Local Vote Research Articles

When Do Voters See Fraud? Evaluating the Effects of Poll Supervision on Perceptions of Integrity

Abstract What shapes voter perceptions of election outcomes? Recent disputes in Malawi and Kenya highlight the vulnerability of local vote counts to accusations of malfeasance, which often generate negative public perceptions of vote reliability. Election monitoring in these countries is thought to crucially affect both the quality of the election and voters’ perceptions of the same. To date, most research on this topic has focused on the effect of non-partisan electoral observers. However, in many countries, two other interest groups also monitor the vote-counting process: political party agents and government election officials. Does the presence of these actors also affect voter perceptions of election integrity? To answer this question, I conducted a conjoint experiment in Malawi and Kenya in which voters evaluate the reliability of vote counts from hypothetical polling stations where the presence of party agents, non-partisan observers, and election officials is varied. I find that the presence of each of these groups does indeed shape voter perceptions: voters are more likely to view vote counts as reliable when they are co-signed by a party agent, election official, or non-partisan observer. Further, these preferences persist regardless of the voters’ own party affiliation or trust in electoral institutions.

Explaining Deviant Voting in Subnational Elections: The Case of Local Council Elections in Germany

Elections in multi-level systems are challenging for voters because they are supposed to hold political representatives accountable in a complex system of responsibilities. Therefore, when casting their votes in elections at different levels of government, level-specific factors should be of relevance for voters when making voting decisions. We compare deviant voting behaviour in two specific types of local democracy, namely those where institutional and political factors cluster differently. While local candidate-oriented democracies are characterised by candidate-centred voting systems and local party systems with low degrees of nationalisation, local party-oriented democracies are characterised by closed list systems and local party systems that show high degrees of nationalisation. Using individual and aggregate data on local elections in Germany from 2014, we show that voters in local candidate-oriented democracies seem to be more affected by local factors when casting their votes. However, we also show that our results depend on the respective measurement strategies for deviant voting, as local vote intention in free list systems may be measured in alternative ways. The paper makes a significant contribution to the understanding of deviant and local voting behaviour in multi-level democracies with different voting systems.

The National Bias of India’s First-Past-The-Post System

The relationship between the local and the national in Indian politics has taken a variety of forms, from secessionist tendencies to agitational politics around specific issues. The course of this relationship is typically explored through electoral performance, primarily whether a party wins sufficient seats to form the government. There is much less attention paid to the relationship between votes and seats. This has led to some questions not getting the attention they deserve, particularly whether the first-past-the-post electoral system that India uses is entirely neutral in the dynamic between the local and the national. This article addresses this question by developing a model that captures the effects of the share of the votes of national parties, as well as the concentration of national and local votes, on the performance of national and local parties. The empirical evaluation of this system points to an overall national bias, which is eroded over time by the emergence of regionally dominant local parties.

Local voters have their reasons. Mapping voting motives in local elections in Belgium

AbstractVoting motives are one of the most studied but still much contested question in political science. There has been much less concern at the local level although two main tendencies can be discerned. Some consider local elections as second order political contests. Others emphasize place‐bound patterns in voting motives. Still, more research beyond those theoretical presumptions is needed to empirically determine motives for the local vote. Therefore, this paper aims to address two questions: (RQ1) Which types of motives do voters attribute to their choice in local elections? (RQ2) What explains similarities and differences in RQ1? To answer these questions, we draw on the data of the Belgian Local Elections Study 2018 in which respondents were invited to answer an open‐ended question about their voting motives for the local elections. Voting in local elections does not appear to be of second order: voters predominantly have general and specific place‐bound reasons.

The Influence of Urban Planning-Related Pledge Budget on Local Election Votes: A City Case in Korea

Most election pledges require a significant budget for their implementation. In the case of a candidate for the head of a local government who presented his pledges related to urban planning by subdividing them into voting districts, we tested how the size of the budget committed to the voters affected the votes. Based on the urban planning-related pledged budget, the economic utility value of one vote was estimated to be about 2050 USD. In elections for local government heads, as the pledged budget related to urban planning increased, the vote percentage and the degree of competition for votes increased positively. Moreover, when the pledged budget related to urban planning exceeded a certain level, the slope of the vote percentage curve tended to be gentle. The slope of the curve is steep in the section up to the pledged budget of 50 million USD, and the slope becomes gentle in the next section. This study was based on a specific case that was limited in terms of space and time, and it was limited to analyzing only the election pledge and election result data without considering the socioeconomic background factors of the voters.

Vote with your rabbi: The electoral effects of religious institutions in Israel

How do religious parties mobilize local support and what impact does different political strategies have on neighborhoods? Previous literature focuses on the social welfare benefits distributed by religious parties. In this paper, I analyze how religious political parties in Israel generate grassroots support among voters by allying with Jewish religious institutions. Using original data, I examine the association between the timing of entry of religious institutions into neighborhoods and local voting patterns for Israeli national elections. I find that religious institutions are associated with a 4-percentage point increase in the local vote share for religious parties, where this effect is larger for religious institutions with connections to political parties. My results suggest that the primary mechanism driving these results are that these institutions influence the vote choice of existing residents by distributing tangible goods. In contrast, changes to the composition of the neighborhood through in-migration has a more limited effect on voting patterns. These findings highlight the impact of religious institutions on the social and political fabric of local communities.

From Political Radicalness to Citizen Participation? Current Reconfigurations of the Breton movement.

This article aims at analyzing the recent mutations of the Breton repertoire of contention. To do so, it proposes to look at the example of an association called Dibab, which praised participatory democracy by organizing local votes on nationalitarian topics in small Breton towns during the year of 2015. Having a look at the trajectory of Dibab activists shows that many of them had started their militant career years ago, and were familiar to more radical pro-independence organizations. How do these activists have managed to play with different political strategies without losing their ideological frames? How have they expressed different kinds of commitment through their political practices and discourses? Observations, document studies and semi-structured biographical interviews disclose that the construction of a new participatory ideal by radical Breton activists does not prevent them from being multipositioned in the militant field, widening their action spectrum by doing so. That is why the Breton repertoire is better understood as a continuum. Indeed, long term processes and the juxtaposition of different spaces of mobilization must be taken into account in the analysis.

Mapping votes and representing power: Spatio-temporal and multiscalar analysis of electoral results in Tunisia between 2011 and 2018

Abstract. Tunisia has held four elections (legislative2011 and 2014, presidential 2014 and local 2018) since the 2011 Revolution. The last municipal elections held on May 6, 2018 were the first free and fair local elections in the country’s history so far. The political dynamics at play after 2011 are far from being settled. In fact, the first National Constituent Assembly’s election in October 2011 knew a large advance of Ennahda Islamist Party. With the 2014 legislative elections we come to witness the advent of a new political party: Nidaa Tounes. However, in the last local elections the political scene was marked by the breakthrough of many independent lists. Along with the ever decreasing voters participation. It reached only 35.6% of registered voters in 2018 which is hardly half the turnout in 2014.This paper aims to use cartographic illustration at the ‘Imada’ level, the smallest administrative scale in Tunisia to provide a local spatial evidence of voting patterns in Tunisia. To my knowledge, this is the first attempt to map electoral results at such a fine scale in the Tunisian political analysis context.For the purpose of this study, a time-series electoral GIS-based database was designed. The data used was mainly provided by the Independent Higher Election Authority (ISIE). The electoral results are first produced at the scale of polling stations which is the finest scale. They are then aggregated into vote centers which in turn are aggregated into sectors or 'Imadas'. Imadas are the building blocks of higher territorial levels such as municipalities, delegations, and governorates (regions).The Imada-level electoral mapping and analysis will be applied to 2011, 2014 and 2018 elections results.The analysis will be applied to two levels : First, the country-level where we will analyse at one and the same time the electoral geography of the two major political parties, i.e. Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes as well as. The dispersion of votes and the turnout evolution .Secondly, we will explore the impact of redistricting and gerrymandering on local votes. Two case studies will be juxtaposed: the stable region of Tunis which underwent no communal redistricting at all as opposed to the region of Kasserine which was completely restuctured.

When Do Female MPs Represent Women’s Interests? Electoral Systems and the Legislative Behavior of Women

Research on women’s political representation has repeatedly shown that female legislators represent women’s interest more strongly than their male colleagues. However, a growing body of literature shows that the parliamentary behavior of female members of parliament (MPs) and the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation of women is affected by a number of institutional variables. This paper contributes to this debate by analyzing the effect of the electoral incentive structure on the substantive representation of women. Drawing on the Competing Principals Theory, it is expected that female legislators more frequently act on behalf of women if their re-election does not depend on the representation of local interests in electoral districts. The empirical analysis uses the German mixed electoral system and analyzes the representation of women’s issues in oral and written parliamentary questions tabled in the German Bundestag between 2005 and 2013. The results of a hurdle regression model show that female MPs are more likely to concentrate on the representation of women’s interests if their re-election is secured and if they do not have to fight for additional local votes from their district.

A Study on the Analysis and Task of the 6·13 Korean Local Elections : Focused on the local elections in Gangwon Province

본 연구는 지금까지 7차례의 지방선거 결과의 논의가 주로 특정 시기에 실시된 전국적 투표행태에 초점을 두고 있다는 문제의식에서 출발하였다. 지방선거는 유권자가 대표자 를 선출하여 지방정부를 구성함으로써 지방자치를 제대로 구현하는데 있다. 그렇다면 지 역적 특수성에 기반 한 특정 지역선거의 결과에 나타나고 있는 투표의 정향성을 분석해 보는 것은 중요하다. 이에 따라 강원도의 6·4지방선거와 6·13지방선거의 결과에 기초한 투표과정 및 투표결과의 정당별 분석뿐만 아니라 주민의 대표성을 파악하기 위한 단체장 과 지방의원의 배경적 특성을 비교분석 후, 그 드러난 문제의 함의와 과제를 제시해 보 았다. 분석결과, 지금까지 정당의 기반이 미약한 강원도는 중앙정치 영향 속에 반복적 투 표행태를 보이면서 새로운 정치지형의 변화를 가져오고 있다. 역대 선거 중 투표율이 가 장 높은 가운데, 20대-30대의 투표율 하락, 도저촌고의 재현, 지역의 과소대표 현실, 지역 대표자들의 세대교체를 비롯해 1당 독점적 지방정부 형태를 보이고 있다. 특히 단체장과 지방의회 그리고 국회의원간의 서로 다른 소속정당의 동거체제로 구성된 복잡한 구도는 향후 강원도 지방정치와 한국 지방선거에 시사점을 주기에 충분하다. 아울러 선거결과를 기초로 선거제 보완 및 자치계층의 다양화, 도내 지역간 및 기관간 갈등 극복, 지방정부 의 광역문제 해결, 지방의회의 통제기능, 정보공개 강화 및 여성정치의 참여 확대 등에 대한 과제를 제언하였다.So far, seven local elections have focused on a nationwide election analysis. Local elections are about the realization of local autonomy by voters selecting representatives to form local governments. Local elections are a key factor affecting the representation and operation of local governments. Therefore, it is important to analyze the orientation of certain local votes based on regional specificity. This study is a comparative analysis of the June 4 local elections and the June 13 local elections in Gangwon Province. And I presented the problems and challenges that appeared in the election results. According to the analysis, Gangwon Province brought about a new political landscape with a weak base for a particular political party. The features of this election are as follows: the highest voter turnout of all elections. And it brought about a drop in voter turnout in people in their 20s and 30s, a repeat of Cities are low and rural is a high voting phenomenon. regional under representations and a generational shift in regional representatives. It also sees the form of a one-party exclusive local government. In particular, the head of a local government, local councils and member of the National Assembly are cohabitation systems of other parties. The complex structure gives many implications for future local politics in Gangwon Province and local elections in South Korea. Therefore, based on the results of the election, the following tasks were presented: They include supplementing the election system, diversifying the self-governing class, overcoming regional and institutional conflicts, resolving the wide-area issue of local governments, controlling functions of local councils, strengthening the disclosure of information and expanding participation of women s politics.

Moral Universalism and the Structure of Ideology

Throughout the Western world, people's policy preferences are correlated across domains in a strikingly similar fashion. Based on a simple model, we propose that what partly explains the particular internal structure of political ideology is heterogeneity in moral universalism: the extent to which an individual's altruism and trust remain constant as social distance increases. In representative surveys with 15,000 respondents, we measure universalism using structured choice tasks. In the data, heterogeneity in universalism descriptively explains a substantial share of desired government spending levels for welfare, affirmative action, environmental protection, foreign aid, health care, military, border control, and law enforcement. Moreover, the canonical left-right divide on issues such as the military or redistribution reverses depending on whether participants evaluate more or less universalist versions of these policies. These patterns hold in the United States, Australia, Germany, France, and Sweden, but not outside the West. We confirm the idea of higher universalism among the Western political left by estimating the universalism of U.S. regions using large-scale donation data and linking this measure to local vote shares.

The Political Economy of the Prussian Three-Class Franchise

Did the Prussian three-class franchise, which politically over-represented the economic elite, affect policy-making? Combining MP-level political orientation, derived from all roll call votes in the Prussian parliament (1867–1903), with constituency characteristics, we analyze how local vote inequality, determined by tax payments, affected policymaking during Prussia’s period of rapid industrialization. Contrary to the predominant view that the franchise system produced a conservative parliament, higher vote inequality is associated with more liberal voting, especially in regions with large-scale industry. We argue that industrialists preferred self-serving liberal policies and were able to coordinate on suitable MPs when vote inequality was high.

Glass Houses and Friends-and-Neighbors Voting: An Exploratory Analysis of the Impact of Political Scandal on Localism

The 2017 U.S. Senate Special Election in Alabama, which was decided on 12 December 2017, was one of the most contentious and scandal-laden political campaigns in recent memory. The Republican candidate, Roy Moore, gained notoriety during the 2017 campaign when a number of women alleged to national media that as teenagers they were subject to sexual advances by Moore, who was then in his early 30s and serving as a local assistant district attorney. The process and results of this particular election provide the heretofore unexamined impact of political scandal on localism or friends-and-neighbors voting in political contests. Based on data from the 2017 special election in Alabama, econometric results presented here suggest that a candidate who is embroiled in political scandal suffers an erosion in the usual friends-and-neighbors effect on his or her local vote share. In this particular case, the scandal hanging over Moore eroded all of the friends-and-neighbors effect that would have been expected (e.g., about five percentage points) in his home county, as well as about 40% of the advantage Moore had at home over his opponent in terms of constituent political ideology.

Scan statistics with local vote for target detection in distributed system

Target detection has occupied a pivotal position in distributed system. Scan statistics, as one of the most efficient detection methods, has been applied to a variety of anomaly detection problems and significantly improves the probability of detection. However, scan statistics cannot achieve the expected performance when the noise intensity is strong, or the signal emitted by the target is weak. The local vote algorithm can also achieve higher target detection rate. After the local vote, the counting rule is always adopted for decision fusion. The counting rule does not use the information about the contiguity of sensors but takes all sensors’ data into consideration, which makes the result undesirable. In this paper, we propose a scan statistics with local vote (SSLV) method. This method combines scan statistics with local vote decision. Before scan statistics, each sensor executes local vote decision according to the data of its neighbors and its own. By combining the advantages of both, our method can obtain higher detection rate in low signal-to-noise ratio environment than the scan statistics. After the local vote decision, the distribution of sensors which have detected the target becomes more intensive. To make full use of local vote decision, we introduce a variable-step-parameter for the SSLV. It significantly shortens the scan period especially when the target is absent. Analysis and simulations are presented to demonstrate the performance of our method.

The within-district distribution of party candidates: A geographical analysis of party lists for Belgian lower house elections

Both political science and electoral geography scholars have demonstrated that locally rooted candidates matter in parliamentary elections. This article examines whether parties change the within-district distribution of party candidates to respond to local electoral volatility. If parties significantly lose votes in an area, they might consider compensating for this loss by increasing the number of local candidates in that area. Using data on the composition of candidate lists and election results for the Belgian Lower House (1987–2010) of eight political parties, we analyze the relationship between local vote shares and local candidate shares. In addition, we examine whether parties’ nomination strategies are determined by the nature of their candidate selection processes. The OLS regression model shows that Belgian parties generally increase local candidate shares in response to local electoral setbacks. We found weak support for the argument that strategies on the within-district distribution of party candidates are related to intraparty candidate selection processes.

Trade Shocks and Far-Right Voting: Evidence from French Presidential Elections

The rise of radical right parties is a Europe-wide phenomenon. While many studies describe the individual or regional characteristics associated with high propensity to vote for the far-right, we know little about the causal impact of economic shocks on electoral support for the far-right. Over the period 1995-2012, we examine the impact of trade-shocks, measured as exposure to low-wage country import competition, on the local vote share of the National Front, the French main far-right party, during presidential elections. We use small communities (cantons) as units of observations and include province (departement) fixed effects, so that the identifying variation comes from within-province change in imports exposure over time. We find evidence of a small but significantly positive impact of import competition exposure on votes for the far-right: a one standard-deviation increase in imports-per-worker causes the change in the far-right share to increase by 7 percent of a standard deviation. Further results suggest that this effect has been increasing over the time period considered. We conduct a simple sensitivity test supporting the notion that: (i) omitting local share of immigrants is likely to bias our estimate downward, and that (ii) this bias is likely to negligible.

Calling All Neighbors: Mobilizing Turnout for a Local Housing Referendum

Existing political science and marketing scholarship suggests that a get-out-the-vote (GOTV) message focused on a neighborhood or not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) issue will be more powerful than a basic GOTV script. However, randomized field experiments testing different scripts have found either minimal script effects or that neighbor scripts are less effective at moving voters to the polls. Here, we take advantage of a local vote on a NIMBY issue—approval of a zoning exemption for a low-income senior housing development—to test the effectiveness of reaching out to registered voters as members of a neighborhood. Consistent with prior work, we find that a basic GOTV message is more effective in increasing turnout; however, we also find that the neighbor message is more effective among some subgroups of voters, including those living farther away from the proposed development.

The Effectiveness of Leader Visits during the 2010 British General Election Campaign

Research Highlights and AbstractThis article showsThe impact of leader visits on local results in general election campaigns. The importance of party leaders in contemporary election campaigns. That leader visits impact vote share but not turnout. The extent to which incumbency plays an important part in leader visit effectiveness.The leaders of the three largest political parties in the UK spent a significant proportion of the 2010 general election campaign touring constituencies. However, the potential impact of such visits upon local party vote share and constituency turnout has remained relatively unstudied. This article, using original data collected in 2010, is the first to examine leader visits during UK election campaigns. The constituencies visited are typically marginal, and while Gordon Brown mostly limited his visits to Labour-held constituencies, the leaders of the other two parties ran more expansionist visit strategies. Exploring the ability of leader visits to affect turnout and vote share, the analysis shows that visits made no impact on local turnout, but the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats received a boost in vote share in constituencies when their leaders visited. Disaggregating this further, these boosts were received primarily in seats held by Labour prior to the election.

The Candidate Effect: Does the Local Candidate Matter?

This paper considers how the quality of the local candidate affects vote choice. Specifically, we address three questions: Does the quality of the local candidate influence vote choice? What impact do individual-level differences have on the relationship between vote choice and local candidates? Finally, what is the potential magnitude of candidate effects in terms of change in vote support? To answer these questions, we analyze data gathered from an online voting experiment. Our findings suggest that a local candidate can influence vote choice significantly, but that such effects are tempered by political awareness and partisanship.

Distributed user Profiling via Spectral Methods

User profiling is a useful primitive for constructing personalised services, such as content recommendation. In the present paper we investigate the feasibility of user profiling in a distributed setting, with no central authority and only local information exchanges between users. We compute a profile vector for each user (i.e., a low-dimensional vector that characterises her taste) via spectral transformation of observed user-produced ratings for items. Our two main contributions follow: (i) We consider a low-rank probabilistic model of user taste. More specifically, we consider that users and items are partitioned in a constant number of classes, such that users and items within the same class are statistically identical. We prove that without prior knowledge of the compositions of the classes, based solely on few random observed ratings (namely O(N log N) such ratings for N users), we can predict user preference with high probability for unrated items by running a local vote among users with similar profile vectors. In addition, we provide empirical evaluations characterising the way in which spectral profiling performance depends on the dimension of the profile space. Such evaluations are performed on a data set of real user ratings provided by Netflix. (ii) We develop distributed algorithms which provably achieve an embedding of users into a low-dimensional space, based on spectral transformation. These involve simple message passing among users, and provably converge to the desired embedding. Our method essentially relies on a novel combination of gossiping and the algorithm proposed by Oja and Karhunen.