Polling Booth Research Articles

Whose Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights.

The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that all citizens have the right to vote without regard to their race, color, or previous condition of servitude. For almost a century the Fifteenth Amendment was a dead letter. Throughout the South millions of nonwhite Americans were excluded from the process by poll taxes, literacy tests, and other devices. The landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 sought to end that injustice. In this absorbing book, scientist Abigail Thernstrom analyzes the radical transformation of the Voting Rights Act in the years since its passage. She shows how a measure carefully crafted to open the polling booths to southern blacks has evolved into a powerful tool for affirmative action in the electoral sphere--a means to promote black and Hispanic officeholding by creating safe seats for minority candidates, What began as an effort to give minorities a fair shake has become a means of ensuring a fair share. Thernstrom demonstrates how voting rights have created a political thicket in which Congress, the courts, and the justice Department have been lost. Why this should be true, how small statutory changes led to large and unexpected results, how civil rights groups prevailed against a conservative Senate, how Republicans have benefited from gerrymandering to increase black officeholding--these stories are all part of Thernstrom's well-told tale. Even though the concept of the right to vote retains an aura of moral simplicity, the issue of minority voting rights is perhaps the most complex, yet least studied, of all affirmative action issues. Whose Votes Count? should stimulate the overdue discussion that the subject deserves among all those concerned with American politics.

Why Americans Don't Vote: Turnout Decline in the United States 1960–1984. By Ruy A. Teixeira (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987. viii, 149p. $32.95).

Tables Preface Introduction: The Empty Polling Booth Framing the Investigation: Analytical Strategy and Statistical Methods Is Demography Destiny?: Social Structure and Turnout Decline Beyond Demography: The Politics of Turnout Decline The American Nonvoter, 1960-1980: A Closer Look The Changing American Nonvoter, 1960-1980 The American Nonvoter Revisited: The 1984 Election Appendix: Data Set and Coding of Variables References Index

Women in South Asian politics

Two contradictory images come to mind whenever one thinks of women in politics in South Asia. One image is that of powerful women leaders (Indira Gandhi, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Benazir Bhutto, Hasina Wazed, Khaleda Zia), swathed in beautiful traditional dresses, surrounded by party leaders who are mostly male, addressing huge public rallies, enthusiastically attended-again, mainly by men. Another image is that of female masses, poor, illiterate, often veiled, huddled in groups in separate 'women only' polling booths or ration lines, or in labour lines seeking casual jobs. To an outsider, the two images are seen as indicative of the contradictions of South Asian society; some Western observers even argue that sharp class or caste differences make it easier for South Asian women of a certain class and family background to achieve positions of political leadership. Whether or not it is easier for women in South Asia to attain the highest political offices is debatable; nonetheless, the frequent emergence of powerful women leaders, both in government and in opposition, in all the major South Asian countries, gives rise to a number of questions: how and why have these women succeeded in assuming political leadership, particularly in societies still dominated by the values of gender segregation and purdah? Is family connection the crucial factor? How representative are these women? What impact does their emergence have on women's participation in mainstream politics? Finally, does so-called mainstream politics hold any future for women or does an alternative exist? While women's participation in politics may be analysed in many ways, this article will concentrate on three major issues: women in leadership, women in mainstream politics, and the new women's movement as an alternative to the mainstream. Data and examples are drawn primarily from the four South Asian countries where women have achieved leadership positions in the last few decades: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Are the Liverpool Liberals Really Different? A Path Analytic Interpretation of Local Voting in Liverpool 1973–82

It has already been demonstrated that part of the success of the Liverpool Liberals in local elections can be attributed to split-ticket voting by Liverpool electors. In May 1979, when city council and Westminster elections took place simultaneously, substantial proportions of voters went into a polling booth and voted for different parties at local and national level. This note attempts a further investigation of the basis of Liberal support in Liverpool local elections. Its main purpose is to test two hypotheses.1. ‘Liberal voting displays a weaker causal linkage to the socio-economic structure of Liverpool wards than does voting for the other two parties.’2. ‘Liberal voting is much more directly related to ward turnout than is voting for the other two parties.’

Campaign Spending in Contests for Governor

HE AMERICAN governorship is a political prize of major importance. Governors are more salient to the citizens of their states than any other political figure save the President. Nominating battles occur more often for candidacies for governor than for other offices, even when incumbents are running for reelection. In general, gubernatorial elections are more competitive than other contests, and this has become increasingly true in the past two decades. In one way or another, governors are the principal leaders of their state political party. Moreover, governors face a wider array of public policy problems than ever before, as the governing role of the states has grown. Commensurately, the national standing of governors has magnified, witnessed by the 1980 presidential contest between former governors Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.l Yet gubernatorial nominations, campaigns, and elections have not been investigated very extensively. Accordingly, the outcomes of gubernatorial elections appear as an alloy of the routine and the idiosyncratic. Systematic investigation of state election outcomes at the aggregate level has centered around three major influences-the effect of partisan strength, the incumbency effect, and the impact of the campaign. Measures of partisan strength aim to capture the baseline support which candidates can expect to receive because of the predisposition of voters to confirm their partisan attachments in the choices they make in the polling booth. Estimates of the for a party indicate what its proportion of the vote would be if the long-term effect of party identification were the only influence on the electoral outcome.2 Aggregate indicators of partisan strength serve as approximations of the normal party vote. Incumbent candidates in an election have an advantage over their challengers both because incumbent status may give them greater visibility to voters, and because the political resources at their command may allow them to conduct more extensive campaigns.3 Thus, incumbency may serve as a positive cue which voters use to make their electoral choices. Moreover, incumbents may be able to amass disproportionately large campaign war chests in order to widen and deepen their reelection efforts. Nevertheless, the

Optimal voting turnouts

There is an extensive and far-ranging literature concerned with positive aspects of election turnouts, dealing with such questions as the number of people who vote, the composition of the voting population, whether it is narrowly 'rational' for those who vote to do so, and so on. l The normative properties of election turnouts and alternative institutional arrangements for influencing them have, by contrast, been largely neglected. A notable exception to this neglect is Gordon Tultock's recent sequence of papers, and G~/rtner's associated comments on optimal poll taxes [Tullock, 1975, 1976 and 1977; see also G//rtner, 1976 and 1977]. Tutlock's general conclusion is that turnouts should be restricted below the levels that would obtain if elections were financed out of general revenue, and hence that some poll tax is required. The arguments which Tullock uses to support this conclusion are two fold. First, the voting process itself is costly in terms of the provision of polling booths, ballot papers, vote-counting machines, scrutineers and so on-and presumably, having greater numbers from the enfranchised population exercising their voting rights will increase this cost. At the optimal turnout, the net benefits from an extra individual's exercise of his vote must exactly offset the incremental processing cost. Second, Tullock argues, since any individual's political "power," defined as the probability that his vote will be decisive, decreases with

The Political Contours of a Coalfield in India

THIS ARTICLE IS based on the results of a survey conducted in 1969-1971 in Dhanbad District in Bihar. The survey covered four of the State Legislative Assembly (MLA) constituencies of Dhanbad District and provided a cross-section of rural and urban areas. In selecting these constituencies, we followed the axis from the remote rural hinterland of Tundi to industrial Sindri (the fertilizer factory area), which also cuts right through the mining belt. The population from which the sample was selected was the electorate listed in the electoral lists. We constructed a two-stage random sample with polling booths as first stage units and individual respondents as second stage units. In order to conduct a representative study, a random sample of five booths of 20 persons each was selected for a pilot survey in order to collect enough material for a proper estimation of sample size. This sample survey provided the data for the estimation of variance, the variance between booths and within a booth. A survey of 20 voters in each of 40 booths would give a representative cross-section of the population and would provide enough data to draw conclusions. We discussed and examined some significant aspects of political awareness with the main emphasis on political participation in a wideranging spectrum of the political system. However, it is not possible to completely comprehend the phenomenon under study. The important

On Defining Voter Rationality and Deducing a Model of Party Competition

One problem to which we must address ourselves before constructing any deductive model of voting behaviour is why people vote at all. On the face of it at least, this seems to be a stumbling block, given the theoretical problem that, compared with the costs of voting, the benefits to be expected are very small; and given the empirical problem that large numbers of people turn out to vote when they cannot possibly hope to influence the result, while others stay at home on the few occasions when a close result is expected. The most common attempted solution amounts to saying that people like voting, or at least that they feel guilty about not voting. This solution can be traced from the early work of Downs to the more recent and rigorous analyses of Riker and Ordeshook. Motives such as citizen duty, the satisfaction of belonging to a democracy, the satisfaction of supporting a particular party, and so on, are ascribed to voters. Each voter is then assumed to conduct a ‘calculus of voting’ in which he or she weighs up these benefits against any inconvenience involved in going to the polling booth. For many the net effect will be positive and voting will therefore be rational.

Post-decision dissonance at the polling booth.

Post-decision dissonance at the polling booth.

LOCAL EFFECTS IN VOTING AT A LOCAL ELECTION∗

A broader definition of local effects may produce more warping of a predicted map of intraurban voting patterns than does the usual “friends and neighbors’ effect. In the 1971 elections in Christchurch City, New Zealand, only a few candidates clearly drew on strong local bases, mainly those standing independently of the main party tickets and those who lived in districts dominated by the opposite party. Local effects were not evident at some polling booths.

But Who Should I Vote for County Coroner?

EVERY TWO YEARS literally thousands of candidates run for election to special district boards, county central committees, and obscure nonpartisan offices where the voters frequently not only do not know who the candidates are or to which party they belong. They do not even know what the officeholder is supposed to do once he or she is elected. The purpose of this research note is to point out some of the stimuli to which voters turn when they know so little about an election that they have absolutely no clues to direct them once they enter the voting booth. We originally asked the question, What does the voter do when he goes into the voting booth with no knowledge of any of the candidates running, no knowledge of any of the candidates' positions on any of the issues, no knowledge of the issues, no partisan labels, and very little knowledge of the functions of the office itself? As the voter enters the polling booth, then, he has no cues about the rewards accruing to him from his voting decision for this particular office except what he sees on the ballot itself.

Voting on the Propositions: Ballot Patterns and Historical Trends in California

Entering the polling booth on Tuesday, November 3, 1964, the typical California voter found himself confronted with an immense sheet of finely-printed green paper, a dirty black rubber stamp, a tiny ink pad, and thirty decisions to render. A few minutes later (the legal maximum is 10) he emerged and numbly surrendered to a clerk his ballot, now slightly embellished, like the fingers of his decision hand, with black ink stains.Most of his decisions were made on a lengthy array of propositions. In these, questions on an assortment of issues were posed, each couched in language tedious and obscure—as only minds trained in the finest law schools could devise.This study seeks to gain some knowledge about factors which influence the vote on these propositions. It employs a somewhat unorthodox method: an analysis of the voting patterns on actual ballots. The ballots furnish attractive data because they are, after all, completely accurate records of the results of those minutes of decision-rendering in the artificial privacy of that cramped polling booth.It would be impossible by this method to generate a comprehensive theory about proposition voting behavior—too much information about the individual voter is forever lost by the secrecy incorporated in the balloting procedure. Nevertheless a contribution can be made in several areas of relevant concern, areas currently dominated more by folklore and mythology than fact or theory.

Voting on the Propositions: Ballot Patterns and Historical Trends in California

Entering the polling booth on Tuesday, November 3, 1964, the typical California voter found himself confronted with an immense sheet of finely-printed green paper, a dirty black rubber stamp, a tiny ink pad, and thirty decisions to render. A few minutes later (the legal maximum is 10) he emerged and numbly surrendered to a clerk his ballot, now slightly embellished, like the fingers of his decision hand, with black ink stains.Most of his decisions were made on a lengthy array of propositions. In these, questions on an assortment of issues were posed, each couched in language tedious and obscure—as only minds trained in the finest law schools could devise.This study seeks to gain some knowledge about factors which influence the vote on these propositions. It employs a somewhat unorthodox method: an analysis of the voting patterns on actual ballots. The ballots furnish attractive data because they are, after all, completely accurate records of the results of those minutes of decision-rendering in the artificial privacy of that cramped polling booth.It would be impossible by this method to generate a comprehensive theory about proposition voting behavior—too much information about the individual voter is forever lost by the secrecy incorporated in the balloting procedure. Nevertheless a contribution can be made in several areas of relevant concern, areas currently dominated more by folklore and mythology than fact or theory.

Significance of the 1963 Korean Elections

How should we evaluate the 1963 Korean presidential and National Assembly elections and the new institutional framework of the Third Korean Republic? The presidential elections were held on October 15, 1963. Election returns from 7,392 polling booths awarded victory by a narrow margin to General Pak, head of the military junta since its successful coup in May 1961 and the presidential nominee of the Democratic-Republican party. Pak's chief opponent was Yun Po-sun of the Civil Rule party, former president of the Second Republic. Pak polled 4,702,642 votes (47%) and Yun 4,546,614 votes (45%) out of the 10,081,198 total valid votes cast; 954,977 votes were declared invalid and 1,948,840 voters (16% of the 12,985,015 total registration) did not participate in the election. (See Table 1.) If General Pak hoped to use this election to obtain a popular mandate for continued military rule in Korea, he failed to obtain it, as the votes cast for his opponents amounted to 5,378,558, or 675,916 votes more than the votes cast for Pak. Clearly, Pak would not have won the election without the organizational support of the Democratic-Republican party.J This party was organized as the junta's government party by Kim Chong-p'iJ, a young dynamic organizer, the prime mover of the aforementioned successful coup and formerly the head of Korea's powerful Central Intelligence Agency. In his capacity as Chief of the CIA, Kim laid down a blueprint for the new party and its monopoly of the decision-making apparatus of a new republican government.2 The junta's popularity had steadily declined, primarily because of the failure of the financial reform program, its inability to cope with the worsening economic situation, and the termination of a short-lived honeymoon between the military and the intellectuals.3 Kim's scheme was to popularize a party which embraced within its leadership as many civilian

British by-Elections, 1951-1955

Previous articleNext article No AccessBritish by-Elections, 1951-1955Richard M. ScammonRichard M. Scammon Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Politics Volume 18, Number 1Feb., 1956 Sponsored by the Southern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2126678 Views: 6Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Voter's Natural Bent

purpose of letting a voter make a record of his opinions on the candidates and the issues that he has been listening to and thinking about for a long time and relating them to a sense of himself and the community he lives in. The official ritual of standing within the isolated polling booth helps the citizen focus his impressions and makes him give them direction. To do this he must think of something beyond his own skin and bones; he is reminded that he is not living alone. He uses his vote for the state, the public-not for a private interest. Grover Cleveland well said: Your every voter, as surely as your chief magistrate, exercises a public trust.

India's General Elections

? under constitution of Republic is now in progress.1 It has been called by Sukumar Sea, Election Gommissioner in charge, the biggest experiment in democracy in human history. Certainly it is largest election ever held. As a result of India's daring decision to introduce universal suffrage in a country where 85 percent of adult population is illiterate^ no less than 176 million persons are eligible to vote, and it is expected that a large majority of them will go to polls. Most of them have never voted before.2 The government of India, working under unprecedented difficulties, is making every ef? fort to ensure that voting is freely and fairly conducted. Much depends on success of this experiment, for democratic institutions are on trial in Asia today. The mere mechanics of election present a prob? lem of colossal proportions. Never before has so large a nation gone to polls. At stake are about 4^500 seats in national House of People and state Legislative Assemblies?the lower houses of central and state Parliaments.3 Seven hundred million ballot papers have been printed. Approximately 224,000 polling booths have been constructed., and equipped with over two million steel ballot boxes. Some 56,000 Presiding Off cers for polling booths will be required; they will be assisted by 280,000 clerks and 224,000 policemen. Several candidates will stand for every seat to be filled, and each candidate will be aided in electioneering by lieutenants, admirers, and party workers. At least two million persons will take a direct part in conduct of elections, either as officials or as po? litical workers. The costs of conducting elections for central and state governments alone have been estimat d at more than $20 million;4 costs to parties a d candidates combined will be even greater.

Voters Pick Their Party

THE drama of election year is enacted mainly between the time the conventions are held and the day the polling booths open. Considerably less dramatic are the push and pull of political forces in the years between elections. Solid political support grows or is lost in a matter of years not months-or at least not during the months of August, September, and October. In the following article the authors summarize the shifts in political opinion which have been taking _place slowly over the last years. This is a picture of the trends in political opinion as of a few days before the Republican Convention. Edward G. Benson is chief statistician of the American Institute of Public Opinion (referred to as AIPO below), and Evelyn Wicoff is head of the tabulating staff of that organization. Mr. Benson has appeared in these pages several times before; Miss Wicoff is a newcomer.