Party Vote Share Research Articles

Cut from the same cloth? Identifying a difference between populist parties in CEE and Western Europe

ABSTRACT This study investigates whether there is a significant difference between populist parties in the West and the CEE by looking at an average trend in the characteristics of populist parties per region, based on Chapel Hill survey data from 2002 to 2019. The measurement includes party maturity, vote share, ideological and economic left-right placement. The cultural axis tendencies show similarities between populist parties across the regions. The economic dimension showed a significant difference: radical-supply parties in CEE were identified on the economic right, whereas in the West, they were identified on the economic left across estimations.

Monumental effects: Confederate monuments in the Post-Reconstruction South

This paper explores the contemporaneous effects of Confederate monuments dedicated in the Post-Reconstruction South. I combine monument, election, and census data to create an election-year panel dataset of former Confederate counties between 1878–1912, then exploit the temporally staggered and geographically distributed dedication of monuments using a generalized difference-in-differences design. I find that monuments caused increases in Democratic Party vote share and decreases in voter turnout, with less robust decreases in Black population share. I find some evidence that more intense monument-building is associated with a decrease in Black lynchings. I also find varying effects based on the era of monument dedication, the intensity of monument-building, and monument characteristics. To address potential mechanisms, I present evidence that monuments were associated with increased use of famous Confederate names for children and show that decreases in voter turnout occurred exclusively in areas with larger Black population shares. Overall, my results suggest monuments promoted a distorted view of Civil War history that primarily persuaded southern whites, but also contributed to Black political suppression. The findings have implications for current debates over Confederate monuments in the United States.

A simple approach to dealing with partial contestation

AbstractObjectiveWe propose a simple approach to dealing with partial contestation in models of multiparty elections.MethodsOur proposed approach is to add a tiny value to the vote share of parties that do not contest a district and then to include dummy variables identifying those districts in which parties do not compete. We can then estimate a single system of equations using a seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) approach and Aitchison's log‐ratio transformation. In our SUR system, we interact the dummy variable for a party that partially contested districts with other predictors in the equation that uses the share of votes of the same party in the log‐ratio outcome. Finally, we estimate robust standard errors for predictors in this equation to address heteroscedasticity.ResultsWe demonstrate the utility of our approach using simulated data and election results from the English parliamentary elections in 2017.ConclusionFrom our simulations, we find that our recommended approach performs as well as that proposed by Tom, Tucker, and Wittenberg. Our strategy is advantageous in that it is easy to estimate, uses information from all districts, and addresses partial contestation in real‐world elections with a single system of seemingly unrelated regressions.

The political fallout of air pollution

This paper studies the effect of air pollution on voting outcomes. We use data from 60 federal and state elections in Germany from 2000 to 2018 and exploit plausibly exogenous fluctuations in ambient air pollution within counties across election dates. Higher air pollution on election day shifts votes away from incumbent parties and toward opposition parties. An increase in the concentration of particulate matter (PM10) by 10 [Formula: see text]g/m[Formula: see text]-around two within-county SDs-reduces the vote share of incumbent parties by two percentage points, which is equivalent to 4% of the mean vote share. We generalize these findings by documenting similar effects with data from a weekly opinion poll and a large-scale panel survey. We provide further evidence that poor air quality leads to more negative emotions such as anger, worry, and unhappiness, which, in turn, may reduce the support for the political status quo. Overall, these results suggest that poor air quality affects decision-making in the population at large, including consequential political decisions.

Factors Causing the Decline of Islam-Based Political Parties Existence on General Elections 2014

The dynamics of the existence of Islamic political parties on the historical stage of democracy in Indonesia have experienced unstable political dynamics. This is inseparable from the plurality of Indonesian society which does not only contain Muslims but is diverse with a diversity of other religions. This dynamic can be seen in the track record of participation of Islamic political parties in general elections in Indonesia. The vote share of Islamic political parties, which has tended to decline since the reform era, is a matter of note and homework to be completed immediately. Many factors certainly contribute to the small number of Islamic political parties' votes. Party characteristics and ideology are at stake in society's assessment of the existence of Islamic political parties.

Mapping Class and Electoral Participation in India from 1996 to 2019

This article studies the relation between class and electoral participation. While the relation between political participation and many demographic variables such as caste, gender, age and location has been well researched in India, the same is not the case for the relation between class and electoral participation. Multiple measures of class (income, asset-wealth, occupation and education) are explored and conceptualized in this article, following which these measures of class are operationalized using the National Election Study datasets covering a twenty-three-year period (1996–2019). Each of these measures is used to trace the relation of class with two outcomes of electoral participation (turnout and party vote share) over time. Disaggregation by gender, locality and caste is provided. Finally, regression analysis to study the impact of these variables on turnout and vote share reveals the complexity of class. We find a complex picture of turnout and party choice with variation across different class measures. More significantly, variations in results raise questions about the usefulness of existing class indices. Further, we find that the type of measure being used affects different outcomes differently. For turnout, income and wealth seem to be better predictors, and for party vote share, subjective class is a better fit, whereas asset-wealth displays opposite patterns to income and subjective class in some instances.

A gate to the world for all? The reaction of neighborhoods in Hamburg to refugee housing

This paper analyzes the political reaction of residents to refugee housing in their neighborhood. The city of Hamburg, Germany, experienced between 2014 and 2017 large refugee inflows that required many new accommodations. Openings of refugee houses led to an increase of 0.9 percentage points in the vote share of right-wing anti-immigrant parties in a neighborhood. The negative reaction applies to reception centers and follow-up accommodations with different inhabitant compositions. It persisted longer for large houses and was stronger for multiple openings and in areas with worse economic conditions and many foreigners and migrants. The right-wing gains came with losses for the governing party. A matching estimation that accounts for an unbalanced distribution of houses across neighborhoods confirms the negative reaction. Voting gains around accommodations explain only a small part of the electoral success of right-wing parties, but the findings suggest giving more attention to the distribution and housing of refugees.

Governors and the Ruling Party Vote Shares in Armenia

Scholarship has made significant advances in our understanding of the determinants of the survival of regional governors under authoritarianism. However, most studies focus on large nondemocratic regimes such as Russia or China. Drawing on data for 2007–2021, I test whether governors in Armenia were rewarded on the basis of their political or economic performance. I find strong support in favour of rewards based on regional election returns, a change in prime ministers, patronage and prior career in state office in the period up to the 2018 revolution. Afterwards, however, vote mobilisation no longer had the same effect on governors’ careers.

Do parties benefit from overhauling their image? The electoral consequences of ‘party rebranding’ in Europe

AbstractPolitical parties are typically seen as conservative institutions which rarely change. Despite this common perception, parties do change, and on occasion, transform themselves by changing features such as the party name and logo, or their policy program. How can we conceptualize these kinds of changes, and what are the electoral consequences for parties which change in these ways? In this paper, I argue that feature changes and policy changes are instances of party rebranding, or situations where a party attempts to overhaul its entire image. I then test the electoral consequences of feature and policy rebrands on a dataset of 239 political parties from 1945 to 2019. The results indicate that feature rebrands increase party vote share for the election after the rebrand, while policy rebrands have no effect. These findings have implications for our understanding of parties themselves and the kinds of party signals that voters respond to.

Do Fiscal Transfers Affect Local Democracy? Lessons from Chilean Municipalities

ABSTRACTExtant literature concurs that fiscal transfers affect local democracy when they grant subnational governments nontax revenue. Yet there is nonetheless a mismatch between this concept and existing measures, which consider the whole transfers local governments receive, including both tax and nontax revenue. This article studies the Fondo Común Municipal (FCM), the most important intergovernmental grant in Chile, and provides a novel measure of nontax revenue. It uses this measure alongside the whole FCM transfer to test the rentier hypothesis. On the one hand, it shows that both measures increase the incumbent party vote share, although the effect of our measure is smaller. On the other hand, it finds that the FCM transfer has an impact on the probability of reelection and the competitiveness of elections, but this effect disappears when using our measure. Overall, the findings suggest that rents from transfers do not lead to strong electoral dominance in unitary states.

Emigrants’ missing votes

What are the causal effects of emigration on election outcomes in the country of origin? Large emigration of high-skilled emigrants can lead to changes in the distribution of political preferences, which affect voting outcomes. Using administrative migration and voting data, we show that emigration from Poland following its accession to the European Union in 2004 caused an increase in vote shares for right-wing parties, while decreasing the vote share for left-wing parties due to emigrants’ missing left-leaning votes. To account for endogenous migration patterns, we construct an innovative instrument that measures the distance to the closest open EU border. Our results highlight that emigration enhances stayers’ trust in right-wing governments and increases stayers’ voting for parties with pro-European positions. Exploiting a change in voting rules over time allows to disentangle different mechanisms. These results have important implications for the design of voting policies.

Persuading voters to punish corrupt vote-buying candidates: Experimental evidence from a large-scale radio campaign in India

During the 2014 Indian general elections, we carried out a large-scale experiment randomizing a radio campaign highlighting the disadvantages of voting for corrupt vote-buying candidates. Official electoral data show that the radio campaign significantly decreased the vote share of parties that engaged in the most vote buying (as reported by journalists). Voter survey data show that the campaign increased the salience of corruption as an election issue and decreased voting for parties that offered gifts. From a policy perspective, we show that radio campaigns are a cost-effective method to influence voter behavior. From a measurement perspective, we show that journalist interviews can impartially identify vote-buying parties.

Inequalities in the geographical distribution and workload of obstetrics and gynaecology specialists by gender in Turkey.

Women often have a preference for female obstetrics and gynaecology specialists (ob/gyns). Following the policy allowing physician selection by patients in Turkey, distribution of ob/gyns by gender across provinces has been an important indicator of access to healthcare. To analyse ob/gyns distribution by gender across provinces in Turkey, with emphasis on the relationship with conservativeness of the province and resulting physician workload. We measured the number of male and female ob/gyns by province in 2016 and the number of outpatient visits and deliveries performed by male and female ob/gyns in 2015. Pearson and Spearman correlation of the female ratio with votes for conservative parties was used to assess the distribution of ob/gyns. We then analysed the correlation with resulting workload of female ob/gyns and ran linear regressions of these variables controlling the number of ob/gyns in a province. More conservative provinces, measured by the vote share for conservative political parties, have a higher ratio of female ob/gyns. Linear regression showed that a 1 percentage point (pp) increase in the vote share corresponded to a 0.69 pp increase in female ratio. For workload, a 1 pp higher female ratio resulted in a decrease in workload, measured as outpatient visits per female ob/gyn divided by that per male ob/gyn, by 0.014. Conservative provinces have more female ob/gyns, but other provinces compensate for that with higher female ob/gyn workload. High workload may have adverse health effects and result in lower quality of care.

Immigration and electoral outcomes: Evidence from the 2015 refugee inflow to Germany

This paper investigates the effects of local exposure to refugees on electoral outcomes in the 2016 state election in Germany. Based on quasi-random variation in the allocation of refugees across municipalities and unique data on refugee populations and their type of accommodation, I find that an increase in the population share of refugees increases the vote share of right-wing parties and decreases the vote share of the incumbent federal government parties. The electoral effects, however, are rather small and solely driven by refugees living in centralized accommodation, while no such effects are found for refugees living in decentralized accommodation.

Population health, not individual health, drives support for populist parties.

Recent electoral shifts toward populist parties may have been partly driven by deteriorating health, although empirical evidence on this link is primarily confined to ecological designs. We performed both ecological- and individual-level analyses to investigate whether changes in health are associated with changes in the support for populist parties. Data were used on the strategic Dutch case, the only liberal democracy featuring leftist and rightist populist politicians in parliament for over a decade. We used: (a) fixed effects models to examine whether changes in the standardized mortality ratios and self-assessed health (SAH) in municipalities were associated with changes in the populist vote share in four parliamentary elections (2006/2010/2012/2017); and (b) 10 waves of panel data collected in 2008 to 2018 to investigate if changes in individual-level SAH were linked to movement in the sympathy, intention to vote, and actual voting for populist parties. The ecological analyses showed that: changes in municipality mortality ratios were positively linked to changes in the vote share of right-wing populist parties, while changes in the prevalence of less-than-good SAH were negatively associated with changes in the vote share for left-wing populist parties. The individual-level analyses identified no such associations. Our findings imply that support for populist parties may be driven by health concerns at the ecological, but not the individual, level. This suggests that sociotropic (e.g. perceiving population health issues as a social problem), but not egotropic (e.g. relating to personal health issues like experienced stigma), concerns may underlie rising support for populist parties.

The effect of trust in government on elections during the COVID‐19 pandemic in South Korea

Recent studies focused on the pandemic's effect on elections, examining partial government interventions (e.g., lockdowns) or a specific area within a country. Governments have taken a variety of nationwide measures in reaction to the pandemic, and they may or may not be working in the best interests of citizens. If citizens believe that a government demonstrates competence, benevolence and honesty in making pandemic‐related decisions, trust in that government may grow, affecting election results. Using data for trust in government and nationwide elections during the pandemic in South Korea, we find that trust in government completely mediates the relationship between the number of confirmed cases of COVID‐19 and the results of elections (i.e., ruling party's win and vote share).

Measuring public support for European integration using a Bayesian item response theory model

This study proposes the use of Bayesian item response theory models to measure aggregate public support for European integration. This approach addresses the limitations of other indicators and produces valid estimates of public attitudes over long time periods, even when available indicators change over time or present interruptions. I compare Bayesian item response theory models with alternative approaches used in the study of support for European integration, and demonstrate that they produce more accurate estimates of latent public opinion. The estimates are validated by showing their association both to alternative public opinion measures and to the vote share of Eurosceptic parties across Europe. I show that Bayesian models solve unaddressed issues like ensuring cross-country comparability of the estimates and modelling responses with multiple answer options.

How Much of Electoral Politics Is in the District? Measuring District Effects on Party Support

AbstractThe electoral district is the fundamental unit of representation in single- and multi-member electoral systems, yet most research shows little interest in district effects on election outcomes, focusing instead on national and individual factors. This is problematic as parties and candidates often put a great deal of effort into district-based campaigns. How, then, can we best capture district effects on party support? We propose a new method using official election returns and geospatial techniques. The result is a measure of how much of a party's vote share is explained by district effects. Using data from the 2006–2019 Canadian federal elections, we find that, on average, 6 to 10 per cent of the variation in a party's vote in Canada is explained by district effects. While district effects on party support are trivial for some districts, in others they account for more than 80 per cent of the variance in party vote shares. The effect of districts on party support is composed, in part, of electoral context, province, socio-economic factors and district campaign intensity. Importantly, the size and sources of district effects on party support vary across parties, suggesting heterogeneity. The benefits of our approach are threefold: (1) it is cost-effective, (2) it can be easily replicated in any setting—past or present—where districts are relevant electoral units and where districting is nonpartisan, and (3) it is responsive to differences in district composition and parties’ campaign effort.

The strategy of protest against Covid-19 containment policies in Germany.

ObjectivesThe article analyzes the epidemiological and political logics of protest against containment policies in Germany. To maximize the mobilization potential, protest organizers organize more protest events when Covid‐19 mortality rates are low, the stringency of containment policies is high, and in districts in which the vote share of mainstream parties is traditionally low.MethodUsing a negative binomial model, we analyze the number of protest events in a sample of 401 German districts over the period from March to May 2020.ResultsWe find robust positive predicted effects of the stringency of containment policies and negative predicted effects for the mortality rate and the strengths of mainstream parties.ConclusionWe interpret these findings as evidence of the strategic behavior of protest organizers that target protest participation and mobilization to keep the movement alive and potentially grow it.

The Online Market’s Invisible Hand: Internet Media and Rising Populism

Given the recent surge of global populism, this article explores the relationship between Internet/social media and support for populist parties by focusing on the structure of the online marketplace. We argue that structure shapes digital networks’ incentives in terms of the content they favor, and marketing strategies they employ to distribute content on a mass scale. Specifically, concentrated/oligopolistic markets mean powerful digital entities that can leverage the regulatory process—thereby weakening constraints and incentivizing consumption/profit above all else. Consequently, these entities can freely favor more incendiary/attention-generating content, and use their outsized influence to saturate the online marketplace with targeted advertising—all of which can amplify the diffusion of populist rhetoric and intensify support bases. Using original data on Internet ownership concentration, social media user-traffic, and populist party vote share in 34 democracies, our findings suggest that concentration of Internet ownership and online audiences each contribute to rising support for populism.