Gubernatorial Elections Research Articles

LASSOing the Governor’s Mansion: A Machine Learning Approach to Forecasting Gubernatorial Elections

LASSOing the Governor’s Mansion: A Machine Learning Approach to Forecasting Gubernatorial Elections

Trade-off Anak Adat Status as a High-cost of Political Transaction in Papua Local Elections

Currently, the political transaction through trade-off anak adat (customary child) status is wider applied in Papua local election. Benefiting from the direct elections, the elites competed for political power in the regions by mobilizing ethno-religious sentiments and utilizing money-politics. The voters, in return, behave as clients as they seek to gain material benefits from their preferred candidates in exchange for political loyalty. This condition caused the high-cost politics during the local election. Based on this problem, this paper attempts to analyze the hijacking of adat (customs) through trade-off anak adat status as a form of political transaction which impacted to high-cost politics. This study cultivates the theory of political transactions to analyze the political transaction in Papua local election especially in the gubernatorial election 2018 and election of DPRD (Regional Representative Council)’s member in 2019. This form of political transaction has caused the high-cost of local election in Papua, which is not only in the form of money, but also carried the social cultural high-cost impact. Of course, vote buying will make the candidates have to spend a lot of money. The trade-off of anak adat status from other than Papuan through buying and selling mechanism rather than using achievement and acknowledgement from the adat community would harm the Papuans. Moreover, this practice has brought detrimental destruction to the socio-cultural values of Papuan adat community. This study is qualitative research that use political approach to observe the local election processes in Papua. We used the criteria of credibility and confirmability to validate the data in our qualitative research.

Public Animo in the 2020 Gubernatorial Election in Central Kalimantan during the Covid-19 Pandemic Era: Religious and Cultural Approaches

Many observers believe that holding general elections during a pandemic is ineffective in attracting public interest, including in Central Kalimantan. This study aimed to examine how the public's animo in the gubernatorial election during the Covid-19 pandemic, through religious and cultural approaches, in which the Central Kalimantan people still respected traditional and religious leaders as role models. This research used descriptive qualitative data collected through interviews with traditional and religious leaders and related documents obtained from election administrators. The findings showed that socialization was a reasonably good tool and strategy carried out by traditional leaders and religious leaders at specific events with cultural (local tradition, Dayak language) and religious approaches (through speech in churches and other religious places of worship). Socialization by traditional and religious leaders contributes to public animo in the gubernatorial election in Central Kalimantan.

DESAIN BALIHO KAMPANYE MAHYELDI - AUDY DI PILGUB SUMBAR 2020 SEKARANG

This study analyzes the design of Mahyeldi - Audy's campaign billboard in the 2020 West Sumatra Gubernatorial Election using a qualitative approach with a literature study method. The analysis focuses on visual elements, typography, symbolism, and visual narratives used in the billboard design. The results show that the billboard design successfully combines traditional Minangkabau elements with a vision of modernity, creating a strong visual narrative about leadership rooted in local values yet oriented towards progress. The use of color, typography, and local symbolism demonstrates a deep understanding of the socio-cultural context of West Sumatra. The design's effectiveness lies in its ability to convey complex campaign messages through an easily digestible visual medium while building an emotional connection with voters. However, this design also raises critical questions about gender representation, identity politicization, and the ethics of visual political communication. This study contributes to the understanding of the role of visual communication in shaping political discourse and influencing voter behavior in an increasingly mature era of local democracy.

Hybrid Movements, Digital Technology, and the Rise and Fall of Far-Right Islamist Protest Mobilization in Indonesia

What explains the rise and fall of far-right Islamist protest mobilization in contemporary Indonesia? The 2016-2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election witnessed significant growth in support for and mobilization of the far-right. While far-right Islamist mobilization has occurred regularly since the fall of the authoritarian Suharto regime in 1998, its longevity and impact on electoral politics has historically been limited. I maintain that the 2016 far-right Islamist protest mobilization was enabled and disabled by the dynamic relationship between hybrid media and hybrid movement strategies. Hybrid thinking serves as a platform for understanding the increasingly diverse and complex nature of Islamist mobilization, generating new ways of exploring some of the classic concerns of social movement studies and technology. Moreover, previous research on the far-right primarily focuses on electoral and party politics, while studies on social movements and technologies often fall into technological determinism, providing only a limited understanding of one of the most pressing issues of our time. This study proposes an innovative analytic strategy to understand the complexity of contemporary Islamist protest mobilization, creating a hybrid movement that effectively spans different movements, constituencies, and institutions, all coexisting within a hybrid media environment that deftly merges elements of old and newer media logics to influence participation, collaboration, and coordination in the spheres of social movements and protest politics.

The Bright Side of Political Uncertainty: The Case of R&D

Abstract We use close gubernatorial elections as a quasi-natural experiment to document a positive effect of political uncertainty on firm-level R&D. This finding is in contrast to the existing literature documenting a negative impact of political uncertainty on capital investment. We examine potential mechanisms and find that our results are consistent with the growth option view of R&D investment. The effect is stronger for politically sensitive and high-tech industries.The results are robust to different proxies for political uncertainty shocks. As predicted by models of investment under uncertainty, the real effects of political uncertainty critically depend on the type of the investment. JEL G18, G38, O31, O32

Political Uncertainty and the Geographic Allocation of Credit: Evidence from Small Businesses

AbstractWe investigate how banks change the geographic distribution of their small business loan portfolio when they face political uncertainty in some of the states where they operate. Using exogenous variation in gubernatorial elections with binding term limits, we show that political uncertainty causes local banks to increase out‐of‐state lending to small firms, particularly those located in higher‐income areas. This effect follows a decrease in local lending and is stronger for banks that are more capital‐constrained. The increase in out‐of‐state credit leads to an increase in employment growth and net firm creation in sectors with larger capital needs.

Investment incentives attract foreign direct investment: evidence from the great recession

Do investment incentives influence private firms’ location decisions? Whereas prior research emphasizes tax incentives, we focus on incentives that require real-time government spending including job training and infrastructure. Real incentives influence where firms invest by resolving costly information asymmetries, and are subject to budget constraints that give rise to political targeting. This paper evaluates how real incentives shape the location decisions of foreign firms, investors who suffer from acute information asymmetries. We leverage features of the Great Recession and the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus, which temporarily increased states’ fiscal capacity to fund real incentives. During the narrow stimulus spending window, states that received more federal Medicaid stimulus—instrumented with the exogenous component of the Act’s funding formula—attracted more foreign direct investment (FDI) and increased state spending on real incentives. The stimulus window approximately coincides with FDI’s temporary geographic expansion into US counties that lacked a history of these investments. On average, these counties had narrow vote margins in the prior gubernatorial election and garnered more state real incentive spending. These correlates are pronounced in counties with idle industrial capacity and in states whose governors sought re-election. Tax incentives had no effect on FDI. These findings have important implications for the efficacy of investment incentives and the political economy of industrial policy.

Political Choices of Muhammadiyah Citizens as a Muslim Minority in the 2018 Bali Governor Election in Indonesia

Purpose: the primary aim of this study is to explore how the Muhammadiyah community in Bali, a minority Muslim group, engaged in the 2018 Bali gubernatorial election to assert and navigate their political identity. This research seeks to understand the impact of their political participation within the broader dynamics of identity politics in a predominantly non-Muslim setting. Theoretical Reference: the study is framed within theories of political identity and political communication, which provide insights into how identities are formed, communicated, and leveraged in political contexts. These theories help elucidate the complex interactions between minority groups and the political environment, particularly in areas where identity politics play a significant role. Method: A qualitative descriptive approach was employed to capture the political preferences and behaviors of Muhammadiyah members during the 2018 gubernatorial election. Data was gathered through interviews, focus groups, and analysis of campaign materials and public statements. This method enabled a detailed and nuanced understanding of the Muhammadiyah community's political engagement. Results and Conclusion: the findings indicate that Muhammadiyah members actively participated in the election, using it as a platform to advocate for their political and social interests. Their engagement was shaped by their minority status and the need to assert their identity in a socio-political landscape dominated by different religious and cultural norms. The election outcomes revealed both the challenges and opportunities faced by Muhammadiyah in navigating identity politics in Bali. Implications of Research: this study highlights the critical role of minority religious communities in shaping political landscapes, even in regions where they do not form the majority. Understanding these dynamics is essential for policymakers, political leaders, and civil society organizations that aim to foster inclusive political processes. It also underscores the importance of effective political communication strategies that cater to diverse communities. Originality/Value: this research contributes to the limited literature on the political behavior of Islamic organizations like Muhammadiyah in regional politics, particularly within non-Muslim majority regions. It offers a unique insight into how identity politics and minority status influence political engagement and communication, adding depth to the discussions on multiculturalism and political inclusion in Southeast Asia.

Oh, the Places They’ll Go: A Geographic Analysis of Gubernatorial Campaigns

Geography has long played a significant role in American electoral politics. Candidates engage in “retail politics” by visiting fairs, festivals, schools, churches, and businesses, to meet and greet potential voters. However, systematically understanding where candidates are actually going has plagued prior work due to small sample sizes and lack of data availability. Presidential elections have been used with success in previous scholarship, but there are few viable candidates to compare within a single cycle. Utilizing competitive gubernatorial elections, this work attempts to address these deficiencies by utilizing social media posts to track multiple candidates in real-time across the 2018 campaign cycle at the state level. The paper tests competing theories of candidate engagement regarding travel decisions: do candidates (1) focus their attention on their partisan base or (2) try to attract independent or “swing” voters? Following an original and intensive data collection effort, we identified location-specific information for over 4700 campaign stops made by major-party candidates across seventeen states. Our results lend support to candidates spending time with their respective bases of partisan support, with Republicans going to rural areas with non-college educated individuals while Democrats travel to urban counties with a more diverse electorate.

Political ‘Colour’ and Firm Behaviour: Evidence from U.S. Power Plants’ Pollution Abatement

We ask whether firms behave differently depending on the political party in charge, above and beyond responding to any actual differences in policy. We use the pollution abatement behaviour of U.S. Steam Electric Power Plants under the Clean Water Act as our case study. Exploiting the variation provided by the outcome of tightly contested gubernatorial elections, we provide causal evidence that large firms respond to the political ‘colour’ of the governor in the state they operate, even when neither the stringency nor the enforcement of the rules depend on it. Within a theoretical model of the interaction between the regulator and the regulated firms, we show that multiple equilibria arise, and the outcomes of the election provide an effective coordination device. This unexpected behaviour has real-world consequences and leads to significant differences in pollution levels.

Hidden contestation: valence issues, methodological blindness and the politics of development in Nigeria

ABSTRACT Political competition in Africa is often characterized as suffering from a number of deficiencies at the level of political discourse and electoral campaigns, which together paint a picture of an essentially vacuous political life. This article contends that these absences are to some degree methodologically generated. If African political actors appear to have little substance to say about the most pressing social and economic issue of the day, then perhaps as scholars of politics we are looking at what they say in the wrong way? This article points to the limitations of an increasingly popular method of discourse analysis in African politics based on coding political statements within a framework that contrasts valence politics with a position-based appeals framework. It argues for an alternative more contextualized, inductive method of analysing political discourse as the struggle to control the meaning of key terms, using the example highly contested gubernatorial election in Nigeria’s southwest. Debates over “stomach infrastructure” and a “hierarchy of needs” reveal the possibility that political discourse and electoral campaigning that on more mechanistic methodologies look devoid of substantive political contestation in fact contain competing conceptions of development and what the state should do.

Optimizing the 2024 Governor Election Quick Count with Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) to Increase Voting Prediction Accuracy

This research aims to increase the accuracy of vote predictions in the Quick Count process in the 2024 Governor Election using the XGBoost algorithm. Quick Count is a fast method for obtaining estimates of election results based on some of the data that has been calculated. The XGBoost algorithm was chosen because it has proven effective in various applications, including predictive modeling. This research analyzes the implementation of the XGBoost algorithm in modeling vote predictions for Quick Count, especially in the context of the 2024 gubernatorial election. By using various evaluation metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, this research provides a comprehensive understanding of the performance of the XGBoost model. The research results show that the XGBoost algorithm achieves high accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score, demonstrating its ability to classify sounds accurately. The practical implications of this research are significant in improving the integrity of the democratic process by providing more reliable and transparent election results. Additionally, this research paves the way for developing more sophisticated Quick Count methods by leveraging insights from previous research on machine learning techniques and data security.

The effect of regime change on entrepreneurship: A real options approach with evidence from US gubernatorial elections

Although political turnover is said to be a healthy component of the business environment, the literature is equivocal about the effects of regime change on early-stage entrepreneurial activity. I present incumbent displacement—the electoral defeat of an incumbent political party's candidate—as a source of regime change, and I analyze how this affects business formation through the lens of real options theory. I test my theory using US gubernatorial elections from 2004 to 2022, leveraging a Regression Discontinuity design to compare changes in business formation trends following elections where a challenger party candidate wins or loses by a close margin. I find that regime change reduces venture creation activity for growth-oriented ventures specifically. I also find evidence of a partial rebound in subsequent months—suggestive that some entrepreneurs delay entry while others permanently abandon their ventures.

The Institute of Gubernatorial Elections as a Marker of Regional Features of the Political Culture of Russians (based on the results of Russian single voting day-2023)

The author examines the institution of elections of heads of subjects of the Russian Federation as a product of political and cultural orientations of both state and political figures of the federal and regional levels of government, and the ordinary citizens. Using comparative and statistical analysis, the relationship between political attitudes and expectations of Russians and the transformation of gubernatorial elections in the period from 1991 to 2022 is explored. The significance of the ethnonational and socio-economic specifics of the political culture of Russians in legitimizing such changes is described. During the analysis of direct gubernatorial elections in 2023, current features of political culture in the context of regions are noted, which may be important in the transformation of the institution of gubernatorial elections. The author compares the results of the gubernatorial campaigns of 2018 and 2023 from the point of view of the landscape of political involvement of Russians and the dynamics of support for federal parties in the regions. The phenomenon of distant electronic voting is analyzed, and the weakness of its perception by residents of Russian regions to ensure accessibility of elections and fair political competition.

Insecurity and Voter Turnout in Governorship Elections in Rivers State, Nigeria

Elections (especially Governorship elections) in Rivers State since 1999 have continued to experience declining curve of voter turnout. Therefore, this study interrogated the effect of insecurity on voter turnout in Rivers State gubernatorial elections from 1999 to 2023. The specific objectives of the study were to; examine the state of insecurity during elections and assess the impact of insecurity on the conduct of elections in Rivers State since 1999. The ‘Structural Functionalism’ theoretical framework was employed in analysing the variables (insecurity, voter turnout, and elections) contained in this work. The qualitative research design method was employed in this paper involving the use of secondary sources of data collection while graphs, charts, simple percentages and tables were used in analysing the generated data. The major research findings were that; elections in Rivers State since 1999 have been characterized by insecurity, declining level of voter turnout due to insecurity in Rivers State; and election-related insecurity is usually caused by desperate members of the political class in connivance with both the State and non-state security actors. In addressing this, the study proposed a number of recommendations including the following; establishment of election offences commission, scaling up of anti-electoral violence advocacy, de-registration of perpetuators of elections insecurity in the voters’ register, and life ban on convicts from political participation, among others.

Land Occupation, Re-occupation, and Housing Cooperative: Commune Formation by Jakarta’s Urban Poor

This article highlights the tension between direct actions and electoral politics to explain the formation of an urban poor settlement, often referred to as a kampungkota, an emerging term for settlements beyond the modern, planned part, in North Jakarta, Indonesia. The authors interpret kampungkota as a commune and unpack the process of commune formation with reference to the experience of Kampung Akuarium into three different yet interconnected parts. The first is direct action through land occupation by the urban poor in the 1980s. The second is direct re-occupation after the 2016 eviction and the joining-up of the settlers with a wider urban poor organization (the commune of communes). The third is the rebuilding and legalization of the commune, which is collectively managed through a housing cooperative, facilitated by a political contract in the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election.

ANALISIS PENODAAN AGAMA DALAM PILKADA DKI JAKARTA TAHUN 2017 BERDASARKAN UNDANG-UNDANG NOMOR 1/PNPS/1965 DAN PANDANGAN MASLAHAH AL MURSALAH

In the case of blasphemy that occurred during the 2017 Jakarta Gubernatorial Election, Law No. 1/PNPS/1965 served as the legal foundation for addressing perpetrators who engaged in acts of blasphemy and according to the concept of Maslahah Al Mursalah aims to ensure that this legal decision not only meets legal requirements but also promotes the welfare of society and maintains interfaith harmony. This paper provides is to examine the regulation of blasphemy in Law No. 1/PNPS/1965 and the correlation of its application in the 2017 Jakarta Gubernatorial Election with the perspective of Maslahah Al Mursalah. The research Results of research (1) The regulation of blasphemy in the 2017 Jakarta Gubernatorial Election based on Law No. 1/PNPS/1965 lacks explicit clarity regarding the definition of blasphemy. (2) The correlation between the application of Law No. 1/PNPS/1965 in the 2017 Jakarta Gubernatorial Election and the perspective of Maslahah Al Mursalah arises in the context of security and law enforcement during the election because of cases of blasphemy. Maslahah Al Mursalah's view on the implementation of the law ensures that legal decisions not only meet legal requirements but also promote the welfare of society and maintain interfaith harmony.

Patterns of Competitiveness in Russian Gubernatorial Elections

AbstractCompetitiveness in electoral authoritarian regimes is compromised by management of the electoral arena through various kinds of manipulation. This study links two dimensions of competitiveness, namely fairness and contestation. We analyze the regional heterogeneity of both dimensions for Russian gubernatorial elections held between 2012 and 2019. To assess competitiveness, we use crowd-sourced electoral observation reports and data from the Central Election Commission. Our analysis reveals significant regional variation in both dimensions. Nevertheless, opposition victories are rare and only occur in exceptional cases. Low levels of electoral malpractices seem to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for close election results. Windows of opportunity for the opposition arise only if the regime misperceives the closeness of the race and if the opposition nominates prominent candidates. Overall, these findings shed light on the complex factors influencing the competitiveness of elections in electoral authoritarian regimes like Russia.

Tell Me an Instagram Story: Ephemeral Communication and the 2018 Gubernatorial Elections

Political campaigns are embracing the visual social media platform Instagram. One digital feature, the Story, has taken over feed sharing across social media. A Story is a sequence of images or videos uploaded to a profile that disappear after 24 hours. The Story is a novel feature relatively unexamined in political communications and marketing research. Specifically, it is unclear how Gubernatorial candidates employ the Instagram Story feature in campaigning. To address this gap, we content analyze 730 Instagram Stories drawn from 20 Gubernatorial candidate accounts one week before and after Election Day 2018. Results reveal that over half of the candidates employed the Story feature over the two-week period. The Story content primarily included indoor rallies and speeches rather than outdoor canvassing. Campaigns featured more static images than video in Stories and rarely used interactive features, such as animation, location tags, and emojis. Stories were also geared toward mobilization messages rather than voter support, behind-the-scenes looks, and attack ads. Last, some gender and political party differences were evident, as women and Democratic candidates utilized Instagram more.