Popular Vote Research Articles

Forecasting Popular Vote and Electoral College Vote Results: Partisan-Bounded Economic Model

Forecasting Popular Vote and Electoral College Vote Results: Partisan-Bounded Economic Model

Is the U.S. Supreme Court Facing a Crisis of Democratic Legitimacy? A Review Article

Abstract Kevin McMahon's A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other examines the extent to which the current Supreme Court—and its conservative supermajority—departs from earlier courts in the extent to which it suffers from a “democracy gap.” McMahon persuasively argues that the current Court is different for two reasons. First, most of the justices in the conservative majority were appointed by presidents who did not win the popular vote and/or were confirmed by senators who represented fewer voters than the senators who opposed them. Second, the homogenization of nominee experience and background has created a “judicial aristocracy” in which the justices are experientially far removed from the elected branches. One puzzle this account raises is why this democracy gap took so long to emerge, given the institutional design of the Court. But given the current polarized state of American politics, the same forces that brought us to the reality of the conservative supermajority are unlikely to abate for quite some time.

Procedural Justice, Representation, and Institutional Trust in Mexico

Both theoretical and empirical studies suggest that confidence in institutions is crucial for the functioning of democratic political systems and is an important element of the citizen–state relationship. Trust in institutions has been mainly explained in terms of institutional performance or as an extension of interpersonal trust. Using data from the 2020 National Survey of Civic Culture (Encuesta Nacional de Cultura Cívica), we examined the determinants of Mexicans’ trust in two institutions elected via popular vote: Congress and the Presidency. We focus on procedural justice and representation to account for trust in both institutions. We found positive relationships (of different magnitudes) between citizens’ trust in both Congress and the Presidency and the indicators of perceived representation, procedural justice, institutional performance, and interpersonal trust. In addition, we found different and significant effects of party identification on trust levels in both institutions.

The Counter-Majoritarian Referendum: Popular Voting Processes and Constitutional Change

ABSTRACT On the one hand, it seems important to bring real citizens into the constitutional processes of making and amending constitutions. This is important in order to foster a sense of ownership and commitment to constitutional principles, have those documents reflect the interests and concerns of ordinary people, and fulfill the principles of popular sovereignty and constituent authority of the people. On the other hand, there are many misgivings about handing over decisional power to the people (for example through referendums) on constitutional issues. The worry here is that these means of bringing citizen into the process are easily hijacked by majoritarian or populist forces and may be used to undermine rather than strengthen principles of constitutional democracy. Constitutions are, among other things, supposed to protect individuals and minorities from majorities. This is the classic tension between democracy and constitutionalism. One solution is to shift ideas of popular sovereignty away from voting and towards fostering public dialogue. In this paper, I argue that one of the most effective ways to foster public dialogue about constitutional essentials is through initiating a referendum. Thus I defend constitutional referendums on the counterintuitive grounds that if properly structured they are effective in promoting the recognition of the limits of majoritarianism.

The diverse impacts of democracy on greenhouse gas emissions

A model to assess the relationship between attributes of democracy and greenhouse gas emissions is developed. Applying this framework to a comprehensive panel dataset covering more than 150 countries over the recent three decades, the following key findings emerge: (i) Direct Popular Voting is highly effective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions across all sources. (ii) Civil Society Participation also proves effective, though its impact is reduced for emissions from well-identified sources. (iii) Greater emphasis on individual and political liberties reduces the effectiveness of Liberal Democracy in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions compared to the previous two indicators. (iv) The impacts of Judicial Constraint on the Executive and Freedom of Expression, while not negligible, are weaker compared to those of the first three indicators. These findings are interpreted and explained, and their implications for the design and implementation of climate policies are examined.

Незашоренные размышления в связи с внесением 22 мая 2024 г. в Государственную Думу проекта федерального конституционного закона «О Конституционном Собрании»

The proposed article discusses various scientific and legal, as well as practical and political aspects of the problem of legislative regulation of the convening of the Constitutional Assembly as the last constitutional body prescribed in the Constitution, but not yet activated, which has exclusive powers to decide on the issue of preserving the invariability of the current Constitution, drafting a new Constitution and its adoption or its submission to a national vote. The paper considers the significance and status of this institution, offers a historical excursion — previous attempts to adopt the law, substantiates the strategic nature of the Constitutional Assembly, the problem of election of its members and the popular vote on the draft of the new Constitution, analyses the correlation between the Constitutional Assembly and the State Duma, makes a proposal on how to update the Constitution of 1993, makes specific comments on the draft law submitted to the State Duma on 22 May 2024, raises the question of the possibility of an integrated approach to the drafting of the new Constitution. The article is oriented towards continuing the discussion on this issue in scientific and practical terms.

“Defend your children, they can be taken by two gay men”: A scoping review of the conflating and diversionary discourses used in same-sex marriage debates

The use of direct popular votes such as plebiscites, referendums, and postal surveys to determine the right of same-sex couples to marry have proliferated in recent years, particularly across the Global North. By including the public in the decision-making process, serious debates have been fermented about the morality of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) rights. Based on a scoping review of the available English language literature, this paper maps the key findings from 24 peer reviewed studies to offer a cross-national analysis of conflating and diversionary discourses used by pro- and anti-SSM advocates. This paper finds that despite ostensibly being about LGBTQ + sexual rights, these debates commonly conflate SSM with other unsubstantiated ‘threats’, categorised here as operating across the global, national, and individual levels. The findings suggest that SSM debates consistently conflated the issue with international human rights discourses, alongside notions of ‘race’, gender, family, and reproduction as a strategy to garner public opinion. This study reveals a complex network of discourses where the rights of LGBTQ + people are continuously harnessed for political agendas extending beyond the specific efforts to legislate SSM. This paper concludes with the limitations of this review and possible directions for future research.

People's Multi-party Democracy: A Success Story of the Communist Movement of Nepal

The 1990s was a crucial time in the global communist movement that faced a serious setback after the collapse of the USSR and other East European communist and socialist governments. In Nepal, communist parties allied with the Nepali Congress, a democratic party to stage the people’s movement to end active monarchy and restore democracy. The call for the people’s movement by the parties appealed the people and they took part in the movement in a historic way. That movement succeeded to restore democracy and end the active monarchy. Madan Bhandari, the secretary-general of the Communist Party of Nepal (Marxist and Leninist) witnessed this unprecedented participation of the people in a peaceful democratic movement and realized the need to democratize the communist movement, so that, they could build people’s trust towards communist parties. In the general election held in 1991, communist parties won forty percent of the seats in the parliament and popular votes as well. In this context, Bhandari presented the document of people’s multi-party democracy in the fifth national congress of the Communist Party of Nepal (Marxist and Leninist) held in 1993, and it was passed overwhelmingly in the congress. This article attempts to make a textual analysis of the document of People’s multi-party democracy to examine the major aspects of the document and to see how successful it has become in democratizing the communist movement in Nepal.

ИСТОРИЯ ЗАКОНОДАТЕЛЬНОГО ЗАКРЕПЛЕНИЯ ПРАВ И СВОБОД ЧЕЛОВЕКА И ГРАЖДАНИНА В КОНСТИТУЦИЯХ РОССИИ: СРАВНИТЕЛЬНО-ПРАВОВОЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЕ

The article is devoted to the historical process of including the rights of citizens of the RSFSR into the basic laws of our state, and later – the rights and freedoms of man and citizen in the Russian Federation. The corresponding norms of the Constitution of the RSFSR of 1918, the Constitution of the RSFSR of 1925, the Constitution of the RSFSR of 1978, the Constitution of the Russian Federation – Russia are analyzed in comparison, including in comparison with similar norms of the Constitution of the Russian Federation. The considered constitutions as the main normative legal acts of the state allowed us to conclude that the rights and freedoms of man and citizen were legislated in 1918, in the first Soviet Constitution. Subsequently, with the development of the state and society, the volume of human and civil rights and freedoms in Russia increased. The Constitution of the Russian Federation, adopted by popular vote on December 12, 1993, contains the largest number of such rights and freedoms, which, taking into account modern federal legislation, complies with generally recognized norms of international law.

Estimator Comparison for the Prediction of Election Results

Cluster randomized experiments and estimator comparisons are well-documented topics. In this paper, using the datasets of the popular vote in the presidential elections of the United States of America (2012, 2016, 2020), we evaluate the properties (SE, MSE) of three cluster sampling estimators: Ratio estimator, Horvitz–Thompson estimator and the linear regression estimator. While both the Ratio and Horvitz–Thompson estimators are widely used in cluster analysis, we propose a linear regression estimator defined for unequal cluster sizes, which, in many scenarios, performs better than the other two. The main objective of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to indicate which estimator is most suited for predicting the outcome of the popular vote in the United States of America. We do so by applying the single-stage cluster sampling technique to our data. In the first partition, we use the 50 states plus the District of Columbia as primary sampling units, whereas in the second one, we use 3112 counties instead. Secondly, based on the results of the aforementioned procedure, we estimate the number of clusters in a sample for a set standard error while also considering the diminishing returns from increasing the number of clusters in the sample. The linear regression estimator is best in the majority of the examined cases. This type of comparison can also be used for the estimation of any other country’s elections if prior voting results are available.

Economic Distress and Electoral Consequences: Evidence from Appalachia

Abstract Information about inequality can change political attitudes in lab and survey experiments. I use data from the Appalachian Regional Commission and a regression discontinuity design to test whether salient information about local poverty can impact voter behavior in a field setting. I find that when the poorest decile of counties is labeled “economically distressed,” the Democratic share of the Presidential and House popular vote rises in subsequent elections. I present suggestive evidence linking this result to local news coverage, rather than spending or other outcomes.

Open Government Policy Making by Popular Voting: Comparing Canada and New Zealand

The connection between open government policy and popular voting is understudied, yet it can reveal interesting patterns of policymaking that blend agenda setting, policy formulation, and decision-making in semiformalized fluid forms. This inquiry investigates the link between policy voting and open government by comparing the case studies of cocreating open government partnership national action plans in Canada and New Zealand. It examines the role of voting within the policy cycle of open government as a system of governance comprised of transparency, participation, accountability, and civic education. It further employs an exploratory mixed-methods approach of analyzing applied reports, official documents, social media campaigns, and expert interviews. It was found that not the voting format but the government’s approach to interaction with stakeholders is associated with the diverging patterns of open government in the two countries.

The Electoral College’s Impact on Presidential Mandates and Agendas

The Electoral College is the method used in every four years to elect the President of the United States. Given that the Electoral College gives the power to elect the president to state-casted votes, the system has in recent years become a source of growing controversy given how two presidents, George Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016, without winning the national popular vote. These elections and the public discourse around them have brought new life to the purpose and impacts of the Electoral College. This paper uses key presidential elections, including those of John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Benjamin Harrison, Woodrow Wilson, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, give insight on how the Electoral College should now be understood. In particular, this paper examines the implications of the Electoral College on one fundamental question: Does election to the presidency via the Electoral College route fundamentally affect the ability of a president to govern effectively? Examining these elections, the context around and impact after these elections, and modern United States political history shows that when the Electoral College is not an extraordinary or exceptionally notable part of an election cycle, the Electoral College does not fundamentally affect the president’s ability to command public and political support required to effectively govern. However, when the Electoral College does become a point of focus during a presidential election and in the beginning of a president’s term, it has wide-ranging impacts. In particular, the College can shape the political and public mandate the president has to lead, shaping their overall agenda for their time in office; cause biases to arise towards certain states and conservative politics; and undermine their ability to serve as a unifying figure. With each modern election having an increased focus on the Electoral College, the system is likely to cause increased polarization and tension with each passing election if serious reforms are not undertaken.

Online disinformation in the 2020 U.S. election: swing vs. safe states

For U.S. presidential elections, most states use the so-called winner-take-all system, in which the state’s presidential electors are awarded to the winning political party in the state after a popular vote phase, regardless of the actual margin of victory. Therefore, election campaigns are especially intense in states where there is no clear direction on which party will be the winning party. These states are often referred to as swing states. To measure the impact of such an election law on the campaigns, we analyze the Twitter activity surrounding the 2020 US preelection debate, with a particular focus on the spread of disinformation. We find that about 88% of the online traffic was associated with swing states. In addition, the sharing of links to unreliable news sources is significantly more prevalent in tweets associated with swing states: in this case, untrustworthy tweets are predominantly generated by automated accounts. Furthermore, we observe that the debate is mostly led by two main communities, one with a predominantly Republican affiliation and the other with accounts of different political orientations. Most of the disinformation comes from the former.

The Risk of Narrow, Disputable Results in the U.S. Electoral College

Abstract Close elections are important for many reasons, including that consequent election disputes can weaken democratic legitimacy and risk political violence. We quantify the probability of close outcomes in US presidential races with novel applications of empirical election models from several sources. We show that razor-thin margins are very likely under the Electoral College (EC). And we establish that the EC causes this closeness: It would not occur under any plausibly comparable popular vote system. The tendency of the EC to generate close elections is found today and throughout US presidential voting history.

Foreign experience in determining the validity of the will of the people

The subject of the study is the experience of foreign countries in the field of the authenticity of the will of the people when voting on direct forms of democracy. The paper examines democracy and the identification of the will of the people in Germany. It is proposed to distinguish broad and narrow approaches to understanding reliability when it comes to identifying the will of the people. Thus, a narrow approach is relevant only to the correctness of the vote count, and then the credibility of the will of the people should be defined as the correspondence of the final voting protocol to the actual will of the people, and with a broad approach it is proposed to consider it as the correspondence of the will of the people to the true and free will of the people. The classification of types of distortions of the will of a citizen (based on their nature) is revealed. The main conclusions of the study are the results of studying the foreign practice of organizing the determination of the reliable expression of the will of the people in direct forms of democracy. In a number of positions, foreign experience can be borrowed. Thus, it would be justified to legislatively and constitutionally consolidate the increasing importance of political parties in the sphere of forming the will of the people. Taking into account foreign experience, it is possible to introduce specific measures of criminal and civil liability of a casuistic orientation for non-fulfillment or violation of the procedural norms of the electoral process stipulated by law, entailing distortion of the will of voters. It seems that there is a need to introduce responsibility to the people and the entire deputy corps of the legislative authority as a whole, that is, the introduction of a popular vote of no confidence in this composition of the legislative authority if there are doubts about the reliability of the results of determining the will of the people. As guarantees of the real implementation of democracy and the power of the people, it would be necessary to provide for the adoption of the most important legislative acts in the field of determining the authenticity of the will of the people, only if there is a popular initiative.

State Resident Handedness, Ideology, and Political Party Preference: U.S. Presidential Election Outcomes Over the Past 60 Years.

Pearson correlation, partial correlation, and multiple regression strategies determined the degree to which estimates of the level of left-handedness in each of the 48 contiguous American states related to citizen political ideology and to Democratic-Republican presidential popular vote over the past 60years. Higher state levels of left-handedness were associated significantly with liberal ideology in each of the presidential election years from 1964 to 2016. Comparable ideology data were not available for 2020. Higher state levels of left-handedness also were associated with a greater degree of Democratic candidate popular vote support in each of the presidential election years from 1964 to 2020 except for 1976. The mean size of these 28 significant Pearson correlations involving the two political criteria was .62 (SD = .12) with a range of .38-.80, indicating handedness alone could account for a mean of 40.1% (SD = 14.9) of the variance in the two political preference variables. Corresponding multiple regressions showed that when state-level Big Five personality, White population percent, urbanization, and income variables were given the opportunity to enter the equations, handedness still emerged with a significant regression coefficient in 26 of the 28 equations. The two exceptions occurred for 1968 with either political preference criterion. It is speculated that such relations are grounded in hypothesized but poorly understood genetic links between handedness, personality, and political beliefs and attitudes, and, that a foundational genetic predisposition to left-handedness in a population may have much greater impact on correlates than overt levels of left-handedness.

Review of the All-Russian Scientific and Practical Conference of the Institute of State and Law of the Russian Academy of Sciences and North-Eastern Federal University «Relevant issues of Private Law» dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the adoption by popular vote of the Constitution of Russia

Review of the All-Russian Scientific and Practical Conference of the Institute of State and Law of the Russian Academy of Sciences and North-Eastern Federal University «Relevant issues of Private Law» dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the adoption by popular vote of the Constitution of Russia

Shifting Electorates and Preferences in Chile’s Constitutional Process

Normatively, democratic constitutions should express how citizens want to govern themselves collectively. Little is known, however, about how citizens’ constitutional preferences can be elicited and aggregated in practice. An intuitively appealing approach is to allow various forms of popular participation during a constitution-making process, including a popular vote to accept or reject the draft constitution (Fishkin 2011). Based on the Chilean experience with democratic constitution making, this article identifies unanticipated and previously unexplored distortions that can lead to incongruence between the preferences of voters and representatives regarding the extent and direction of constitutional change.

The health costs of political identity: evidence from the US during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT We estimate the impact of US political identity on COVID-19 safety behaviors, cases, and deaths. Our data set merges US county-level data on mask-wearing, cell-phone mobility, vaccination rates, county characteristics, and variables reflecting conservative political identity with COVID-19 cases and deaths from the first 12, 20, and 28 months of the pandemic in the United States. State-level fixed-effect estimations controlling for county characteristics indicate every 10 percentage point increase in the county popular vote for President Trump in the 2020 election to be associated with a 0.36σ reduction in a COVID-safety index, 1798 additional COVID cases, and 31.9 COVID deaths per 100,000 county residents in the initial 28 months of the pandemic. Further, we ask whether differential behavioral responses during the pandemic can be explained by traditional strains of American conservatism or are associated with a more specific Trumpian identity. We create state-level indices of traditional libertarian and social conservatism, finding that these indices display little systematic explanatory power over COVID-safety behaviors, cases, and deaths relative to 2020 Trump voter support.