Popular Vote Research Articles

The role of vote advice application in direct-democratic opinion formation: an experiment from Switzerland

In an increasingly digitized world, vote advice applications (VAAs) seem to be effective in providing voters with personalized information about their own positions vis-à-vis parties’ positions and specific policies. Even though electoral research has increasingly paid attention to the role VAAs play in voter’s opinion formation, very few studies have examined VAAs in the context of direct-democratic decisions. This article fills this gap by providing new insights into how VAAs affect individual decision-making in popular votes theoretically and empirically. We use novel data from the referendum campaign on the 2017 new energy law in Switzerland: a VAA experiment carried out in the framework of a three-wave panel survey. In the third wave, which took place a week before the referendum, respondents were randomly assigned to a treatment group and a control group; only the former was shown the VAA and made to use it. The results indicate two main takeaways. First, that using a VAA has a tangible effect inasmuch as the share of undecided voters is smaller among the treatment than among the control group. Second, VAA usage can have both a persuasive effect (i.e., it can change vote intentions) and an intensifying effect (i.e., it can strengthen voters’ preexisting intentions).

MODIFICATION OF THE ELECTORAL LEGISLATION IS THE IMPERATIVE OF OUR TIMES

The article discusses the issues of modernization of the electoral legislation implemented in the last few years. The factors that caused the appearance of innovations and their content are considered. A significant role in this process was played by the political component, the increased confrontation between two approaches to understanding the future of Russia: strengthening state principles and following liberal ideas. Attention is focused on the innovations that appeared in the conditions of the pandemic. A brief summary of them is given. Purpose: to show the modification of the electoral legislation in Russia in connection with the political and epidemiological situation in the country, to demonstrate the possibility of solving current problems by reflecting them in the statutory legal regulation. Methods: the comparative method is used to compare the norms of electoral law. The method of formal logic allows to show the relationship of political and epidemiological components in the modification of electoral legislation. The formally legal method is applied in the process of evaluating the innovations of electoral law. The result of the study is that the legislator is obliged to take into account political, socio-economic, epidemiological conditions when forming the legal basis of elections. A popular vote is the only way to express the will of the people and to ensure that voters trust their representatives in the policies pursued by the authorities.

Labor Unions and American Elections

In 2000, labor unions attempted to enhance their political influence by increasing voter turnout among union members in support of Al Gore. This strategy was thought to be especially effective in a polity where voter participation is so low. Labor's political efforts helped Gore to a popular vote victory, but the union political strategy failed because of the dynamics of the Electoral College and low union density in many regions of the United States.

Patterns of (de)politicization in times of crisis: Swiss residents' political engagement, 1999–2020

We explore period, cohort and age effects on political engagement of Swiss residents from 1999 to 2020. A particular focus lies on the impact of the successive crises democratic societies have faced in recent years, such as the economic and debt crisis, refugee crisis, climate change, terrorist attacks or COVID-19 pandemic. We review the literature on the potential of such large-scale external events for both politicization and depoliticization. We then draw several hypotheses, which we test empirically. We consider several dimensions of political engagement (interest in politics, party identification, participation in popular votes, political discussions, and political trust), and seek to explain their variation over time, using data from the Swiss Household Panel. Our results suggest that “troubled times” have little effect on political engagement overall, but that crises stimulate political discussions and trust in government in the short term. We further find increasing levels of political trust in the longer run, which might reflect a cumulative effect of the various crises. In contrast, we find steadily declining levels of traditional forms of political engagement, namely party identification and participation in popular votes, as well as interest in politics. For cohorts, we find a U-shaped association between generations and political engagement. An exception to this pattern is political trust, where we observe a small but steady increase from older to newer generations. For age, we observed a monotonic increase of political engagement with age for all indicators. Again, trust in government somewhat deviates from other forms of political engagement, as it first decreases in the younger age groups and then increases from the age of 40 onwards. In conclusion, we discuss some implications of these complex patterns of results for the future of democratic systems.

Plebiscites, Referendums, and Ballot Initiatives as Institutions of Popular Sovereignty: Rousseau's Influence on Competing Theories of Popular-Vote Processes

AbstractPopular-vote processes — such as plebiscites, referendums, and initiatives — are frequently understood as Rousseauian instruments of popular sovereignty. Yet, Rousseau did not theorize these devices himself. As a result, he has been claimed by proponents of competing theories of popular-vote processes. Theorists of sleeping sovereignty have claimed Rousseau's distinction between sovereignty and government in support of rare, constitutional referendums. Theorists of direct democracy invoke Rousseau's criticism of representation to demand frequent referendums. Plebiscitarianism casts Rousseau's general will as demanding the unification of the nation in one popularly legitimated leader through top-down plebiscites. Lastly, Condorcet's proposal for the “censure of the people” outlines how the sovereign could initiate popular votes itself in order to check the power of the government. I contend that Condorcet's account provides the most compelling link between Rousseau's account of popular sovereignty and the institutional design of popular-vote processes.

Demokratizációs remények és aggályok

The article analyzes the political discourse concerning direct democracy between 1985–89, when the issue of introducing popular vote at local and national level became relevant, both as a general institutional reform of political decision-making, and as the result of some major initiatives launched by social movements. The analysis covers the related law journal articles, party-state documents, the writings of political and intellectual elites (including the opposition), and the wider public (mainly daily and weekly newspapers). The discourse analysis is based on the academic literature of direct democracy and some new aspects, like the timing of introducing direct democracy, its role and perspectives, the consideration of threats and benefits, and the relevance of international examples as possible models for reform. The paper finds that the opposition and the party-state regarded the introduction of popular vote differently: while the emerging opposition emphasised the function of controling the state power by popular votes, the party-state expected to stop shrinking its social legitimacy. Meanwhile, general public seemed to be indifferent about this remarkable democratic reform.

The Development of Framework Legal Regulation in the Field of Delimitation of Subjects of Jurisdiction and Powers of Federal Government Bodies of the Russian Federation and Its Subjects

The article analyzes individual legal acts regulating the issues of delimitation of the jurisdiction and powers of the Russian Federation and the constituent entities of the Russian Federation in terms of legal technique, in particular, the presence of elements of a framework legal regulation. Separate aspects of framework legal regulation from the point of view of constitutional law, the purpose of this study is to study the legal technique, tools of framework legal regulation. The mechanism of framework legal regulation exists in the field of delimitation of the subjects of jurisdiction and powers of federal government bodies and its subjects. From the point of view of legal technique, signs of framework legal regulation can be traced in the legislation of the USSR, however, conceptual changes in the development of federal relations began to occur at the end of the 20th century. An analysis of the legal acts that were signed before the popular vote on the adoption of the Constitution of the Russian Federation is essential in the process of determining the legal tools that the legislator used in regulating federal relations in the Russian Federation. Regulatory legal acts, including the Federal Treaty, were of great importance in the process of centralization of state power in our country, contributed to preventing the withdrawal of the autonomous union republics of the RSFSR from its composition. The Federal Treaty has certain features, on the technical and legal side, the text contains polysemy, relatively certain norms that create uncertainty in legal regulation, on the one hand, and on the other hand, in some Treaties there is a condition for further specification of legal relations, which allows taking into account the local features of the regions in further legal regulation. In complex states, the relationship between federal authorities and subjects of the federation is important, first of all, in order to carry out the functions of the state. From the point of view of the methodological concept of historicism, it is possible to explore the development of legal means of framework legal regulation, which were laid down during the formation and development of federal relations in Russia. Based on the results of the study, certain problems were identified, as well as generalizing conclusions were made.

Implementation of Voter by using Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for Fault Tolerant System

In a fault tolerant system, voting algorithm plays a major role in decision making. Inexact majority voting, majority voting, and weighted voters are most popular voting algorithms. In each of these techniques, redundant modules produce unpredictable outputs, and finding an agreement among these outputs is the functionality of voter. In this proposed system, voter is implemented using soft computing technique called ABC algorithm. The basic ABC algorithm is a very modest, adaptable and clear model. There are two categories of searchers in the hive of ABC; namely, unemployed searchers and employed searchers. Based on the intelligent performance of honey bee swarm, ABC is one of the optimization algorithms. The behaviours of bees are used to optimize weights of Triple Modular Redundant system, where each module plays an imperative role in the selection of voter. For evaluating the performance of voting algorithms, some performance measures have been defined; they are, safety and availability measures. ABC algorithm has been proposed to improve the safety and availability of the existing system.

Freedom As and Against Democracy

Freedom As and Against Democracy

Congratulations to the 2022 MRS Spring Meeting & Exhibit “Science as Art” Winners! By popular vote, the following images were chosen as 1st Place Winners

Congratulations to the 2022 MRS Spring Meeting & Exhibit “Science as Art” Winners! By popular vote, the following images were chosen as 1st Place Winners

Using polls to forecast popular vote share for US presidential elections 2016 and 2020: An optimal forecast combination based on ensemble empirical model

This study introduces the Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) technique to forecasting popular vote shares in general elections. The technique is useful when using polling data. Our main interest in this study is shorter- and longer-term forecasting and, thus, we consider from the shortest forecast horizon of 1-day to three months ahead. The EEMD technique is used to decompose the election data for the two most recent US presidential elections; 2016 and 2020. Three models, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Neural Network (NN) and ARIMA models are then used to predict the decomposition components. Subsequently, the final hybrid model is constructed by comparing the prediction performance of the decomposition components. The predicting performance of the combination model is compared with the benchmark individual models: SVM, NN, and ARIMA. Finally, this is also compared to the single prediction market IOWA Electronic Markets. The results indicate that the prediction performance of combined EEMD model is better than that of the individual models.

Communities with an anchor institution have higher coronavirus vaccination rates.

Anchor institutions ("anchors") are large employers, rooted in a community by reason of mission, capital, or relationships. Many anchors have encouraged coronavirus vaccination for employees and their families. Our objective was to determinewhether the presence of an anchor was associated with a higher county-level vaccination rate. A cross-sectional study focused on 745 small- and mid-sized US counties. We used data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Reference USA's US Business Database, Economic Innovation Group's Distressed Communities Index database, 2021 County Health Ratings and Rankings, 2020 US Presidential Election popular vote data, and National Center for Health Statistics urban-rural classification data. We constructed 3 explanatory variables of interest: a binary variable indicating whether the county had an anchor; a continuous variable representing the number of anchors within a county; and the percent of all workers in the county who were employed by an anchor. Multivariable linear regression models were adjusted for race/ethnicity, political party allegiance, rurality, economic distress, and prevalence of smoking and adult obesity. Counties with an anchor had vaccination rates 2.31 (P<.01) percentage points higher than those without an anchor. The number of anchors in a county was also significantly associated with higher vaccination rates. Efforts by anchors to encourage vaccination may have been successful, and that anchors may be well positioned to amplify public health messages. However, the influence and efforts of anchors to increase vaccination did not fully mitigate disparities in vaccination rates by race, ethnicity, and political party allegiance.

Effects of fingerprint recognition algorithms on toeprint and fingerprint

Democracy is a form of government in which politicians are chosen by popular vote. Voting may be done using behavioural biometrics, known as transparent balloting, which involves indicating a candidate of preference by indication, or physiological biometrics, known as hidden balloting, which involves appending a fingerprint to a vote. In certain countries around the world, fingerprints are used to cast ballots. However, injury casualties, natural disaster victims, and lepers, who account for one out of every 10,000 people in the world's population of approximately 7.7 billion, may pose a concern if their fingerprints are used to classify them. Two photographs were chosen to make up the sample collection: a Toeprint image with a left loop to be contrasted with a fingerprint image with a left loop. The photos were subjected to the standard fingerprint recognition algorithm, which included processes such as Normalisation, Orientation, Binarization, Thinning, and Minutiae Extraction. Since the experiment was not designed to measure the accuracy of the recognition algorithm, processing time and image quality were not taken into account. When the findings were compared, it was discovered that the algorithm had the same impact on both photos and that the derived minutiae points, which are the foundation for successful matching, were greater than 100. A modern method of self-identity and voting for lepers and injury patients is now accessible.

INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS AND LEGAL FRAMEWORK FOR NEW VOTING TECHNOLOGIES IN THE ELECTORAL PROCESS

The main condition for the formation of the Republic of Kazakhstan as an independent, sovereign state is the formation of a democratic society. The democratic processes taking place in the country require further improvement of the electoral system, which is one of the most important institutions for the formation and development of democracy. The formation of government bodies by popular vote is the basis of a democratic political system. The process of its passage depends on the use of new electoral technologies. Therefore, ensuring the impartiality and purity of the voting results is a task of great political importance. One of the main features of the electoral processes of the 21st century is the technological nature, consisting of new terms - digital and mobile revolutions, digitalization, virtual space, electronic democracy, electronic government, electronic governance, electronic voting. At the present stage of the development of electoral law, a rather promising direction is the introduction of electronic voting tools and complexes using digital technologies into the practice of conducting elections. An erroneous opinion is the understanding of digital technologies used at the stages and phases of the electoral process as electronic voting, with the exception of the voting process. Electronic voting is a term denoting various types of voting, including electronic means of voting, as well as technical electronic means of counting votes.

Public trust in citizens’ juries when the people decide on policies: evidence from Switzerland

ABSTRACT Facilitative political trust is the reduction in cognitive demand citizens experience when forming their opinions about political issues. This type of trust is important for generating legitimate democratic institutions in the eyes of politically uninvolved citizens. The article develops and validates an original direct measure of facilitative political trust among voters receiving a voting aid compiled by a Swiss municipal-level deliberative minipublic convening twenty citizens ahead of a federal popular initiative vote on expanding affordable housing policies. Based on perceiving the randomly selected group as competent and aligned with voters’ interests, we find a reliable and valid latent trust measure using confirmatory factor analyses among the same sample of voters within the municipality at two points during the campaign, ahead (N = 1159), and again around the time of the ballot (N = 472). In subsequent multiple regressions, increases in facilitative trust sores are the main driver of readers’ ratings of both the voting aid’s usefulness for deciding how to vote and of how important they judge its information for their peers’ vote decisions.

The Election of a Fringe Candidate: Anomalous or Normal? The Arrival of Donald Trump to the White House in 2016

Donald Trump’s 2016 successful electoral bid came as a surprise both to the public and pundits. Soon after the upset election, conventional wisdom settled on an explanation: that Trump’s victory was linked to Americans that felt left behind by globalization and the current political establishment. Conventional wisdom provided quick and straightforward answers. Nevertheless, these answers were incomplete. Chief among the missing elements of the improvised explanation was the radicalization of the Republican party. To fully understand how the transformation of the Republican Party resulted in President Trump’s election and his foreign policy, this article will analyze the case through constructivist lenses. According to this perspective, identity plays a crucial role in both domestic and international politics. By providing an analysis of American identity and especially of the identity of the Republican Party, constructivism provides useful knowledge in the interpretation of both Trump’s election and his administration’s foreign policy. We argue that what really explains Trump victory in the electoral college in the November 2016 electoral process (he lost the popular vote by about three million votes) are ideational, identity-related factors—not his personality or the globalization-related arguments conventional wisdom focuses on.

Czech Republic: Political Developments and Data in 2021

AbstractSeveral important events occurred in Czech politics in 2021. The cabinet of Prime Minister Babiš primarily focused on tackling the COVID‐19 pandemic. Four cabinet changes were made, two affecting the Health Minister and two affecting the Foreign Minister. The Constitutional Court repealed several sections of the electoral law governing the general election, leaving only a few months to pass a new electoral law before the next general election. In the October 2021 election, the SPOLU electoral alliance won the popular vote, while the governing party ANO gained the most seats under the new electoral law. The election was a disaster for left‐wing parties, as Social Democrats and the Communists gained no seats in the lower house. A new coalition government, led by political science professor Petr Fiala, was formed at the end of 2021. President Zeman was hospitalised for several weeks, casting doubts about whether he was able to fulfil his presidential duties.

A ascensão eleitoral do Rassemblement National de Marine Le Pen

In April 2022, Marine Le Pen passed for the second consecutive time to the second round of the presidential elections against the incumbent president Emmanuel Macron. Twenty years early on, her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, caused a political earthquake at the European level after attaining a similar presence in the second round of the presidential ballot. In comparison to the 17.8 per cent of the vote obtained by Le Pen in the second round, Marine’s electoral support in 2022 more than doubled this figure, as she collected 41.45 per cent of the popular vote in 2022. This trend demonstrated an impressive growth of electoral support of the French far right, which was the party family with most electoral support at the presidential ballot. This research will review the Front National development under Le Pen’s leadership, as well the electoral ascension and political programme of Marine that led to the rebranding of the party into Rassemblement National.

Argentinian Elections

Election forecasts, based on public opinion polls or statistical structural models, regularly appear before national elections in established democracies around the world. However, in less established democratic systems, such as those in Latin America, scientific election forecasting by opinion polls is irregular and by statistical models is almost non-existent. Here we attempt to ameliorate this situation by exploring the leading case of Argentina, where democratic elections have prevailed for the last thirty-eight years. We demonstrate the strengths—and the weaknesses—of the two approaches, finally giving the nod to structural models based political and economic fundamentals. Investigating the presidential and legislative elections there, 1983 to 2019, our political economy model performs rather better than the more popular vote intention method from polling.

Politically Viable U.S. Electoral College Reform

Abstract The U.S. Electoral College’s winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes creates a high susceptibility to disputes and errors, but past reform attempts have glossed over their likely disruptions to power balances among states and between the two political parties. This gap is filled by connecting pragmatic models of power shifts and election disputability to a historically informed probabilistic model of future elections. This methodology is then applied to a continuum of reform proposals between the current system and the Lodge-Gossett version of a national popular vote. The results show that a modest smoothing of winner-take-all near the toss-up point delivers a good tradeoff between reducing dispute frequency and distorting power balances, enabling meaningful reform in an era of high polarization. This conclusion holds for extrapolation of the current national landscape into near-future elections, as well as for more arbitrary distributions of partisans among states to represent far-future landscapes. However, as electoral award smoothing diminishes the frequency of disputed elections, it inevitably broadens their scope.