Electoral Politics Research Articles

Ask and You Shall Receive: The Effects of Negativity and Fundraising Appeals on Facebook

Social media has transformed electoral politics and allows campaigns to micro-target supporters. However, little is known about the effectiveness of political ads on social media, particularly those that appeal for money. We study the fundraising effects of ad campaigns sponsored by a well-funded Super PAC, The Lincoln Project. Our model includes 100s of millions of ad impressions targeting Facebook users in the 50 states, plus D.C., over 308 days in 2020. We coded ads for tone and fundraising appeals and find that the most effective ads are those that directly appeal for money, while ads that use negativity are associated with a small, positive effect. Ads that include both negativity and fundraising appeals are associated with the most money: each impression yields an additional $0.52 in itemized donations (campaign contributions). The results confirm what previous research on campaign giving has found— people tend to give money to campaigns when they are asked to—and show how digital advertising influences political behavior.

Electoral Politics in the Classroom: Reflections on the Sociology of Simulated Characters

Simulations have become a staple of political science education due to their effectiveness and creative nature that contributes to learning success. In this contribution, we argue that simulations can also offer new insights not only into student engagement and active learning, but also into the sociology of political processes. In this case it is a political communication seminar, that included a simulation of presidential campaigns and an election in a fictionalized setting. This article shows that in a classroom setting the students are prone to reproduce existing electoral leanings and behavior. In the proposed simulation of elections in a fictional country of Genovia, the students naturally aligned around two candidates: a right-wing populist and an environmental activist who ultimately lost the elections. This article offers several insights into an online simulation format and breaks down the sociology of the surprisingly realistic representation of a Euro-American electorate.

ELECTIONS AND STOCK MARKET RETURNS: EVIDENCE FROM BORSA ISTANBUL

Stock prices may display predictable patterns around major political events, particularly in emerging market economies where political risk is a key component of asset risk premiums. One distinct event that would be expected to result in an abrupt increase in political risk is elections. Motivated by this notion, we study the returns for a set of indicator and sectoral indices of Borsa Istanbul stocks and the U.S. Dollar–Turkish Lira exchange rate around political elections held in Turkey over 2001–2020. Our tests reveal an accumulation of economically and statistically significant positive abnormal returns for all Borsa Istanbul stock indices and negative abnormal returns for the U.S. Dollar–Turkish Lira exchange rate over a window that starts as early as a month prior to the election date and extends for two weeks into the post-election period, with the effect being particularly strong in the week immediately following the election. Consistent with a political risk-based story, volatility of index returns starts increasing over the same period and plateaus out at a level that is roughly one-and-a half to two-folds greater than its pre-election period average.

Types of political connections, election years, and firm performance in Pakistan: Moderating role of external monitoring

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Women of Bihari Society in Electoral Politics

The presented article deeply explores the question of representation of women in the electoral politics of Bihar. Bihar became the first state to give fifty percent reservation to women in panchayats, but the irony is that even today the condition of women remains pathetic. Apart from political representation, women started fighting for their basic questions from the eighties. Revolting against feudal oppression, demanding an increase in wages for working in the fields, this movement is today demanding equality with men in every field. It is true that getting 50 percent reservation in Panchayats is limited, but the feeling of public participation has strengthened among women. This article evaluates the question of women's claim in the politics of Bihar around all these issues.
 
 Abstract in Hindi Language
 प्रस्तुत आलेख बिहार की चुनावी राजनीति में महिलाओं के प्रतिनिधित्व के सवाल की गहन पड़ताल करता है. पंचायतों में महिलाओं को पचास प्रतिशत आरक्षण देने में बिहार पहला राज्य बना लेकिन विडम्बना यह है की आज भी महिलाओं की दशा दयनीय ही बनी हुई है. राजनीतिक प्रतिनिधित्व से इतर महिलाओं ने अपने बुनियादी सवालों के लिए लड़ाई की शुरुआत अस्सी के दशक से करना शुरू कर दिया थी| सामंती उत्पीडन के खिलाफ विद्रोह, खेतों में काम करने के लिए मजदूरी बढाने की मांग से होता हुआ यह आन्दोलन आज हर क्षेत्र में पुरुषों से बराबरी की मांग कर रहा है. यह सही है कि पंचायतों में पचास फीसदी आरक्षण मिलने से सीमित ही सही लेकिन महिलाओं के भीतर जन भागीदारी की भावना प्रबल हुई है. इन्ही सब मुद्दों के इर्दगिर्द यह आलेख महिलाओं की बिहार की राजनीति में दावेदारी के सवाल का मूल्यांकन करता है|
 Keywords: राजनीति, महिलाएं, भागीदारी, अधिकार, समाज, लोकतंत्र, समानता, अधिकार, मतदान, आन्दोलन

Analyzing Social Media Sentiment: Twitter as a Case Study

This study examines the problem of Twitter sentimental analysis, which categorizes Tweets as positive or negative. Many applications require analyzing public mood, including organizations attempting to determine the market response to their products, political election forecasting, and macroeconomic phenomena such as stock exchange forecasting. Twitter is a social networking microblogging and digital platform that allows users to update their status in a maximum of 140 characters. It is a rapidly expanding platform with over 200 million registered users, 100 million active users, and half of the people log on every day, tweeting out over 250 million tweets. Public opinion analysis is critical for applications, including firms looking to understand market responses to their products, predict political choices, and forecast socio-economic phenomena like bonds. Through the deep learning methodologies, a recurrent neural network with convolutional neural network models was constructed to do Twitter sentiment analysis to predict if a tweet is positive or negative using a dataset of tweets. The applied methods were trained using a publicly available dataset of 1,600,000 tweets. Several model architectures were trained, with the best one achieving a (93.91%) success rate in recognizing the tweets' matching sentiment. The model's high success rate makes it a valuable advisor and a technique that might be improved to enable an integrated sentiment analyzer system that can work in real-world situations for political marketing.

Gandhi and Gandhi: Modernity, Gender and Reform in the Films of Rajesh Khanna

Meghnad Desai fittingly described the twentieth-century India as ‘a tale of two Gandhi dynasties’ – Mahatma Gandhi and Indira Gandhi. The confluence of two Gandhi(s) – former, ideologically and latter, socio-historically – provides an opportunity to read Rajesh Khanna’s star text with an altogether distinct theoretical approach. In this article, the author attempts to read Rajesh Khanna (1942–2012), the popular and veteran Indian actor, against the politico-historical backdrop of Indira Gandhi’s leftward leanings and to reveal the possibility of the Gandhian (former) paradigm for reform and national reconciliation within the iconography and the form of his films. More specifically, the article examines Mahatma Gandhi’s framework of an alternate modernity and masculinity embedded within Rajesh Khanna’s on-screen persona. Khadi, one of the major tropes for Mahatma to critique the western models of modernity, masculinity and progress, finds a focused attention vis-à-vis the iconography of Rajesh Khanna’s star text. Rajesh Khanna’s foray into electoral politics in early 1990s, echoing the Gandhian connotations of his stardom, will also be the subject of a brief discussion in this article.

Identity Politics and its Implication on the Nigerian Electoral Process

This paper discusses the impact of identity politics on the Nigerian electoral process, with a focus on the 2019 general elections. The emergence of identity politics, which relies on ethnicity, religion, and regionalism to shape voters' preferences, has had far-reaching consequences on political discourse and election outcomes in Nigeria and other parts of the world. The paper draws on Social Identity Theory (SIT), as theoretical frame work which posits that individuals derive a sense of identity and self-esteem from their membership in social groups, to explain how group membership shapes attitudes and behaviors in the electoral process. The paper argues that while identity-based mobilization may provide short-term electoral gains for some politicians, it undermines the principles of inclusivity and diversity that are essential for a thriving democracy. The impact of identity politics on the Nigerian electoral process is not always positive, as ethnic and religious identities have often been used to mobilize violence and undermine the democratic process. Furthermore, the use of identity politics in political discourse can lead to the exclusion of certain groups and the formation of polarized and divided communities. The study found that in the 2019 presidential election, ethnic and religious identities played a significant role in determining voting patterns. The study also found that voters were more likely to support candidates who they perceived as representing their group's interests. These findings are consistent with the predictions of SIT, which posits that group membership plays a crucial role in shaping attitudes and behaviors. The paper highlights the need for political parties and candidates to focus on critical issues such as economic development and security, rather than relying on ethnic and religious identities to mobilize voters. It is also essential to promote intergroup dialogue and cooperation to foster national unity and social cohesion. Ultimately, the study emphasizes the need for a more nuanced and inclusive approach to politics that recognizes the division and polarization of diversity of identities and interests in Nigeria. The study recommends that political leaders, civil society organizations, and the media should encourage an inclusive political discourse that emphasizes the importance of unity and cooperation over

The Hindsight Bias and Its Applications

The hindsight bias, also known as the “I knew it all along” effect, is a psychological phenomenon in which a personbelieves they predicted the outcome of an event, even if they did not act on their “prediction.” Individuals can beaffected by the hindsight bias to confidently overestimate their judgment, which can have severe consequences. Also,it can negatively affect all aspects of society to varying degrees. Social experiments have demonstrated that thisphenomenon exists in the investment industry, politics, and the law. It can be detrimental to individuals, affect theoutcome of political elections, and compromise the impartiality of police evaluations. Due to the impact of hindsightbias, there are several suggested ways to prevent this bias, and it is essential to understand how to prevent and accountfor it.

“Minimal” and “Biased”: An Intersectional Analysis of Female Candidates’ Perceptions of Their Local News Coverage

This qualitative study analyzes the perceptions of US women political candidates about their local news coverage at a pivotal moment of change in both journalism and electoral politics. Through an intersectional approach, in-depth interviews with thirty-seven women who recently ran for office from 2016 to 2020 revealed findings in two areas of news research: local news declines and gender bias in political news. First, massive declines in local news capacities have trickled into local political communication, which, along with affordances of social media, point to a decline in relevance of local media to local campaigns. Second, participants perceived bias in their news coverage based on an identity intersecting with their gender, partisan affiliation, or both. Their experiences offered two potential ways forward for local news to reattain relevancy in local elections in countries of local news declines: through accountability journalism, and by diversifying staff to meet the needs of a diversifying electoral slate of candidates.

The Decline of Religion and Its Rise in Electoral Politics: Religious Belief, Religious Practice, and the Strength of Religious Voting Cleavages

Economic development has been linked to a declining importance of religion. But alongside secularization, there has been an increased salience of religion in electoral politics. These seemingly contradictory trends can be understood by distinguishing between two dimensions of religiosity: religious belief and church attendance. We show that religious voting cleavages are strongest in democracies where there is religious cohesion, which means belief and practice go hand in hand. Voting cleavages require group members to have distinctive policy preferences and be politically engaged. Strong religious beliefs are associated with distinctive policy preferences (but not with political engagement), and church attendance is associated with political engagement. Thus, religious cohesion provides the key ingredients for a religious political cleavage. But what explains variation in religious cohesion in democracies? We find that religious cohesion increases with economic security. Thus, economic security can promote secularization, but also facilitate the religious cohesion associated with strong religious voting cleavages.

Responsibility for violation of the rules of financing a political party, election agitation or agitation of a referendum

The article emphasizes that political parties contribute to the formation and expression of the political will of citizens. Thanks to them, citizens of Ukraine can exercise their right to freely choose and be elected to state and local government bodies. A form of direct democracy, in addition to elections, is a referendum. Attention is focused on the fact that the financing of political parties, pre-election campaigning or referendum campaigning can be the tool that, in the presence of deficiencies in the current legislation regulating social relations that arise when giving or receiving a contribution to support a political party, or when receiving state funding of a statutory activities of a political party, or when providing or receiving financial (material) support for pre election campaigning or referendum campaigning, may be used to suppress the will of voters. Attention is also drawn to such a phenomenon as political corruption.
 It is established that the fines for violating the rules of political party financing, pre-election campaigning or referendum campaigning are disproportionate to the amount of money that any political party receives and spends during elections. The consequence of this is that the amount of the fine fixed in the Code of Ukraine on Administrative Offenses, the Criminal Code of Ukraine, is not a safeguard against violations. The amount of money spent on political advertising and pre-election campaigning and the amount of fines for violating the rules of political financing are disproportionate. It is proposed to amend the Code of Ukraine on Administrative Offenses, applying an approach according to which the fine is 100% of the amount of illegal contributions or support received, but not less than 100 tax-free minimum incomes of citizens. If the reporting procedure is violated, the fine is at least 1,000 tax-free minimum incomes of citizens.
 The shortcomings of the legislation of Ukraine consist in the fact that the provision of financial (material) support for campaigning or in favor of a political party is equated with the transfer of ownership; for criminal offenses characterized by a greater degree of public danger, fines are lower than for administrative violations. Ways to improve the current legislation of Ukraine are proposed, including, in Art. 159 1 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine is proposed to provide for such a sanction as confiscation of property.

A theory of gender’s effect on vote shift with a test based on Turkish elections

ABSTRACT Despite great advances in the last decades, there is an enduring gender gap in a majority of the countries. Gender is prevalent in all aspects of life, and it is impossible to avoid gender roles. The choices regarding gender roles are threefold: Accept them, reject them, or have an ambivalent stand. When voters grow incongruous with their parties, they look for an alternative which is ideologically closer to them. However, evaluating this vote shift without the full effect of gender will provide an incomplete picture of electoral politics. I theorize that when voters are faced with female candidates or female party leaders, their assessment of gender roles will be a deciding factor for whether the intended vote shift will be realized. I apply this extended theory of ideological and gender role congruity to a high gender gap context, Turkey, utilizing district level electoral data. Taking into account the spatial dependence of factors that affect voting behaviour, I empirically demonstrate that for two ideologically opposing parties, the salience of gender politics through the ranking of female candidates on the closed-lists and presence of national female leadership affected their vote share in line with my theoretical expectations in the 2018 general election.

Face-to-face: Three facial features that may turn the scale in close electoral races

When voters in political elections intend to vote for a candidate who represents their political interests, they cannot avoid being influenced by the visual appearance of the candidates. In fact, many political campaigns are dominated by billboard advertising that mainly focuses on politicians' face portraits. While extant research already showed that a candidate's visual appearance has an impact on electoral outcomes, the present research goes a step further and investigates which specific facial features increase or decrease a politician's likelihood of winning an election. Evaluating 17 facial features, we identified mouth width, the ratio of eye height/width, and eyebrow height as relevant predictors of electoral success. In particular, we find across a correlative study, an experimental study, and an analysis of German Federal Elections that a wide mouth and large eyes that extend vertically have a robust and coherent influence on the likelihood of getting votes. Thin eyebrows increase the likelihood of getting votes in our hypothetical voting scenarios but not in the analysis of real election data. Furthermore, we show that the effects of the mouth and the eyes are statistically mediated by perceived trustworthiness and perceived dominance. In terms of real-life relevance, our analysis suggests that these three facial features can make the difference in close races.

Electoral Politics: Democracy and Electoral Security in Nigeria

Democracy in Nigeria has been fragile and fluctuating since independence as conflict, triggered by political rivalries, violence, ethnicity, religion and insecurity, poses a major threat to her democracy. The late Nigerian political scientist and theorist, Claude Ake in 1993, warned that external and elite support for electoral democratisation was not the same as actual democracy. He argued that the substitution of democracy for elections had resulted in a struggle for power at the polls by the elite groups. To this end, the incidences of electoral violence, political competition and insecurity have since become a constant nightmare and a serious source of concern to all actors participating in the electoral system. The cornerstone of democracy is the electoral process, with a viable Election Management Board (EMB) that conducts free, fair, open and secured elections. Electoral security is one of the focal points for a successful and effective administration of the electoral process. The electoral process must be geared towards building citizens' confidence, especially by ensuring that votes are cast anonymously and without coercion, while also making sure that election results reflect the collective will of the voters. With the aid of secondary sources of data, using content analysis, the paper concludes that defending elections not only involves protecting voting units and ballots, but also protecting the functions, resources and technologies that support election processes and which help manage voters and election results in Nigeria. In order to protect our electoral politics in Nigeria, there is a need for an effective and secure electoral process, laced with a credible and acceptable outcome. This paper emphasises on security as a crucial condition in the context of elections, such that it assists in establishing an enabling environment that is conducive to holding democratic polls.

Trump’s Election Billboards: A Multimodal Cognitive Study

Multimodality is the analysis of language besides other modalities (images, sounds, gestures, video images, etc.). Election billboards as a kind of multimodal text is used during elections to promote a candidate's image and advertise their presence. The current study seeks to analyze a sample of Trump’s 2020 election billboards in the American presidential election billboards as a type of multimodal texts from the view point of Multimodality and Cognitive Semantics. Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) model and Langcker’s Construal Theory (2013) are used to demystify how the visual and linguistic elements cooperate to serve the purpose of the billboard as a whole. The visual elements are analyzed based on Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) Grammar of Visual Design model. On the other hand, Langacker's construal operation model is used for the analysis of both linguistic and visual elements as a cognitive semantic theory. The analysis's findings indicate that the models are essential to constructing and deciphering the meaning of political election campaign billboards, and they also prove that in constructing meaning, the visual and textual elements of Trump’s election billboards complement one another even though the focus on the linguistic elements is observed to be higher to some extent rather than that of the visual elements

Money Politics In Local Democracy: A Case Study In The Simultaneous Election Of Village Heads Throughout Bombana Regency In 2022

In Bombana district, Southeast Sulawesi Province on February 20, 2022 a democratic party was held through the simultaneous general election of village heads throughout Bombana district which was attended by 109 villages as stipulated in Bombana Regent Decree No. 449 of 2021 Concerning Schedules and Stages of Simultaneous Village Head Elections in 2022. In the implementation of local democracy through simultaneous village head elections, there are many practices of money politics carried out by village head candidates, success teams, and the community itself. The purpose of this research is to find out the factors causing the practice of money politics in the simultaneous village election. The method used in this study is a qualitative method by describing the facts that occur in the field to be explained more deeply through primary data sources, namely interviews, and secondary data, namely books and journals. The results of this study indicate that several factors cause money politics in simultaneous village elections in Bombana district, including the habitual factor that continues to occur at every election moment at all levels of democracy that occurs in Bombana district, and economic factors due to the Covid-19 outbreak that hit Indonesia. nationally 2 years ago, the factor of the absence of a special supervisory agency for village head elections, the factor weak laws and regulations on all hierarchies governing villages, and the absence of political education carried out by the local government and stakeholders in building village community intelligence about the dangers money politic.

Rally Day

Abstract March 5, 2018, was the final rally day for the Sierra Leone People's Party prior to that country's national elections. The SLPP held its last day of public demonstrations in Bo, the country's second largest city and primary urban center in the Mende-dominant southeast. As was true of other political parties in other cities and other elections in Sierra Leone's turbulent past, violence played a key role in structuring rally day events and participants’ experiences of them. Yet this violence has not always been the same. In 2018 the beating of a young man by a rally crowd was in some ways unexceptional, both in Sierra Leonean politics and in the postcolonial response to urban crime. And yet it marked a subtle shift in both Sierra Leonean electoral politics and in the way such vigilante justice in African cities is interpreted. Contrasting the ethnographic elements of this single day with other representations of crowd violence in West Africa, this article explores an urban landscape that complicates the distinction between political and nonpolitical violence and between the presence and absence of the postcolonial state.

Construction of Ethno-Religious Identity in Nusa Tenggara Timur Local Politics

This article described the discourse on ethnoreligious identity in electoral politics in NTT from the perspective of post-structuralism. The discursiveness of identity is important because it helps with how ethnoreligious identity is constructed to become hegemonic in electoral politics. Using Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, this study found three articulations constructing ethnoreligious identity in electoral politics to become hegemonic, namely first, the historical articulation of enemy and ally; secondly, the institutionalization of representation of ethnoreligious identity in candidate pairs; and third, the daily socio-political practices of political actors. Reflectively, even though the three articulations have different working logics, they are ultimately absorbed in the “nodal point,” namely the hegemony of ethnoreligious identity in electoral politics. This study aims to raise citizens’ critical awareness that the hegemony of ethnoreligious identity in electoral politics is not taken for granted but is a social construction. By gaining this awareness, the citizens are expected not to be trapped in the essentialism of identity in electoral politics. This study contributes to the discourse study of the hegemony of ethno-religious identity in electoral politics.

The Waning of Kiai's Role: Transformation from Cultural Broker to Political Broker in Regional Head Election

This study aims to analyze the transformation of the role of Kiai in the local political context, focusing on their role as cultural broker to become political broker in Banten Regional Head Election. This research involved a qualitative study involving in-depth interviews with Kiai in the Banten area and an analysis of related documents. The study's results found a change in the role of the Kiai from being a cultural broker responsible for spreading religious and cultural teachings to the public into a political broker involved in the political process and regional head elections. Kiai not only acts as spiritual leaders but also become determinants in the local political process, including in the regional head elections. Kyai uses their religious influence and authority to influence political preferences and voter behavior. They also have access to political networks and play a role in coordinating political support for certain regional head candidates. This research provides a better understanding of the transformation of Kiai's role from a cultural broker to a political broker in the political process. This study implies that it is a basis for developing a comprehensive understanding of local political dynamics in Indonesia and the role of religion in the political process.