General Election Outcomes Research Articles

The Outlier State: Alaska’s FY 2012 Budget

DOI 10.1515/cjpp-2012-0027 Calif. J. Politics Policy 2012; 4(3): 2–38 Research Article Jerry McBeath* and Tanya Buhler Corbin The Outlier State: Alaska’s FY 2012 Budget Abstract: This report discusses the Alaska economy in 2010 and 2011, reviews demographic and workforce changes, and surveys the 2010 primary and general election outcomes. It discusses state issues with federal connections, and then analyzes the FY 2012 budget process (the governor’s requested budgets and legi­slative responses extending into a special session. The state entered FY 2012 with a substantial budget surplus, unlike most other states. Keywords: Alaska Permanent Fund; natural gas pipe line; oil prices; petroleum production tax (ACES); redistricting *Corresponding author: Jerry McBeath, Department of Political Science, University of Alaska Fairbanks, PO Box 756420, Fairbanks, AK, USA Tanya Buhler Corbin: Department of Political Science, Radford University, PO Box 6945, Radford, VA, USA 1 Introduction Alaska is a non-contiguous state of the American union. Certainly, it differs from all other American states in its revenue sources and expenditures. This paper describes the fiscal policy process explaining the Alaska FY 2012 budget plan, and covers the period from July 1, 2010 until the end of August, 2011. The report begins with a discussion of the state’s economy in 2010 and the first eight months of 2011, provides an overview of the demographic and workforce changes in the previous year, and then surveys the 2010 primary and general election outcomes. Next, we discuss the state issues with federal connections tracked in this report over the last dozen years. Central to this report is an analysis of the FY 2012 budget process, including the governor’s requested budget (operating, supplemental, and capital), legislative responses, and the extension of debate into two special sessions. A special section examines the main fiscal issue of the legislative session – Governor Parnell’s proposed reform of the state’s oil taxation regime. The report presents the final FY 2012 budget, with explanations of changes from the previous year. Alaska entered FY 2012 with a substantial budget surplus, unlike most of the other states. The plan for this year’s expenditures is positive, and no major

Universal Party Primaries and General Election Outcomes: The Case of Uruguay (1999-2009)

*What would happen if all parties competing in the electoral game were forced to hold open, binding, concurrent and obligatory primaries constrained by a ‘Sore Loser Law’? The answer to this question has not been explored, perhaps because there is only one democracy in the world that has applied such rules more than once: Uruguay. This country offers a fertile ground for testing some of the hypotheses developed by the literature. This research supports the hypotheses that (i) candidates selected in primary elections with more than one candidate are likely to be the ones located farthest away from the median voter, but closer to the party’s constituents and (ii) there is an optimal level of competitiveness in primaries, beyond which either higher or lower competition can damage the party in the corresponding general elections. The implications of this study have relevant bearing on critical questions that academics, politicians and political reformers regularly ask about primaries, not only in the UK, but also elsewhere.

Spending, Contacting, and Voting: The 2010 British General Election in the Constituencies

A substantial body of recent research has uncovered the impact of constituency campaigns on British general election outcomes, using the published returns of candidates' spending as a proxy measure for their campaigns' intensity—the more spent, the greater the intensity of the local campaign, and the greater the intensity of campaigning, the better their performance in the constituency, and the poorer their opponents' performance. These data refer only to the last few weeks before the election, however, and cannot identify how spending affects behaviour. For the latter, it is argued that spending is a proxy measure for the amount of contact between candidates and voters; the greater the amount spent the greater the probability that an elector contacted will vote for the relevant party. It has been difficult to evaluate this argument until the 2010 general election, however, for which the availability of a large panel survey that includes information on those contacts allows a full assessment of the hypothesis. The results show that the more spent in a constituency the greater the volume and range of contacts there, which in turn increases the probability of individuals voting for the party concerned.

Analysing multiparty competition in plurality rule elections

The study of general election outcomes can be helped by finding better approaches for visualizing large quantities of information and asking questions about its patterning. We review the Nagayama or ‘all possibilities' triangle display, and show that it can only legitimately be used to show an overall ‘field’ of results that is logically feasible, called the effective space of competition, which varies with the number of observable parties. We apply this reductionist view to analysing outcomes in three leading plurality rule systems (the USA, India and Great Britain), focusing on evidence of the Duvergerian psychological effect acting on voters during campaign periods. The Effective Competition Space view illuminates some key differences across countries, and variations with rising numbers of parties competing. We next consider a more holistic approach, the ‘crown’ diagram, which links electoral district outcomes more closely to the most important politico-ideological dimension in each country. Both views suggest some tentative evolutionary hypotheses for the variegated development of plurality rule systems over time. Britain is a highly nationalized party system, but one that has moved substantially away from Duvergerian predictions of two-party focusing, and towards multiparty politics. The USA seems to be a case of ‘stunted development’. India shows a partial Duvergerian conformity, yet combined with a substantial vertical scatter of non-Duvergerian results. Applications to over-time and regional analysis within countries are also sketched.

The Moving Centre: Preferences for Government Activity in Britain, 1950–2005

The political ‘centre’ is often discussed in debates about public policy and analyses of party strategies and election outcomes. Yet, to date, there has been little effort to estimate the political centre outside the United States. This article outlines a method of estimating the political centre using public opinion data collected for the period between 1950 and 2005. It is demonstrated that it is possible to measure the centre in Britain, that it moves over time, that it shifts in response to government activity and, furthermore, that it has an observable association with general election outcomes.

More Democracy: The Direct Primary and Competition in U.S. Elections

This article offers a first-ever comprehensive empirical assessment of a key Progressive reform, the direct primary, and its impact on competition in American elections. We begin with a review of the problems Progressives diagnosed in the American electoral system and reasons to expect the direct primary to be a pro-competitive, democratizing reform. We then consider prior research into the direct primary and electoral contestation and describe the database of primary and general election outcomes that we have constructed to trace competition in primaries for federal and statewide offices. Finally, we examine the historical trajectory of competition in primary elections, starting with the first decades after the introduction of the reform and then the succeeding decades.Consistent with the hopes of reformers, we find primary elections indeed provided a forum for contestation for federal and statewide elections. Although primaries were never broadly competitive, even at the outset, they accounted for about a third of the serious electoral tests faced by statewide officeholders and about a fifth faced by U.S. representatives. The role of primaries as a venue for robust contestation, however, was short-lived, as the competitiveness of federal and statewide primaries decreased sharply starting in the 1940s. The last section of this article explores whether two recent developments in American elections—the extension of two-party competition and the rise in the value of incumbency—conspired to temper the contribution of direct primaries to electoral competition.

Special Elections to the U.S. House of Representatives: A General Election Barometer?

Vacancies in the U.S. House of Representatives are filled using special elections. These elections occur off the usual American electoral cycle, and their results are routinely portrayed by the American mass media as indications of what to expect in the next general election. We examined the predictive power of special elections results with respect to the general election outcomes for the U.S. House of Representatives from 1900 to 2008. We found that special elections that yield a change in partisan control do have predictive power regarding general election results.

Partisan Dealignment, Party Attachments and Leader Effects

This paper takes issue with the widespread assumption of constancy in the meaning and measurement of party identification over time and space. It holds that the partisan dealignment common to established democracies has eroded the validity of the Michigan scale’s assumption that voters can identify with only one party, arguing instead that dealignment can encourage secondary attachments to other parties. To persist with an exclusivist conceptualization of party identification under these conditions is shown to risk the misspecification of voting models since the effects of these secondary attachments can be misleadingly attributed to short‐term influences, like leaders, associated with those parties. The dynamics of the voting decision can thereby be seriously distorted. The force of this argument is demonstrated through a comparison of general election outcomes in relatively aligned Australia and relatively dealigned Great Britain.

The March 2009 Local Elections in Turkey: A Signal for Takers or the Inevitable Beginning of the End for AKP?

The article offers a descriptive geographic account of the March 2009 local elections in Turkey. Cluster analysis is employed to investigate the results and changing voting patterns compared with the 2004 local government elections. AKP has stalled but remains the dominant party in the system. The electoral map indicates three main regions: the coastal western and most developed provinces where the opposition is strong, the east and southeastern provinces with rising Kurdish ethnic electoral support, and the more conservative provinces in between where the governing AKP remains dominant with the nationalist MHP trailing behind. Economic developments and the potential reshaping of ethnic Kurdish support will shape the next general election outcome.

The Importance of Race and Ethnicity in Congressional Primary Elections

Research regarding the electoral importance of race and ethnicity in congressional elections is limited by the overwhelming focus on general-election outcomes. This article seeks to extend this research by examining minority candidate emergence and electoral competition in U.S. House primary elections, using a new data set on all U.S. House contests between 1994 and 2004 that includes demographic information on all the candidates in the primary elections. The results indicate that district-level race and ethnicity are associated with minority candidate emergence; furthermore, the presence of minority candidates influences electoral competitiveness in primary elections.

Primary Elections and Candidate Ideology: Out of Step with the Primary Electorate?

This article draws on a new dataset of House primary‐ and general‐election outcomes (1956–98) to examine the relationship between primary elections and candidate ideology. We show that, like presidential candidates, congressional candidates face a strategic‐positioning dilemma: should they align themselves with their general‐ or primary‐election constituencies? Relative to general‐election voters, primary voters favor more ideologically extreme candidates. We show that congressional candidates handle the dilemma by positioning themselves closer to the primary electorate. This article thus supports the idea that primaries pull candidates away from median district preferences.

How Voters Evaluate Economic Competence: A Comparison between Parties in and out of Power

Accounts of general election outcomes increasingly talk about voters comparing parties in terms of their perceived competence to manage the economy and public services. This raises the question of how voters form evaluations of party competence. While it is assumed that voters form evaluations of the incumbent based on the signals provided by its current performance in office it is less clear how, in the absence of such a performance record, voters might evaluate the potential competence of the opposition. Using data from the British Election Panel Studies this article models the process by which voters form evaluations of parties' competence to manage the economy and compares results across incumbent and opposition parties. On the basis of evidence from general elections of 1992–2001 the article demonstrates that the process of evaluation formation does differ between parties in and out of power with retrospective evaluations of recent economic performance influencing evaluations of the former but not the latter. Nevertheless, the article also demonstrates that voters are capable of forming evaluations of the opposition which are more than a simple mirror image of their evaluations of the incumbent. In the absence of an up-to-date performance record these evaluations are based on long-term partisan and ideological predispositions and the cues provided by party leaders.

The Italian election of May 2006: Myths and realities

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The figures in Table 1 show a difference, excluding the overseas constituency, of 25,224 votes; 24,755 is the official figure announced by the Court of Cassation after the scrutiny of contested ballots. The difference for the Senate, taken from the figures given at http://www.repubblica.it/speciale/2006/elezioni/senato/index.html, includes the overseas constituency. 2. Recent narrow victories include the Israeli Knesset contest of 1981 (which saw Likud party beat Labour by just 10,405 votes); the US presidential contest of 2000 (decided by just 537 votes in the state of Florida); the German federal election in 2005 (when the CDU/CSU emerged ahead of the SPD by just 1% of the vote). Nor is it unheard of that the party that loses in terms of votes nevertheless wins in terms of seats. If this is what happened in the case of the 2006 Italian Senate contest, then the outcome was one to be placed alongside one US presidential outcome and two British general election outcomes since the war. 3. FI's vote declined from the 29.5% it had won in 2001 to 21.0% while both the UDC and the League saw their vote shares rise (to 5.0% and 5.9% respectively). Meanwhile, the parties of the centre-left made only modest gains to take 46.1% in 2004. 4. Those elections were a disaster for the Cdl: the governing coalition emerged the loser in 12 of the 14 regions where voting took place; took 12,220,858 votes (43.9%) as against the centre left's 14,632,412 (52.6%), and lost control of six of the eight regions it had won in 2000. 5. It won in terms of seats in 1996 only because the centre-right's vote was split.

Unintended Consequences: Anticipation of General Election Outcomes And Primary Election Divisiveness

This article offers the first theory to explain the relationship between primary election divisiveness and general election outcomes that is grounded in candidates' own behavior. Conventional wisdom holds that divisive primaries cause candidates to do poorly in general elections. I show that primary divisiveness does not cause this or any other pattern of general election results. Rather, expectations about general election results cause primaries to be divisive. Non-incumbents enter races they think they can win, and they think they can win where the incumbent is vulnerable. More candidates enter those races than others, splitting the vote among them. This stampede creates divisive primaries in which incumbents are most likely to do poorly, and challengers well, in the general elections. As a result, divisiveness is associated with (but does not cause) better general election performances among challengers and worse performances among incumbents. In this manner, primary divisiveness is an unintended consequence of behavior directed towards the goal of winning the general election. I tested these propositions using data from major-party House primaries between 1976 and 1998 and found that (a) candidate expectations of victory determine when and where divisive primary elections occur, (b) those expectations drive the correlation between primary divisiveness and general election results, and (c) primary divisiveness correlates with incumbents doing poorly, and challengers well, in general elections.

Forecasting Seats from Votes in British General Elections

This article develops a forecasting model of seat shares in the House of Commons applied to general election outcomes. The model utilises past information about party seat shares, together with data from the polls gathered prior to the election, to forecast the number of seats won by the parties. Once it has been estimated the model will be used to make a forecast of the outcome of a possible general election in May 2005. The article starts by focusing on research into translating votes into seats, or the cube rule and its modifications. It then goes on to develop the forecasting model, which is based on electoral and poll data from 1945 to 2001.

Divisive Primaries And The House District Vote

The verdict on the divisive primary hypothesis has fluctuated as investigators have pursued a variety of theoretical and methodological debates. Although most recent studies find that divisive primaries harm general election outcomes, some claim that this effect is spurious, an artifact of uncontrolled electoral prospects phenomena. I argue that this claim is debatable because it rests on questionable conceptual and model constructs and evidence inconsistent with an investigation that controls for the phenomena central to the spurious effect claim. Instead, I show that null and alternative hypothesis findings turn on an unfeatured design characteristic, pooling election years. After controlling for phenomena central to the spurious effect claim and pooling election years, I extend the divisive primary hypothesis to the arena currently void of evidentiary support: elections to the House of Representatives. In addition, I find that the divisive primary penalty is asymmetric, applying in incumbent but not open-seat races.

The Effects Of Primary Divisiveness On General Election Outcomes In State Legislative Elections

Does a divisive primary contest harm a candidate’s chances in the general election? This question is addressed in an analysis of legislative campaigns in nine states during the 1994 and 1996 election cycles. Findings indicate that primary divisiveness does affect general election outcomes but in the opposite direction than anticipated. Greater divisiveness in a candidate’s primary leads to a higher vote share in the general election. Similarly, greater divisiveness in a general election opponent’s primary leads to a candidate receiving a lower vote share. Simply the presence of a primary challenge is found to exert a substantial positive influence for a candidate in the general election, particularly in open seat contests. Such counterintuitive results are attributed to the low levels of information that voters typically possess about state legislative primaries and to the strategic decisions of candidates who seek legislative office.

The Impact of Negative Campaigning: Evidence from the 1998 Senatorial Primaries

We investigate the amount of negative campaigning in the 1998 senato- rial primaries and the ramifications of negative campaigning on primary turnout and general election outcomes. A large literature has developed to show whether primary divisiveness has significant consequences for electoral outcomes, though we do not have much knowledge about what primary divisiveness entails (Bernstein 1977: 540). We employ a holistic measure of campaign negativity measured by coding newspaper articles three months prior to the primary to uncover how much negativity exists in senatorial primaries, which campaigns turn negative, and the relation- ship between primary negativity and several campaign factors. We find that primary divisiveness is strongly related to campaign negativity, neg- ativity boosts primary turnout, while divisiveness depletes a nominee's general election fortunes.

Perceptions of negative political advertising: meaningful or menacing? An empirical study of the 1997 British General Election Campaign

The electorate are increasingly volatile in terms of their voting behaviour, and this presents valuable opportunities for the marketing discipline to offer the world of politics new insights and strategies. This paper suggests that those with little brand loyalty, who ultimately determine the outcome of general elections, perceive and use political advertising, particularly the genre commonly described as ‘negative’, in very different ways to the ‘politically active’. It argues for a more sophisticated approach to segmentation of political audiences based on prior involvement levels. It also offers support for the continued use of some forms of negative advertising with a number of important caveats.

Divisive Primaries and General Election Outcomes: Another Look at Presidental Campaigns

Theory: The divisive primary hypothesis asserts that the more divisive the presidential primary contest compared to that of the other party the fewer votes received in the general election. Thus the party candidate with the most divisive primary will have a more difficult general election fight. However, studies at the presidential level have failed to consider candidate quality, prior vulnerability of the incumbent president or his party, the national nature of the presidential race, and the unique context of each presidential election campaign. Once these factors are taken into account presidential primaries should have a more marginal or even nonexistent effect in understanding general election outcomes. Hypothesis: Including appropriate controls for election year context in a state-by-state model and creating a national model that controls for election year context, candidate quality, and the nature of the times should diminish the effect of nomination divisiveness on general election outcomes. Methods: Regression analysis is used to examine the effect of presidential divisive nomination campaigns on general election outcomes. Results: Once election year context in the state-by-state model is controlled for, divisiveness has a much more modest effect. This modest effect does not appear to change general election outcomes. In addition, the election year model, which posits that presidential elections are national elections and not state-by-state elections, indicated that divisiveness was not significantly different from zero.