Partisan Choice Research Articles

Great for Constitution Writing but an Obstacle to Democratic Consolidation: The Ephemeral Value of the Hare Quota Formula in Tunisia’s Parliamentary Elections

ABSTRACT The Hare Quota-Largest Remainders (HQLR) formula promoted consensus-building during Tunisia’s constitution-writing process and in the new democratic regime’s first years but it is now an obstacle to democratic consolidation. HQLR discourages the development of a tractable partisan choice set – one large enough to afford voters meaningfully distinct options but not so large as to be cognitively overwhelming – and fosters party fragmentation in parliament, obstructing the formation of workable governing coalitions. One result has been coalitions and national unity governments so heterogeneous as to lack common purpose, frustrating and disillusioning citizens and risking nostalgia for the decisiveness of the previous, authoritarian system. Replacing HQLR with either D’Hondt or St.Lague divisors formula would reverse the incentives toward parliamentary fragmentation, foster a more coherent political party landscape, and, if democratic competition is restored following President Kais Saied’s auto coup in July 2021, facilitate Tunisia’s democratic consolidation by clarifying partisan accountability in parliament.

We Are One: The Social Maintenance of Black Democratic Party Loyalty

Despite growing ideological diversity within the group, black Americans have maintained their overwhelmingly unified support for the Democratic Party. We argue that black Democratic partisanship is upheld, in part, through black Americans’ use of social sanctions (both positive and negative) to encourage compliance with a group norm of Democratic Party support. Leveraging the exogenous assignment of racial social context provided by the race of an interviewer in face-to-face American National Election Study survey interviews of black respondents, we demonstrate the racialized social imperative of black Democratic Party identification. We show that black respondents are more likely to identify as Democrats in the presence of other blacks, particularly those respondents whose conservative ideological placement provides a cross-pressuring incentive to otherwise make an alternative partisan choice. Our social explanation of black partisan homogeneity is a significant departure from previous accounts that have focused almost exclusively on attitudinal ascriptions to racial shared fate.

RELIGIOUS VOTING IN THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION: TESTING ALTERNATIVE THEORIES

Scholars of American electoral politics have documented the recent partisan realignment of religious groups. Indeed, careful analysts often find that religious variables are better predictors of partisan choice than classic socioeconomic divisions. Still, there has been relatively little effort to put this religious realignment in both theoretical and historical perspective. In this article, we update our previous work on the historical evolution of religious partisanship, demonstrating the continued relevance of ethnocultural (or ethnoreligious) theory, utilized by political historians, and restructuring theory, an important sociological perspective. Both viewpoints help us understand presidential elections since the 1930s, as we demonstrate with data from a wide range of surveys. After utilizing the 2020 Cooperative Election Study to examine the contemporary voting of ethnoreligious groups in greater detail, we test the impact of religious variables controlling for other demographic, attitudinal, and partisan influences and find that religious identities and orientations often retain independent influence even under stringent controls for other factors shaping the presidential vote.

Candidate sex, partisanship and electoral context in Australia

Research on the effect of candidate sex on vote choice has tended to find that, even when voters state preferences for candidates of their own sex, party identification tends to win out on election day. However, not all elections present a clear partisan choice for voters: primary elections in the United States, intra-party candidate selection in Australia, and municipal elections in a range of jurisdictions either pit intra-party candidates against each other or provide only weak partisan cues. In this paper, we use a conjoint experiment to directly compare the effects of candidate sex and partisan affiliation on voters' preferences: in one context where partisan affiliation is constant (e.g. a primary contest) and a second where partisan affiliation varies (e.g. a general election). From a probability-based sample of Australian voters, we find left-identifying female respondents tend to prefer female candidates regardless of the candidate's partisan affiliation and electoral context. By contrast, right-identifying male voters prefer male over female candidates in intra-party contests between right-affiliated candidates, suggesting that conservative men are the least supportive of female candidates. As conservative men dominate Australia's current governing parties, we argue the preferences of this demographic inhibits the advancement of female politicians.

Social policies, political attitudes and ageing: Results from a survey on Greater Lisbon

This paper considers an important aspect for the assessment of public policies in Portugal, namely the opinions of laypersons or population in general, and particularly the ones regarding social policies. Such opinions, even though different from the ones of experts, must be dully taken into consideration in any assessment of the effectiveness of public policies. The study is based on a survey performed in December 2016, regarding a sample of 600 individuals living in the Greater Lisbon, stratified by gender, education and age. Its main focus is the analysis of shifting attitudes according to age. The questions refer namely to: identification with political parties; vote in recent elections; reasons for vote and/or abstention; interest for politics; features perceived in Portuguese political agents; trust in political agents; satisfaction with the functioning of democracy in Portugal; citizens’ perceived influence in political events; relevant aspects in partisan choice; self-perception in terms of left-right dimension; preference for economic market regulation, state regulation and/or regulation by the ‘third sector’; evaluation of social policies; biases within these perceptions and preferences associated with gender, levels of income, and age.

The Gender Gap Is a Race Gap: Women Voters in US Presidential Elections

Scholarship on women voters in the United States has focused on the gender gap, showing that, since the 1980s, women are more likely to vote for Democratic Party candidates than men. The persistence of the gender gap has nurtured the conclusion that women are Democrats. This article presents evidence upending that conventional wisdom. It analyzes data from the American National Election Study to demonstrate that white women are the only group of female voters who support Republican Party candidates for president. They have done so by a majority in all but 2 of the last 18 elections. The relevance of race for partisan choice among women voters is estimated with data collected in 2008, 2012, and 2016, and the significance of being white is identified after accounting for political party identification and other predictors.

Which Party Represents My Group? The Group Foundations of Partisan Choice and Polarization

While groups have been central to thinking about partisan identity and choices, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to the role of perceptions of the group composition of the parties. We explore this critical linking information in the context of religious groups, some of the chief pivots around which the parties have been sorting. Using three national samples, we show that perceptions of the religious group composition of the parties are often biased—evangelicals overestimate the presence of evangelicals within the Republican Party and the irreligious within the Democratic Party. The key finding is that individuals are far more likely to identify with the party in which they believe their group is well represented—a finding which clarifies the role of party image shifts in constructing partisanship, the limits of the culture war motif, and the importance of social perception in shaping beliefs about party representation.

Unreflective Partisans? Policy Information and Evaluation in the Development of Partisanship

What factors enable and motivate citizens to form partisan identities? Popular accounts, as well as several major theoretical approaches, attribute a central role for policy and ideological concerns in shaping the partisan orientations of voters. Information about the policy aims of parties should therefore, on average, make it easier for an individual to find a party that best fits her views, especially if she had previously been less familiar with the parties. The evidence for this is mixed, however. Plenty of studies find a robust correlation between policy views and partisanship. Yet there is mounting evidence that citizens look to parties to decide where to stand on policy issues, suggesting that partisan identification precedes policy preferences. We bring new evidence to bear by investigating directly the impact of substantive policy information on the partisan identities of ordinary citizens. To do this, we carry out a pair of original experiments across six countries, five of which are relatively young or unstable party systems. One experiment informs citizens about the policy goals of the major parties; we find little to no evidence that such information affects levels of partisanship. The other experiment tests the impact of inviting citizens to evaluate and compare their own position to the positions of the major parties, a more direct test of the sort of reasoning posited in some theoretical accounts. We find that this reflective task in fact depresses levels of partisanship, perhaps especially among those who knew less about politics and parties from the outset. This suggests that thinking about policy differences and proximities pushes citizens away from partisan attachments they form in the ordinary course of life, perhaps because such thinking generates fresh doubts or focuses attention on facets of partisan choice that matter less in typical processes of preference formation.

Political Schizophrenics? Factors Affecting Aggregate Partisan Choice at the Local Versus National Level

In a sample of 12 states across all regions of the United States, I find that one of every three counties supports a different party for president than for its local legislature. I use a unique data set containing partisan affiliations of county councillors to analyze contexts that might lead voters to choose different parties at different levels of government. I find support for three explanations of representational splits: incomplete realignment, local electoral factors, and differentials in party strength. This article takes a step toward understanding how parties and partisan identities operate in a federal system.

The Local Political Context of Latino Partisanship

AbstractThe question of how partisanship is influenced by exogenous factors has been vigorously debated, yet this debate is less frequently noted in the literature on Latino partisanship. This study analyzes the 2006 Latino National Survey with geographic identifiers to explore how the political context of a county influences Latino partisan self-identification. There are a variety of reasons why the political environment might influence Latinos’ partisan choice. First, a substantial proportion of the adult Latino population in the United States is foreign-born, potentially lessening the influence of parental partisan socialization. Second, increased migration to areas outside the Southwest has exposed Latinos to new and different social, political, and economic environments. Using subgroup analysis, interactive logit models, and regression discontinuity, we find that the local political context influences the party attachment of Latino immigrants in predictable ways. However, for Latinos born in the United States, our analysis does not provide evidence of a causal connection between partisan environment and an individual's partisan identification.

Sex isn’t Gender: Reforming Concepts and Measurements in the Study of Public Opinion

The importance of sex and gender to political behavior is reflected in the volume of work examining gender gaps in public opinion and partisan choice. Despite their centrality, sex and gender are poorly measured in survey research. The principal problem is the conflation of gender with sex in survey research. Consequently, gender is typically treated as a dichotomy, with no response options for androgynous gender identities, or indeed degrees of identification with masculine or feminine identities. We compare a new measure of genuine gender identification with a conventional measure of biological sex to determine whether the practice of using sex as a proxy for gender is sound. Sex is a fair proxy for gender, but for about a quarter of our sample, it is not. Moreover, greater nuance is gained when analyses incorporate a finer-grained measure of gender than is possible by using biological sex as a substitute. We argue that this is simply the start to an important conversation and that more research is needed to ascertain how we might best measure “gender” in the future.

Geographic Sorting in the Golden State, 1990-2014 : Evidence from County-level Data on Statewide Elections

This paper addresses the question of partisan geographic sorting in California since 1990 and analyzes how the Golden State is geographically sorted along the party line. By applying an alternative way of measuring spatial division in vote choice across different counties, we analyze the vote shares data in California since 1990 and the findings suggest that Californian voters have become more clearly sorted along the party line across counties. According to the findings, red counties became more Republican, and the blue counties became more Democratic while the number of swing counties has declined. Further, this study suggests that geographic partisan sorting in California is mainly driven by the Swing counties whose median household income tends to be lower than the state average. Namely, we find that county level economic conditions are somehow associated with the changes in partisan vote choice, although further examination is required.

Electoral Consequences of Rainfall on the Election Day: Compositional Data Analysis

The two-party vote share of the Republican Party in U.S. elections tends to increase when it rains, but its mechanism is not fully understood. Existing studies focus on the costs of participation and argue that bad weather hurts the Democratic Party disproportionately because cost-sensitive marginal voters tend to be supporters of the Democratic Party. Based on the literatures of psychology and related fields, we examine the possibility that rainfall affects voters' moods and makes them more risk averse. An observable implication is that bad weather benefits the Republican Party disproportionately because voters tend to perceive Republican candidates as less risky. We decompose the rainfall effects into these two channels -- differential turnout and vote shift -- and show that the alleged Republican advantage derives in part from an increase in the number of votes for the Republican Party. Specifically, at least about 1% of voters change their partisan choice in bad weather.

Race, Class, and Values in Post-New Deal Presidential Politics: Inverted Class Loyalties as a Trend in Presidential Elections, 2000–2012

This article analyzes the role of race, class, and values as a determinant of voting behavior in recent presidential elections. Over the past decade the What's the Matter with Kansas? thesis has been cited to argue that the culture wars over social issues (civil rights, homosexual rights, feminism, gun control) have inverted the class determinant of partisan choice to the point where lower-income white voters favor the Republican Party while professionals have shifted toward the Democratic Party. The article concludes that there is significant evidence that the class loyalties as determinants of partisan identity established by the New Deal have been superseded by values-driven imperatives, which are themselves trumped by racial identities. As a result, traditionally Democratic pre-materialist white blue-collar constituencies have moved toward the Republican Party, while the opposite has occurred in traditionally Republican post-materialist suburban constituencies.

Politics as Normal? The 2012 French Presidential Election

This article proposes a framework based on three levels of analysis for understanding the 2012 presidential election: the institutional, the partisan and the situational. The 2012 election confirmed the bipolar institutional incentives that structure political competition in the Fifth Republic. The partisan dimension, however, was more fluid than this bipolar reading would lead one to expect. The situational dimensional was highly relevant in terms of the overarching crisis and the loss of trust in Nicolas Sarkozy. The poor quality of fit between underlying partisan choice and political representation does not augur well for a broad-based response to the crisis.

Do Conditional Cash Transfers Affect Electoral Behavior? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Mexico

This article reexamines the argument that targeted programs increase pro‐incumbent voting by persuading beneficiaries to cast ballots against their first partisan choice. The evidence comes from the randomized component of Progresa, the pioneering Mexican conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. Experimental data show that early enrollment in the program led to substantive increases in voter turnout and in the incumbent’s vote share in the 2000 presidential election. The experiment also reveals that opposition parties’ vote shares were unaffected by the program. Thus, the electoral bonus generated by CCTs may be best explained by a mobilizing rather than persuasive mechanism. These findings are difficult to reconcile with the notion that the electoral effects of CCTs are a result of prospective concerns triggered by threats of program discontinuation or endogenous program enrollment. Instead, the evidence in this article suggests that CCTs’ mobilizing effects are compatible with programmatic politics.

Perceptions of Electoral Fairness and Voter Turnout

Previous research has established a link between turnout and the extent to which voters are faced with a “meaningful” partisan choice in elections; this study extends the logic of this argument to perceptions of the “meaningfulness” of electoral conduct. It hypothesizes that perceptions of electoral integrity are positively related to turnout. The empirical analysis to test this hypothesis is based on aggregate-level data from 31 countries, combined with survey results from Module 1 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems survey project, which includes new and established democracies. Multilevel modeling is employed to control for a variety of individual- and election-level variables that have been found in previous research to influence turnout. The results of the analysis show that perceptions of electoral integrity are indeed positively associated with propensity to vote.

Was the Joke on the Democrats Again? Turnout and Partisan Choice in the 2004 U.S. Election

The peak turnout rate in the 2004 presidential election highlights an important question for students of electoral participation: Did the higher levels of turnout advantage one of the two major party candidates? In this paper, we analyze state and county-level presidential and gubernatorial election results in 2000 and 2004, and find that Bush won the presidential election in spite of, rather than because of, the increase in turnout. The partisan effects of turnout varied across gubernatorial elections, and we found no evidence that local partisan minorities benefited from higher levels of turnout.

A Bayesian Learning Model with Applications to Party Identification

Previous research has suggested that party labels operate like brand names that citizens use to inform their votes. The article argues that this earlier work has focused too much on the content of party messages, while the informational value of party labels also depends on voter uncertainty about the party's behavior in office. These intuitions are developed in a Bayesian learning model in which voters update their beliefs about the mean and variance in the distribution of parties' ideologies, and apply these beliefs to a spatial model of partisan choice with risk-averse voters. The model predicts that if party unity is high, then party labels will provide a useful signal to voters about candidate characteristics and identifications with the parties will be strong, but if party unity is low, then party attachments will be weak. This approach seems to explain both the stability in respondents' political preferences over the life-cycle and the decline and resurgence in the strength of party identifications in the American electorate over the last half-century.

Does Turnout Decline Matter? Electoral Turnout and Partisan Choice in the 1997 Canadian Federal Election

Abstract.The recent decline in electoral turnout in Canada has attracted the concern of scholars and public officials, but the partisan consequences of this decline have received only scant attention. We begin to address that question with a simulation based on the 1997 Canadian Election Study. Based on estimated probabilities of individual behaviour derived from multinomial logit models of voter choice, we find that higher turnout would have likely hurt the Liberal party in Quebec, but slightly helped the Liberals outside of Quebec. We interpret this pattern as evidence that generational politics plays a role in shaping the relationship between electoral turnout and partisan support.Résumé.Le déclin récent dans la participation électorale au Canada a attiré l'intérêt des chercheurs et des représentants de l'Etat, mais les conséquences partisanes de ce déclin n'ont sucité qu'une attention limitée. Nous commençons à aborder cette question à l'aide d'une simulation basée sur l'Etude électorale canadienne de 1997. En nous appuyant sur des probabilités estimatives du comportement individuel dérivées de modèles logistique multinominal du choix d'électeur, nous constatons qu'une participation plus importante aurait probablement nuit au Parti Libéral au Québec, mais aurait légèrement favorisé le Parti Libéral en dehors du Québec. Nous interprétons ce modèle comme preuve que la politique de générations contribue à la formation du rapport entre la participation électorale et l'appui partisan.