Party General Election Research Articles

Evaluating the Minority Candidate Penalty with a Regression Discontinuity Approach

Abstract Do parties face an electoral penalty when they nominate candidates of colour? We employ a regression discontinuity design using state legislative election data from 2018, 2019, and 2020 to isolate the effect of nominating a candidate of colour on a party's general election performance. Utilising this approach with real-world data heightens external validity relative to existing racial penalty studies, largely supported by surveys and experiments. We find no evidence that candidates of colour are disadvantaged in state legislative general elections relative to narrowly nominated white candidates from the same party. These findings challenge the leading explanations for the underrepresentation of racial/ethnic minority groups, with implications for candidate selection across the United States.

The Impact of Incumbent/Opposition Status and Ideological Similitude on Emotions in Political Manifestos

The study involved the analysis of emotion-associated language in the UK Conservative and Labour party general election manifestos between 2000 to 2019. While previous research have shown a general correlation between ideological positioning and overlap of public policies, there are still conflicting results in matters of sentiments in such manifestos. Using new data, we present how valence level can be swayed by party status within government with incumbent parties presenting a higher frequency in positive emotion-associated words while negative emotion-associated words are more prevalent in opposition parties. We also demonstrate that parties with ideological similitude use positive language prominently further adding to the literature on the relationship between sentiments and party status.

Participation in Voting Parties Based on Gender and Ages

In a democracy, a general election is a platform for citizens to use their political rights. However, not all citizens use it well, leading to an imperfect voting participation level. This situation motivates this study to exist. With this intention, this paper examines and analyzes the participation to vote decision in the party general election in 2019 based on gender and ages. Backing up this goal, we use the people in three regencies in West Java: Subang, Majalengka, and Sumedang, as the population. Because of these areas, we utilize multistage random sampling to take 600 people as the samples. As the statistical checking, we use the Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis to test the hypotheses based on the categorical responses. After investigating the answers through the statistical test and discussing their outputs, we deduce that the participation of females is lower than that of males, demonstrating the gender gap. Also, the younger the participants, the higher involvement to vote.

БОРОТЬБА ЛЕЙБОРИСТСЬКОЇ ПАРТІЇ ВЕЛИКОЇ БРИТАНІЇ ЗА ВИБОРЦІВ В 20-Х РР. ХХ СТОРІЧЧЯ

The article examines the processes of growth of the British Labour Party in the early XXth century. The reasons of Labour Party’s success on parliamentary and municipal elections in the 1920s have been analyzed. The main attention is paid to the party’s activities in constituencies and analysis of Labour Party General Election Manifestos, General Elections Results and other statistic data. The relations between the Labour Party and churches in Great Britain have also been investigated. The support of the Anglican Church and denominations in Great Britain gave the Labour Party some votes but they lost some votes of believers in the next election in 1924 because of Labour government’s failure to acknowledge Bolshevik persecution of the Christians in the USSR. The Labour attempts to win the countryside were also not so fruitful. It is emphasized that 1918 was the turning point in the formation of the Labour Party as mass, widely represented and influential parliamentary party. The reorganization of the Labour party in 1918, Representation of the People Act (1918), adoption of the “Labour and the New Social Order” party constitution have proved to be favorable for its further evolution. But some difficulties such as conflicts between left and right views in the party, absence of convincing majority, black mass-media technologies from political opponents and problems in economics of the country, seriously influenced on its abilities to win success in 1920-s.

Access to the countryside: the tragedy of the house of commons

The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 (the CRoW Act) serves as an example of the way in which ideology can frequently become a casualty of realpolitik. Wider access to the countryside was a pillar of Labour Party general election manifestos from the 1950s until the introduction of the CRoW Act. This article examines the antecedents and emergence of this statute to determine whether the eventual form of the rights of access under the CRoW Act represent a missed opportunity to grant public rights over private land.

How Divisive Primaries Hurt Parties: Evidence from Near-Runoffs

In many democracies, parties and their voters rely on competitive primary elections to choose nominees for the general election. Competitive primaries may help parties select higher quality candidates and advertise these candidates to voters, but they also run the risk of exposing nominees' flaws, offending losing candidates' supporters, and making the party look weak to general-election voters. Do longer, more competitive primaries help or harm parties in the general election? The existing literature on so-called divisive primaries comes to mixed conclusions, likely because of chronic issues of omitted variable bias and reverse causation. In this paper, we address these problems by taking advantage of U.S. states that use runoff primaries, second-round elections which, when triggered, create longer, more contentious primaries. Using a regression discontinuity design in primary elections close to the runoff threshold, we find large and negative effects of runoffs on the party's general-election fortune in the U.S. House and Senate. We estimate that going to a runoff decreases the party's general election vote share by 6-9 percentage points, on average, and decreases the probability that the party wins the general election by roughly 21 percentage points, on average. In U.S. state legislatures, in contrast, runoff primaries do not hurt, and in competitive contexts may in fact help, parties in the general election. The results suggest that divisive primary elections are highly damaging when salience is high but beneficial when salience is low, a pattern we argue is driven by the opposing effects of information in high vs. low salience primary elections.

Flip-Flopping, Primary Visibility, and the Selection of Candidates

We present an incomplete information model of two-stage elections in which candidates can choose different platforms in primaries and general elections. Voters do not directly observe the chosen platforms, but infer the candidates' ideologies from observing candidates' campaigns. The ability of voters to detect candidates' types depends on the visibility of the race. This model captures two patterns: the post-primary moderation effect, in which candidates pander to the party base during the primary and shift to the center in the general election; and the divisive-primary effect, which refers to the detrimental effect of hard-fought primaries on a party's general-election prospects. (JEL D11, D72, D83)

Flip-Flopping, Intense Primaries and the Selection of Candidates

We present a model of two-stage elections in which candidates can choose different platforms in primaries and general elections. Voters do not directly observe the chosen platforms, but rather infer the candidates' ideologies from signals made during the campaign (debates, speeches), where a larger number of signals corresponds to a higher-intensity campaign. This model captures two patterns: (1) the post-primary moderation effect, in which candidates pander to the party base during the primary and shift to the center in the general election; and (2) the divisive-primary effect, which refers to the detrimental effect of intense primaries on a party's general-election prospects. These effects are obtained in spite of the fact that primary voters are forward-looking and take into account that a more extreme candidate has a smaller chance of winning the general election than a moderate one does.

The Funding of Constituency Party General Election Campaigns in Great Britain

The issues of political party campaign expenditure and funding sources are again high on the British political agenda. Most attention is focused on the amounts raised and spent by the parties nationally, with much less being devoted to the separate local parties in the 641 parliamentary constituencies—where the amounts that can be spent on general election campaigns are subject to legal constraints. Little is known about the sources of funds for those campaigns, and research on the 1997 general election has shown that for most parties the legal requirement to disclose where they obtain their income does not result in the disclosure of original sources of their income. As at previous elections, however, the amounts spent in the constituencies have an impact on the outcome, sustaining the case for regulation; much is spent outside the legal constraints, however, and it is difficult to envisage ways in which this might be regulated.

THE PROSPECT FOR RENTS AND PRIVATE INVESTMENT IN HOUSING

At the Conservative Party Conference of 1986, the Minister of State for Housing, Mr John Patten, outlined his intentions for a new Rent Bill to be included in his party's general election manifesto. This directs the spotlight onto rented housing and Mr Patten's slogan ‘the right to rent’ will no doubt lead to a lively discussion. This paper aims to contribute to the debate by reviewing two major housing reports as they relate to rents and making further suggestions.