People Vote Research Articles

Digital Democracy: How Technology Can Drive Higher Voter Turnout in Elections

This article pinpoints the transformative role of technology in improving the rate at which people vote during elections. An important concept developed in this paper is that of digital democracy, and as such, a thorough analysis will be done on technological advancements, which have so far proved very instrumental in promoting civic participation and entailing more involvement in the democratic process by all concerned through online voter registration, mobile phone applications, and social media campaigns. The article, therefore, pinpoints studies showing that states that have adopted online registration actually report higher rates of active voters, while mobile apps present information that makes voting more manageable. Social media also offers an effective outreach opportunity, particularly among younger voters, to create in them a sense of community and urgency about participation in electoral activity. The integration of educational tools, such as virtual workshops and gamified learning, enables further development of the capability to push participants and voters forward in an accessible and engaging manner. The article leverages these advantages of technological developments as a means toward creating a better-informed and more active electorate contributing to the health of democracy.

Factors Influencing Political Brand Coolness and Voting Intention

ABSTRACTEstablishing a voter connection requires political parties to prioritize providing the electorate with pleasurable experiences, treating them as consumers, and incorporating the “coolness factor” as a key ingredient. Consequently, the perceived coolness of a political brand is a characteristic that develops and evolves independently within society. The current empirical research aims to explore the various factors that contribute to the perceived coolness of political brands and its influence on voting intention. The study's participants are selected from India, a vibrant and diverse nation known as the world's largest democracy. In order to analyze the data, researchers employ the technique known as Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The results of the analysis highlight the considerable impact of political party brand meaning on its coolness, indicating a positive relationship between the two. The coolness of the political party brand is heavily influenced by the leader's image, which has a significant positive impact. It is further revealed that political party brand coolness has a significant positive association with voting intention and party brand engagement. Our investigation shows that political brand engagement serves as a mediator in the association between political brand coolness and voting intention, besides the direct influence of political brand coolness on voting intention. A comprehensive understanding of the study's findings enables political marketers to identify more effective strategies for cultivating political brand coolness and leveraging them to create memorable experiences that resonate with voters. Those factors ultimately affect how people vote.

Monkeys Predict US Elections.

How people vote often defies rational explanation. Physical traits sometimes sway voters more than policies do-but why? Here we show that rhesus macaques, who have no knowledge about political candidates or their policies, implicitly predict the outcomes of U.S. gubernatorial and senatorial elections based solely on visual features. Given a pair of candidate photos, monkeys spent more time looking at the loser than the winner, and this gaze bias predicted not only binary election outcomes but also the candidates' vote share. Analysis of facial features revealed candidates with more masculine faces were more likely to win an election, and vote share was a linear function of jaw prominence. Our findings endorse the idea that voters spontaneously respond to evolutionarily conserved visual cues to physical prowess and that voting behavior is shaped, in part, by ancestral adaptations shared with nonhuman primates.

Cost misperception and voting for public goods

AbstractPublic good provision is often determined through referendums by voters, who weigh benefits against costs. However, perceptions of benefits and costs may be incorrect, which could in turn lead to voter error and misallocation of public goods. Using real‐world referendums, we evaluate voter perceptions of the private costs of providing public goods by conducting three exit polls of New England voters and an online survey of California voters. By comparing cost perceptions to actual tax incidence, we find pervasive evidence that voters misperceive costs. Fewer than 20% of voters in our samples reported perceived costs within 25% of estimated actual costs. These findings are unsurprising given the ubiquity of opaque language explaining the financial consequences of public good referendums. In addition, our analysis suggests that actual costs have no statistical bearing on voter choice, but at least in the New England sample, voter approval is affected by perceived costs. Thus, a substantial proportion of voters are making decisions based in part on inaccurate costs, which in some cases lead to people voting against their preferences and potential misallocation of public funds. Further, researchers who match voter approval with estimated actual cost are unlikely to obtain accurate cost responsiveness or valuation estimates.

How does information about inequality shape voting intentions and preferences for redistribution? Evidence from a randomized survey experiment in Indonesia

We test the elasticity of people's voting intentions and preferences for redistribution to information about inequality through a large-scale, randomised survey experiment in Indonesia. Respondents received information about either (1) the level of national inequality, (2) the level of national inequality in combination with the degree of intergenerational mobility, (3) their position in the national income distribution, or no information. The first two treatments raised people's concern about inequality and mobility. The first treatment also increased the likelihood they would vote against the President. The third treatment lowered richer respondents’ support for redistribution. These findings provide new insights about the challenges of increasing public support for government-led redistribution, such as tax increases and greater spending on social protection, in middle-income country settings.

Regulatory competition and cross‐fertilization in bank performance in the US banking markets

AbstractThis paper examines empirically cross‐fertilization in the productivity growth of banks between a state and its neighbouring and non‐neighbouring states (i) before (i.e. 1971–1977) the interstate multibank holding company (IMBHC) deregulations and (ii) during (i.e. 1982–1995) the IMBHC deregulations, which, through cross‐border bank M&As mainly among neighbouring states, could inject new blood, awaken the market for corporate control and enhance cross‐fertilization in bank performance among neighbouring states. Further, the 1978–1981 period offers a natural experiment to examine Baumol's Contestable Markets Hypothesis (CMH). The legislature of Maine made the first IMBHC deregulatory move in 1978. There was no reciprocity until New York and Alaska made their moves in 1982. Under CMH, Maine's move should inject a competitive spirit and alter bank performance for better across all—neighbouring or non‐neighbouring – banking markets during this period. Theoretically, Kane's regulatory equilibrium framework provides guidance to address these matters and Tiebout's people vote with their feet framework extends and supplements this guidance. Empirically, FDIC's annual banking data, aggregated at the state level, constitute the main input in computing the productivity growth indices for each of the 48 contiguous sample states between 1971 and 1995. Estimations of a novel spatially driven fixed effects model that uses these indices produce empirical results. The empirical model exploits the proximity of one sample state to its neighbouring states while also embracing a set of randomly chosen non‐neighbouring states as a control sample. Results show that cross‐fertilization in bank performance, observed among neighbouring states before the introduction of the IMBHC deregulations during 1971–1977, gets stronger in response to the dynamically evolving IMBHC deregulations during 1982–1995 and that improvements in banks' productivity growth during 1978–1981 support Baumol's CMH. Overall, our results demonstrate the importance and influence of cross‐fertilization, as a matter of proximity of subjects, on banks' performance and suggest promise for future research that embraces the spatial dimension of banking markets and data.

Partisanship is why people vote in person in a pandemic

AbstractObjectiveThe choice of voting methods has increasingly become a politicized, partisan issue. We ask: Can a nationalized partisan rhetoric cast doubt on vote‐by‐mail (VBM) despite years of experience and a raging pandemic?MethodUsing 2020 general election records in Colorado, an established all‐mail voting state, we analyze first the general choice of voting methods using supervised machine learning and then the choice to switch to in‐person voting despite having used VBM in previous cycles.ResultsThe choice of voting modes is mainly habitual; local variations of COVID‐19 hardly mattered. Republican partisanship played an important role in predicting “switchers” to in‐person voting; the probability was 5.2 percent conditional on being a Republican as opposed to 1.9 percent for a Democrat.ConclusionsThe results suggest that voting in person can be heavily polarized by partisan communication, despite being a health behavior in a pandemic and voters having experience with mail voting.

Do people vote to avoid disapproval?

ABSTRACT Do people vote to meet others’ approval or to avoid their disapproval if they were to abstain? We examine the role of injunctive norms on turnout by means of discussion network data from an original survey module in the Austrian National Election Study. We improve on previous measures of injunctive norms by asking respondents whether their political discussants would disapprove if they abstained. We find that about half of the respondents believe that people around them would be disappointed if they did not vote and that disapproval expectations matter for turnout, but only among those with a weak sense of civic duty. Our study contributes to a better understanding of how individual perceptions about social norms matter for voter turnout.

Pemenuhan Hak Asasi Politik Para Pemilih Pemula Pemilihan Umum Tahun 2024 Pada Warga Surabaya

The 1945 Constitution of The Republic of Indonesia (UUD NRI 1945) Article 1 paragraph (2), states that sovereignty is in the hands of the people, which means that the Indonesian is a democratic country based on the constitution, because in paragraph (3) it is also said that Indonesia is a legal state. This popular sovereignty, especially in the political field, means that the people vote or elect their representatives to manage he government through general elections. It is reaffovured in article 1 paragraph (3) and article 2 paragraph (1) that MPR< DPR and DPRD are elected through general elections. Likewise in article 27 paragraph (2), article 28 paragraph (1), article 28 E paragraph (2) and article 28 I paragraph (5). Therefore, thus research uses empirical juridical research methods, because it is related to legal awareness among citizens, especaily regarding the use of voting rights in general elections as an effort to uncrease the number of votes in the upcoming 2024 general elections. Especailly for residents in one of the community unit in Klampisngasem sub-district, Sukolilo sub-district, Surabaya. The increasing number of prospective first-time voters since 2020 requires socializations regarding understands of voting rights so that citizens have legal awareness regarding voting rights as regulated in the 1945 NRI Constitution. This outreach s an effort to increase the number of first-time voters among citizens in the 2024 general elections. Increasing the number of first-time voters shows that the process of implementing the principles of democracy in Indonesia is in accordance with the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia.

Do the People Matter in Policymaking in Ghana? A Reflection on the E-Levy and Debt Exchange Programs

The extent to which the masses have a say in matters concerning their lives is crucial in governance. It makes a significant amount of knowledge to say that people vote for elected policymakers to make policies that will make their lives better off and not the opposite. However, in the making of policies, the views of the people who either benefit or suffer the ramifications of policies are not taken into consideration. Therefore, the content analysis methodology has been employed in this study to systematically analyze secondary sources about the recent adoption of the E-Levy policy and Debt Exchange Program to ascertain whether the people mattered in adopting and implementing these policies. The adoption of these policies has raised a lot of controversies, with the public agitating and calling for its termination. The government of Ghana, being keen on continuing with the implementation of these policies as the only way out of the country's economic hardship, raises a lot of questions. After a systematic analysis of the literature, the paper argues that both policies were passed without the involvement of the people. The implication of the government’s failure to adopt a participatory policymaking approach accounts for the citizenry's loss of trust in the government.

The challenge of increasing turnout at participatory budgeting: The Parisian perspective of “getting toward citizens”

ABSTRACT A common problem for participatory budgets’ organizers is making people participate in them. Some organizers think and act to enhance participation. However, literature has paid little attention to that phenomenon. Thus, this study aims to explore how organizers address this issue through an in-depth case-study (the participatory budget of Paris). The research question is: What was the Paris PB organizers’ perspective toward participation from 2014 to 2020? There is a supplementary question: To what extent were their efforts to increase turnout effective? I used a mixed-method approach to answer these questions. First, I hypothesized that they had developed a perspective, a set of coordinated actions, and views about their problem of participation. I discovered the perspective of “Getting toward citizens”: being active to make (more) people vote. I then assessed the effectiveness of their efforts to increase turnouts.

Voter's gratification in using online news and the implications on political landscape in Malaysia

AbstractIn recent years, democratic societies have relied heavily on online news to enlighten the public on current issues in politics. This study investigates voters' gratification in using online news and its implication on the political landscape. This study examined how information seeking, social utility, guidance/judgment, and personal fulfillment drawn from the Uses and Gratification theory, change Malaysians' voting decisions. The survey included a sample of 700 registered voters from the Malaysian Klang Valley. The data were gathered using convenience and purposive sampling using nonprobability sampling technique. Analysis from Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling using SmartPLS 3.0 demonstrated that information seeking, social utility, guidance, and personal fulfillment could positively determine the people's vote choice. Using online news for guidance is the strongest predictor of the people's vote choice. This study provides important implications where the government can capitalize on the effectiveness of online media to reach the public and rationalize major policy decisions. Future research may utilize a longitudinal approach.

Define and Explain the Concept of Rationality in the Context of Voting and Political Behavior

Voter behavior is the study of how people vote at the time of voting and what factors influence their voting behavior through political participation. According to Harrop and Miller, voting behavior is influenced by the sociological aspects of individuals or societies, such as occupational groups, origins, gender, and age, while for politicians; voting is influenced by political programs and campaigns implemented by politicians. The aim of this research paper is to investigate the rationality of voting and voter behavior in both sociological and political ways and to present the characteristics that should be present in order to vote rationally.

Fairness and Support for Populist Parties

On the premise that issues of fairness are important to voting behavior but often unrecognized, we explore how feelings of unfairness increase support for populist parties. We distinguish personal unfairness, the view that one’s own economic situation is unfair, from social unfairness, the view that the economic situation of others in society is unfair. Based on findings in psychology, we argue that uncertainties associated with the transition to a globalized knowledge economy heighten people’s feelings of personal unfairness and find empirical support for that contention. We develop arguments about why feelings of personal unfairness should increase support for the populist right and feelings about social unfairness should increase support for the populist left and find empirical support for them. Our results contribute to explanations for why people vote for the populist right rather than the left and underline the roles that uncertainty and issues of fairness play in electoral politics.

Konflik Sosial: Budaya Politik Uang Di Desa Puguh Kabupaten Kendal Jawa Tengah

Pilkades or Puguh village elections are decorated with politics of money to attract the people's vote, so the politics of money became a normal thing and had become a culture before the village head elections took place. Using an ethnographic approach that focuses on a descriptive development of the political culture of money within a Puguh village community. Results and research discussions of understanding on political money and social conflict. The politics of money itself comes because the elite or prospective village heads seek an influential position in the village, and also because of people who are less conscious of pancasila values and lack of understanding in politically-related communities. In this case the political culture of money itself leads to social conflicts within the society, a conflict of tension in one's interaction with another.

The association between the proportion of Brexiters and COVID-19 death rates in England

RationaleA cultural divide may exist between a set of people who accept and a set of people who reject the advice of experts. This cultural divide may have important consequences and policy implications, especially in times of severe crisis. ObjectiveEcological study of whether there exists a significant conditional correlation between two variables that appear unrelated except for attitude towards experts: (1) Proportion of people voting in favour of remaining in the European Union in 2016 and (2) COVID-19 outcomes measured by death rates and vaccination rates. A significant conditional correlation would indicate that polarized beliefs have important consequences across a broad spectrum of societal challenges. MethodsThis study uses simple descriptive statistics and multiple linear regression, considering confounders suggested in the related literature, with data at the District level in England. ResultsDistricts where people voted most heavily in favour of remaining in the EU (top quintile) had nearly half the death rate of districts in the bottom quintile. This relationship was stronger after the first wave, which was a time when protective measures were communicated to the public by experts. A similar relationship was observed with the decision to get vaccinated, and results were strongest for the booster dose, which was the dose that was not mandatory, but highly advised by experts. The Brexit vote is the variable most correlated with COVID-19 outcomes among many variables including common proxies for trust and civic capital or differences in industry composition across Districts. ConclusionsOur results suggest a need for designing incentive schemes that take into consideration different belief systems. Scientific prowess – such as finding effective vaccines – may not be sufficient to solve crises.

Electoral Campaigns in Times of Lockdown: Post-Soviet Experiences

This article aims to analyse the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic upon electoral campaigns in a fragile democracy (Georgia) and two illiberal polities (Belarus and Russia). It covers the period of time from March to December 2020, focusing on several critical junctures in each country: for Belarus, the 9 August 2020 presidential elections; for Russia, the 1 July ‘people's vote’ and the cycle of regional elections in September 2020; and for Georgia, the 31 October 2020 parliamentary elections. The article argues that COVID-19 did not diminish citizens’ demands for fundamental norms of electoral democracy and policy transparency; in fact, it increased political mobilisation within all three countries.

ANALISIS HUKUM ISLAM DAN HUKUM POSITIF TERHADAP FENOMENA MONEY POLITIC

In every election performance in Indonesia since the beginning of Indonesian independence until the current era, it has always been nodai with dirty election violation practices. One example is the practice of money politics which has always been a shadow for the face of Indonesian democracy. Islam sees the concept of money politics as the same as the concept of risywah or bribery in a broad sense. Where both give rise to tyranny for other groups. There are so many impacts of this money politics practice, one of the most dominant is the increasing number of corruption, collusion, and nepotism in Indonesia. All those things are because of the money that has been spent to buy the people's vote. The way to prevent money politics is to increase the integrity of law enforcement officials in eradicating election violations and providing education to the public on the cause and effect if they receive money politics.

Turnout, government performance and localism in contemporary by-elections

ABSTRACT Pored over by the media and used as crucial testing grounds for new candidates and campaign techniques by political parties, by-elections – or special elections – are comparatively under-studied in contemporary academic analyses. These elections, held outside the normal election cycle enable local voters to replace a departing representative, but the way in which they vote has often been dismissed as being driven by national factors. In the British case, despite the attention such contests bring, understandings of the way in which people vote in contemporary by-elections are based largely on data from over forty years ago. This article represents a substantial updating of the literature on by-elections, using data on 148 contests from the British context to examine whether pre-existing assumptions from the literature hold: namely the importance of national and local factors. It finds that by-elections no longer represent useful routes by which defeated MPs can re-enter Parliament. For both turnout and party vote share at these contests, a combination of local contextual and national factors impact by-election results, whereas contest specific factors such as having a local candidate only make a difference in a few cases.

Examining the association between California tobacco licensed retail density and public support or opposition to state anti-tobacco legislation.

The state of California has enacted progressive anti-tobacco policies, including Proposition 56 in 2016. In response, the alternative and emerging tobacco product (ATP) industry has increased its political activity. This study explores the association between the proportion of people voting against Proposition 56 and tobacco/ATP retail density. We conducted a retrospective analysis using data on licensed California tobacco retailers, which were then cross-referenced for categorization using Yelp. Proportion voting against Proposition 56 was obtained from the Secretary of State's website. A series of linear regression tests were performed between population-normalized retailer density and voting proportion at the county level before and after adjusting for covariates such as age, gender, race/ethnicity and median household income. The total number of licensed tobacco retailers increased by 29.31% from 2015 to 2019. Association between proportion voting against Proposition 56 and retail density was significant during voting and during periods of policy implementation and post-implementation (2016-2018) for non-specialized tobacco retailers. For specialized/ATP retailers, significance was only detected during the post-implementation period (2018-2019) after normalization. Proportion voting against Proposition 56 was also a significant predictor of increase in total number of non-specific (β=0.48, p=0.008) as well as specialized tobacco and/or ATP retail storefronts (β=0.21, p=0.001) from 2016 to 2018. This study provides initial evidence of the association between tobacco retail density and voting patterns for anti-tobacco policy. Future research should examine the role of tobacco retail density on variation in local support for state tobacco control initiatives, including tailoring outreach to specific voting census blocks in communities with heavy retail presence.