Individual Voting Behavior Research Articles

Treiber, Hubert (2021). Die „rückwärtsgewandte Expertenreform“ – Eine verwaltungswissenschaftliche Studie zur Großen Strafrechtsreform der 1950er Jahre. Halle an der Saale: Universitätsverlag Halle-Wittenberg. 169 Seiten. ISBN: 978-3-86977-244-8.

The empirical study applies cluster analyses to records of the commission on criminal justice reform. By analysing discrepancies in the individual voting behaviour of the commission members, the study identifies distinct clusters which coincide with the commission members’ professional background: While the commission members with a scientific background hardly ever form a homogenous group, commission members who practice law e. g. as judges or who are public servants show a more consistent behaviour. This is attributed to the distinct role perceptions within the respective profession. Overall, the commission members represented mostly conservative values, leading to a criminal justice reform with strong reference to previous drafts. With this in mind, the book furthermore analyses rhetorical strategies used within the legal profession to obscure a person’s involvement in the Nazi-Regime.

Identifying the economic determinants of individual voting behaviour in UK general elections

Abstract We explore the economic determinants of individual voting behaviour in five UK electoral cycles during 1992–2014. Using the Understanding Society and the British Household Panel Surveys, we investigate the importance of political sentiments and subjective economic evaluations disentangling persistence of party support and unobserved heterogeneity effects. We estimate joint dynamic tripartite models of party support and egocentric perceptions of current and prospective finances, permitting longitudinal simultaneous determination of perceptions of personal finances and political preferences. The results validate the economic voting hypothesis in cycles adjacent to economic downturns: support for the governing political party is positively related to individual perceptions of own financial well-being. Failing to account for simultaneity and not accounting for dynamics and initial political party support inflate the impact of personal financial evaluations.

Local public spending, electoral consensus, and sustainable structural change

This paper explores electoral consensus regarding local public spending as a way for policymakers, particularly in western democracies, to secure long-term electoral support to govern the sustainability of structural change. Public spending is perceived by local electoral constituencies as immediately affecting people's lives and thus strongly influences individual voting behaviour. Focusing on the case of Italy, this paper explores the electoral consensus–public spending nexus on the municipal level. The results show that, on average, an increase in local public spending is associated with a reduction in electoral consensus towards anti-system parties, whereas an increase in local public spending does not yield a significant raise in electoral consensus for pro-system parties. We find nevertheless heterogeneous effects across different geographical areas and spending categories for both anti-system and pro-system party consensus. The results yield insights for scholarly debate and implications for policymaking to garner the electoral consensus needed for sustainable structural change.

Mobilizing for what? Polarized citizens and electoral turnout in transitioning Tunisia

ABSTRACT In countries that have recently transitioned to democracy, what factors most drive citizens to mobilize and participate in early elections? Many comparative studies on democratization and elections stress the vital importance of early elections in new democracies – with voter turnout inexorably linked to a democracy’s long-term stability and legitimacy – however, much of this literature focuses on aggregate rather than individual-level behaviour, and very little targets the Middle East/North Africa region. This study closely examines individual voting behaviour in democratizing Tunisia’s critical second election in 2014. We argue that amidst great uncertainty, the polarizing issues of national and political identity created systematic disparities in participation – with the most ideologically polarized citizens/social groups more likely to vote. Using original data from a survey conducted in Tunisia right after its November 2014 elections, we find that Tunisians were sharply divided in their support for democracy, the previous regime, and Islamic governance. Specifically, Tunisians who were more ideologically polarized along its secular-Islamist divide and those more satisfied with the new democratic system were more likely to vote – overall suggesting somewhat uneven electoral participation in this critical election and, therefore, the potential for the kind of instability conducive to democratic breakdown.

Can citizens guess how other citizens voted based on demographic characteristics?

AbstractHow well do citizens understand the associations between social groups and political divisions in their societies? Previous research has indicated systematic biases in how the demographic composition of party supporters are perceived, but this need not imply that citizens misperceive the likely voting behavior of specific individuals. We report results from two experiments where subjects were provided with randomly selected demographic profiles of respondents to the 2017 British Election Study (BES) and then asked to assess either (1) which party that individual was likely to have voted for in the 2017 UK election or (2) whether that individual was likely to have voted Leave or Remain in the 2016 UK referendum on EU membership. We find that, despite substantial overconfidence in individual responses, on average citizens’ guesses broadly reflect the actual distribution of groups supporting the parties and referendum positions.

Populism in an Identity Framework: A Feedback Model

Abstract Drawing upon the social psychology concept of identity entrepreneurs (Haslam et al., 2010), we develop a feedback model between politicians and the public that strongly emphasizes the circumstances in which public opinion may facilitate populist discursive elements and politics. We thus consider the success of populism as neither inherently driven by political leaders nor primarily driven by increasing populist attitudes in the public and acknowledge the fragmented nature of the populist discourse emphasized by recent studies. We raise the question of whether there is a populist collective identity, which is accountable in terms of populist rhetorical elements, and how it changes over time. To answer this question, we apply the proposed framework to the case of the rise and development of the populist discourse in Switzerland while accounting for its dynamic adaptation to raising public concerns and for the influence of its core rhetorical elements on individual voting behavior.

Environmental Issues in Recent British and Canadian Elections

ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES IN RECENT BRITISH AND CANADIAN ELECTIONS
 
 The 2019 elections in Britain and Canada illustrate the difficulties in communication between a concerned public and prospective office-holders on the most critical set of issues of our times. An increased level of public awareness and concern about the state of the environment has been expressed in public opinion polls, social movement activity has increased, and Green parties have expanded their appeal. Despite these developments in recent years, environmental issues have not been able to exert a major impact on individual voting behaviour in elections, or on overall election outcomes. Issues related to the environment are usually treated, by both politicians and the public, in valence terms. Valence issues are ones upon which there is broad consensus about the goals of public policy, and political debate focuses not on "what to accomplish" but rather on "how to do it" and "who is best able." Regarding the environment, general formulations like global warming and climate change prompt politicians to offer concerned rhetoric and engage in virtue signaling, but specific policy proposals are often absent. 
 This paper examines four reasons why environmental/climate change issues did not have a major impact on the 2019 Canadian and British elections. First, environmental concern in society at large was imperfectly translated into election issues. Second, the major political parties produced inadequate and unconvincing environmental manifestos. Third, environmental issues were not central to most voting decisions. Fourth, environmental issues had limited impacts on election outcomes.

A SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF PARTY LEADERSHIP INFLUENCING VOTING BEHAVIOR IN TRADITIONAL COMMUNITIES OF KHYBER PAKHTUNKHWA DISTRICT DIR UPPER

Purpose of the study: Voting Behavior is the combination of social, psychological, and attitudinal factors leading to a vote in an election. Thus, the central aim of the current research study was to analyze the influence of party leadership on voting behavior.
 Methodology: Due to the diverse picture of the study area, a multistage stratified sampling technique was used to get more reliable information from 317 sample respondents including (212 males and 105 females). Data was collected through a pre-tested interview schedule; to determine the association between the dependent variable (voting behavior) and independent variable (party leadership) chi-square test was applied.
 Main findings: The association of voting behavior was significant between voting behavior and preference of local leaders in the election (P=0.024), leader’s inspiration in voters’ constituency is counted in the electoral process (P=0.011), those leaders who work for public welfare (P=0.000), past performance of the leaders is your major concern (P=0.001), to influence voters by all means (P=0.048), commitment and devotion of the leaders (P=0.040) and dynamic leaders are symbols of development for society (P=0.554).
 Applications of this study: Results as a whole indicate a significant role of party leadership in influencing voters. People generally cast vote to candidates who are local, have influence in the constituencies and did public welfare schemes in past and shows commitment and devotion. The findings of the study will be helpful in policymaking.
 Novelty/Originality of this study: This study attempts to explore new factors that contributed to individual voting behavior. Further, the present paper is unique in the sense that it is based on opinions and responses collected directly from the voters in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan.

The impact of bailouts on political turnover and sovereign default risk

This paper develops a stochastic dynamic politico-economic model of sovereign debt to analyze the impact of bailouts on political turnover and sovereign default risk. We consider a small open economy in which the government has access to official loans conditional on the implementation of austerity policies. There is a two-party system in which both parties care about the population’s welfare but differ in an exogenous utility cost of default. Political turnover is the endogenous outcome of the individual voting behavior. In a quantitative application to the Greek economy, we find that bailouts amplify political turnover risk, which, in turn, elevates sovereign interest spreads. While stricter conditionality fosters the probability of political turnover and sovereign default in the short run, it may mitigate political turnover and default risk in the long run. The frequency of political turnover is U-shaped in the strength of conditionality.

Partisanship does not tell the full story: The complexities of public opinion and fracking in the United States

Although party affiliation is a strong predictor of differences in citizen opinion about a wide range of public policy issues, the picture is more complex for unconventional gas development (UGD) through hydraulic fracturing. Using data collected in Colorado (n = 390) around the time of the highly polarizing 2016 Presidential Election, we conduct a latent class analysis based on individual perceptions of the possible risks and benefits of UGD. Instead of finding attitudes polarized along party lines, citizens in Colorado parsimoniously cluster into three substantially sized groups that cannot be explained by party identification and sociodemographic variables. We also test the value of group membership by assessing association with individual voting behavior at the hypothetical ballot box using language from actual measures filed for placement onto the 2016 Statewide Ballot in Colorado. Results suggest that attitudes toward UGD may be better explained by perceptions of potential costs/disadvantages and benefits/advantages rather than traditional sociodemographic and political party variables. This suggests that understanding public opinion on fracking means moving beyond our traditional conceptualization of opinion formation, even in today’s politically polarized environment.

Where do hawks and doves fly when shots are fired?

This paper explores the diverging electoral impact of instigating high-hostility militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) on the votes shares of hawkish, right-wing and dovish, left-wing incumbents, respectively. More specifically, I propose that deploying troops electorally harms doves and benefits hawks. I test this hypothesis via two studies. Study-1 presents a macro-level analysis of an incumbent’s electoral performance in a dataset covering 389 elections in 27 democratic countries between 1950 and 2010. With the objective of capturing heterogeneity of individual voting behavior at the appropriate level, Study-2 scrutinizes cross-national survey results from Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) covering 19 elections in 6 democracies. Multilevel models across both studies concur that in times of conflict, voters become significantly less supportive of dovish, left-wing incumbents and slightly more so of hawkish, right-wing ones compared to times of peace. The results also suggest that doves lose particularly substantial support from their co-partisans and ideologically left leaners.

How do coalition signals shape voting behavior? Revealing the mediating role of coalition expectations

Existing empirical research suggests that there are two mechanisms through which pre-electoral coalition signals shape voting behavior. According to these, coalition signals both shift the perceived ideological positions of parties and prime coalition considerations at the cost of party considerations. The work at hand is the first to test another possibility of how coalition signals affect voting. This coalition expectation mechanism claims that coalition signals affect voting decisions by changing voters' expectations about which coalitions are likely to form after the election. Moreover, this paper provides the first integrative overview of all three mechanisms that link coalition signals and individual voting behavior. Results from a survey experiment conducted during Sweden's 2018 general election suggest that the coalition expectation mechanism can indeed be at work. By showing how parties' pre-electoral coalition behavior enter a voter's decision calculus, the paper provides important insights for the literature on strategic voting theories in proportional systems.

The company you keep: Satisfaction with life, economic freedom, and preference-policy mismatch

We examine the interaction between individual preferences for markets and state-level economic freedom as it relates to Satisfaction with Life (SWL). Fundamental tenets of economic freedom assert that societies free of excessive government involvement are wealthier and, ultimately, happier; individuals who are allowed to pursue self-interest are argued to be more motivated and more productive, and so society as a whole is better off. Though there is substantial empirical evidence that freer societies are wealthier, the evidence connecting economic freedom and happiness is less clear. We explore the relationship between economic freedom and SWL at the individual level. We examine differences between personal preferences for free markets and state policy and how this ‘preference-policy mismatch’ is related to SWL. We then briefly examine the relationship between preference-policy mismatches and individual self-reported voting behavior, including implications for Tiebout sorting. This study is the first to focus on individual economic ideology, i.e. individual level of support for free markets, and SWL in the United States. Combining individual and state level data we offer improvements to prior studies in a number of areas including an enhanced measure of life satisfaction, a richer basis for examining left-right differences than simple political identification, and an examination of the effect of preference-policy mismatches on satisfaction with life. We find significant relationships between SWL and individual support for markets, state-level economic freedom, and preference-policy mismatch. Further, preference-policy mismatch is positively associated with self-reported voting frequency. We find little support for Tiebout sorting.

Committee Decision-Making Under the Threat of Leaks

Leaks are pervasive in politics. Hence, many committees that nominally operate under secrecy de facto operate under the threat that information might be passed on to outsiders. We study theoretically and experimentally how this possibility affects the behavior of committee members and the decision-making accuracy. Our theoretical analysis generates two major predictions. First, a committee operating under the threat of leaks is equivalent to a formally transparent committee in terms of the probabilities of project implementation as well as welfare (despite differences in individual voting behavior). Second, the threat of leaks causes a committee to recommend rejection of a project whenever precise information has been shared among committee members. As a consequence, a status-quo bias arises. Our laboratory results confirm these predictions despite subjects communicating less strategically than predicted.

Moral Transgressions by Groups: What Drives Individual Voting Behavior?

We conduct an experiment where subjects are matched in groups of three and vote on a moral transgression. Analyzing different voting rules, the frequency of votes for the moral transgression increases with the number of votes required for it. This effect persists when considering pivotal votes only, which eliminates opportunities to save on own moral costs and to rely instead on sufficiently many votes for the transgression by other group members. A series of novel treatments allows us to identify guilt sharing and preferences for consensual voting as empirically relevant and independent drivers of voting behavior.

Moral Transgressions by Groups: What Drives Individual Voting Behavior?

We conduct an experiment where subjects are matched in groups of three and vote on a moral transgression. Analyzing different voting rules, the frequency of votes for the moral transgression increases with the number of votes required for it. This effect persists when considering pivotal votes only, which eliminates opportunities to save on own moral costs and to rely instead on sufficiently many votes for the transgression by other group members. A series of novel treatments allows us to identify guilt sharing and preferences for consensual voting as empirically relevant and independent drivers of voting behavior.

Immigration and voting for redistribution: Evidence from European elections

In this paper we document the impact of immigration on political support for welfare state expansion, using national election data of twelve European countries between 2007 and 2016. We match individual information on party voting with a classification of the political agenda of 126 parties during 28 elections. We first investigate the impact of local immigration on individual voting behavior, keeping the political platform of parties fixed. We then shift focus from voters to political parties, and investigate how immigration affects the political agenda of European parties. To attenuate omitted variable and selection bias concerns, we implement an instrumental variable approach that exploits cross-regional variation of immigrant settlements in 2005, along with the skill and nationality composition of recent immigrant flows. We find that larger inflows of highly educated immigrants are associated with European citizens shifting their votes toward parties that favor expansion of the welfare state. On the other hand, inflows of less educated immigrants induce European parties to endorse platforms less favourable to social welfare.

VOTING AND SOCIAL PRESSURE UNDER IMPERFECT INFORMATION

AbstractWe develop a model in which costly voting in a large, two‐party election is a sequentially rational choice of strategic, self‐interested players who can reward fellow voters by forming stronger ties in a network formation coordination game. The predictions match a variety of stylized facts, including explaining why an individual's voting behavior may depend on what she knows about her friends' actions. Players have imperfect information about others' voting behavior, and we find that some degree of privacy may be necessary for voting in equilibrium, enabling hypocritical but useful social pressure. Our framework applies to any costly prosocial behavior.

Roll-Call Votes in the German Bundestag: A New Dataset, 1949–2013

This letter introduces a comprehensive data collection on roll-call votes (RCVs) in the German Bundestag between 1949 and 2013. RCVs are one of the most important data sources on parliamentary behavior. Beyond producing legislative output, RCVs put the positions of Members of Parliament (MPs) and party groups on the public record, serve party leaders as an instrument with which to monitor backbench behavior, and enable opposition parties to obstruct parliamentary business (Saalfeld 1995a). RCVs from various parliaments have been used to investigate, among others, party competition and legislative coalition formation, the strategic behavior of individual MPs and legislative parties, party unity and intraparty politics, and MP responsiveness to voters and other outside interests (for example, Carey 2007; Carrubba, Gabel and Hug 2008; Eggers and Spirling 2016; Hix 2004; Hix and Noury 2016; Poole and Rosenthal 1997). Empirical research can rely on comprehensive longitudinal roll-call data for a number of countries, most notably the US Congress (for example, Lewis et al. 2017; Poole and Rosenthal 1997),1 the European Parliament (Hix, Noury and Roland 2005), and the British House of Commons (for example, Eggers and Spirling 2016; Norton 1975); on some cross-country comparative datasets for shorter periods of time (Carey 2007; Coman 2015; Hix and Noury 2016; Sieberer 2006); and on numerous contemporary and historical single-country datasets.2 For the German Bundestag, RCV data has thus far only been available for limited periods of time (Ohmura 2014b; Saalfeld 1995b; Sieberer 2010; Stratmann 2006). At the same time, the Bundestag is an attractive parliament to study. It is one of the most powerful legislatures in a parliamentary democracy (Sieberer 2011); its internal organization is rather elaborate (Saalfeld 2000); and its mixed electoral system offers attractive opportunities to analyze one of the most fundamental aspects of legislative behavior: the effect of electoral rules on legislative voting (for example, Manow 2015; Sieberer 2010; Sieberer 2015). The datasets described here contain information on individual voting behavior and a wide array of variables that characterize the MPs and RCVs they voted on. The data are freely available to the academic community at Harvard Dataverse.3 In this letter, we describe the structure of the datasets, present descriptive information on key variables and discuss potential research questions to be addressed with the data.

Complex ballot propositions, individual voting behavior, and status quo bias

One concern about direct democracy is that citizens may not be sufficiently competent to decide about complex policies. This may lead to exaggerated conservatism in the voting decision (status quo bias). To investigate how complexity affects individual voting behavior, we develop a novel measure of proposition complexity (using official pre-referendum booklets) and combine it with post-referendum survey data from Switzerland. Using Heckman selection estimations to account for endogenous variation in participation rates, we find that an increase in proposition complexity from the 10th to the 90th percentile would decrease voters' approval by 5.6 ppts, which is often decisive: an additional 12% of the propositions in our sample would be rejected.