoral settings in South Korea using a regression discontinuity (RD) design. We claim that incumbency provides advantages in local elections, but its positive effects diminish in national legislative elections. Local politicians have an opportunity to develop close ties with their constituents, insulating themselves from national politics; but, due to the centralized nature of national politics, members of the National Assembly do not. Consistent with our expectation, incumbency effects are generally positive in local elections, but insignificant or even negative in national legislative elections. We also find that politicians who previously held local elected office enjoy an incumbency advantage in national legislative elections.

Climbing the ranks: incumbency effects in party-list systems

Incumbents tend to have a solid electoral advantage in candidate-centered electoral settings. Do similar incumbency effects exist in more party-centered environments? We estimate incumbency effects in an open-list proportional representation system, exploiting that seats are first allocated across parties, and then to candidates within party lists. Using data from Norwegian local elections 2003–2015, we document that a candidate that barely wins a seat in the local council has about a 9 percentage points (43%) higher probability of being elected in the next election compared to a candidate that just misses out on a seat on the same party list. We find no evidence that voters contribute to this personal incumbency advantage. Rather, it seems as if party elites are instrumental in securing the electoral success of their party affiliates. We show that incumbents and non-incumbents run again in the subsequent election at about equal rates, but that incumbents tend to advance in the party hierarchy and obtain safer ballot positions in future elections, which is what ultimately leads to electoral success.

The Bangladesh party-state: a diachronic comparative analysis of party-political regimes

Since independence in 1971, both civilian and military regimes have ruled Bangladesh. As many other military regimes did, the latter civilianised their rule through the formation of political parties and participation in general elections. When diachronically analysing political formations in Bangladesh, it is appealing to make a clear-cut distinction between autocratic and democratic regimes. However, this article argues that throughout its post-independence history, the dominant form of rule has been the party-state. Revisiting the work of Aristide Zolberg, this article develops a typology of party-states, away from its initial focus on single-party regimes. It argues that party-state formation can also be witnessed in competitive electoral settings.

Da Formentini a Sala

The article retraces the last 20 years of direct mayoral election in Milan. It shows how the changes in institutional and electoral settings influenced both the party system and the voters' electoral responses. The first part of the article retraces the strategies of alliances and the choice of candidates made by the main coalitions. The second part estimates the flows of votes using the Goodman model. In order to quantify the mobility of Milanese electorate a typology of voters is proposed (stable, converted, absent, etc.). The third part analyses some indexes to assess the degree of bipolarism, fragmentation and personalisation of the city party system. In a context more and more volatile and tripolar, Milan is now one of the more bipolar city in Italy.

Vent’anni di elezione diretta del sindaco a Bologna

The article retraces the last 20 years of direct mayoral election in Bologna. It shows how the changes in institutional and electoral settings influenced both the party system and voters' electoral responses. By analysing the electoral history of the city, we also show that personalization raised, electoral competition became more (bi)polarized, electoral turnout gradually decreased, voting results became less and less predictable attenuating Bologna past exceptionalism. This article fills a gap in a literature that has not yet offered a longitudinal study of electoral changes in Bologna since the 1990s. More precisely, the article gives an analysis of both the political supply and the electoral flows to understand how party system has changed and if and how voters have become more mobile.

Group incentives and rational voting

Our model describes competition between groups driven by the choices of self-interested voters within groups. Within a Poisson voting environment, parties observe aggregate support from groups and can allocate prizes or punishments to them. In a tournament style analysis, the model characterizes how contingent allocation of prizes based on relative levels of support affects equilibrium voting behavior. In addition to standard notions of pivotality, voters influence the distribution of prizes across groups. Such prize pivotality supports positive voter turnout even in non-competitive electoral settings. The analysis shows that competition for a prize awarded to the most supportive group is only stable when two groups actively support a party. However, competition among groups to avoid punishment is stable in environments with any number of groups. We conclude by examining implications for endogenous group formation and how politicians structure the allocation of rewards and punishments.

Get out the vote: how to increase voter turnout

Get Out the Vote! Is a practical guide for anyone trying to mobilize voters or organize at the grass roots. Unlike authors of other campaign advice books, Donald Green and Alan Gerber root their work firmly in rigorous science. Their recommendations emerge from thorough experiments conducted in real electoral settings, examining the impact and effectiveness of door-to-door canvassing, telephone calls, direct mail, and other campaign tactics. Since 1998 the authors have conducted research in over a dozen states, studying a wide range of federal, state, and municipal elections. Their book connects theory with practice, informing campaign professionals and local organizers as well as students of electoral politics. They discover that many GOTV tactics used by campaign managers and political consultants are less effective than is often believed. The authors, relying on rigorous and systematic research, challenge much of the conventional wisdom about what works and what doesn't in the political campaigns. The authors' applied form of political science has won acclaim from scholars and earned the attention of campaign professionals and journalists. This book presents their result for a non-academic audience interested in putting campaign research into practice, and the findings will be surprising to many. Get Out the Vote! will help both consultants and the candidates who use their services better understand the efficacy of campaign methods. It is essential reading in an age of electronic communication, professional electioneering and voter apathy.

Regular Voters, Marginal Voters and the Electoral Effects of Turnout

How do marginal voters differ from regular voters? This article develops a method for comparing the partisan preferences of regular voters to those marginal voters whose turnout decisions are influenced by exogenous factors and applies it to two sources of variation in turnout in the United States—weather and election timing. In both cases, marginal voters are over 20 percentage points more supportive of the Democratic Party than regular voters—a significant divide. The findings suggest that the expansion or contraction of the electorate can have important consequences. Moreover, the findings suggest that election results do not always reflect the preferences of the citizenry, because the marginal citizens who may stay home have systematically different preferences than those who participate. Finally, the methods developed in the article may enable future researchers to compare regular and marginal voters on many different dimensions and in many different electoral settings.