Potential Voters Research Articles

Social class predicts preference for competent politicians

Perceptions of interpersonal competence are an important predictor of success in the political domain. However, we provide evidence that competence is valued differently by individuals across the social class spectrum. Across two experiments (N1 = 441; N2 = 500), we found that voting-eligible participants of relatively higher social class expressed a greater likelihood than their lower-class counterparts of voting for a candidate embodying competence. Moreover, they were more likely to explicitly prefer such a candidate to one embodying warmth. Exploratory analyses suggest that these preferences were mediated by perceptions relating to self-interest and self-other similarity: compared to their lower-class counterparts, higher-class potential voters saw the competent candidate as more likely to care about people like them and as more interpersonally close. An internal meta-analysis suggested that these patterns of preference were unique to competent politicians and that they were meaningfully different from class-based patterns of preference for warm politicians. We conclude that competence, in the political domain, is distinctively appealing to higher-class individuals, and we discuss the implications of these findings for psychological theory, political participation, and the representativeness of the political system in general.

PENGARUH SOSIAL MEDIA TERHADAP PERSEPSI PUBLIK DALAM PEMIIHAN KEPALA DAERAH DI SUMBAWA TAHUN 2020

The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of social media on public perception of regional head elections in Sumbawa in 2020. The method used was a qualitative method with a descriptive approach, data collection techniques with interviews, documentation, and literature studies related to the problems studied. The results of this study indicate that social media can influence public perception in the election by becoming a political campaign and marketing tool, namely the first 4Ps are products; The most important product of a political party is of course the candidate himself along with the party platform, concept, and work program of the political party itself. Second promotion: A good promotion is not luck, but a good promotion must be placed precisely where the sale will take place, how the promotion will run and for whom the promotion is. Third price: Price or price in political marketing includes several things ranging from economic, psychological image to national image. Fourth place: places related to pairs of candidates can maximize all potential voters well or effectively, political socialization to pairs of candidates can accommodate all levels of society. Candidate pairs are always able to classify, map, and analyze layers and forms of community characteristics.

Millennial Political Concerns and Political Preferences towards Presidential Election in 2019: Evidence from Palembang

The 2019 democratic party was dominated by millennial generation voters. In the face of the democratic party for the presidential/vice presidential election which was held in 2019, the millennial generation is a group of potential voters whose the largest voting rights because it influences in determining who the candidate for the nation's leader is. This study uses a mixed method research, which combines qualitative and quantitative research methods with analytical descriptive to obtain more in-depth data. This study seeks to reveal the political preferences of the millennial generation of Palembang in the presidential election 2019. By using the theory of voting behavior, this study attempts to analyze the political preference factors of the millennial generation in the presidential election 2019. The results of this study indicate that the political preferences of the millennial generation of Palembang in the presidential election 2019 based on several factors, namely sociological factors, psychological factors, and the rational choice of the millennial generation in determining the candidates they choose. The political rights of the millennial generation is important because of the position of the millennial generation as a generation that has the potential to determine the life of a better Indonesian political system.

Cuantificador todo en tiempos del Covid

The sudden onset of the Coronavirus pandemic created the need for contemporary societies to adjust quickly to new rules that frequently limit our civil rights. Governments are obliged to take decisions and inform society of such. On the other hand, imposing unpopular rules on potential voters can result in a loss in popularity that can be devastating for a politician. This is true even in the face of a force majeure. Therefore, from the point of view of the pragmatics of political discourse it is imperative to choose those linguistic devices that would allow communicative goals to be achieved while not compromising the speaker. In the official speeches of the Spanish Prime Minister that took place between January and June 2020 and which coincided with the most dramatic period of the pandemic, the frequency of the use of quantitative expressions, especially of the collective universal quantifier todo, is significant. In this paper we will analyse various uses of this linguistic expression that arise from the discursive pragmatic strategies employed by the speaker.

Contesting Power Online: Campaigning via Twitter in Kenya’s 2017 Elections

Building on scholarship studying Twitter and political campaigns, we examine Kenya's 2017 elections to learn which candidates used Twitter and how they used it. We collected and analyzed 15,691 tweets made by eighty-six candidates between June 8 and August 8, Election Day. We find that, like candidates in other contexts, ruling party candidates in Kenya rarely interacted with other users and instead used Twitter as a broadcasting tool. Nevertheless, while earlier studies questioned Twitter's ability to encourage dialogue between candidates and citizens, we find that some candidates—particularly independent candidates—used Twitter to engage with potential voters.

Political Microtargeting and Online Privacy: A Theoretical Approach to Understanding Users’ Privacy Behaviors

Social media allow political parties to conduct political behavioral targeting in order to address and persuade specific groups of users and potential voters. This has been criticized: Most social media users do not know about these microtargeting strategies, and the majority of people who are aware of targeted political advertising say that it is not acceptable. This intrusion on personal privacy is viewed as problematic by users and activists alike. The overarching goal of this article is to elaborate on social media users’ privacy perceptions and potential regulating behaviors in the face of political microtargeting. This work is theoretical in nature. We first review theoretical and empirical research in the field of political microtargeting and online privacy. We then analyze how privacy is experienced by social media users during political microtargeting. Building on our theoretical analysis, we finally suggest clear-cut propositions for how political microtargeting can be researched while considering users’ privacy needs on the one hand and relevant political outcomes on the other.

Election Guidelines: Know the Rules

Election Guidelines: Know the Rules

Тенденції розвитку виборчих технологій в Україні в умовах становлення інформаційного суспільства

The article says that in Ukraine in recent years there has been a rapid development of political technologies, including the electoral ones. This was the result of a profound reform of the political system. In order to gain power, political forces began adopting the experience of other democracies and borrowing technologies that could help them succeed in the election process. Although election technologies are a relatively new phenomenon, they are designed to ensure the most important area of interaction between the state and civil society through the election procedure - the transfer of power to the members of society through the elections. The article says that an important place among other election technologies is occupied by information ones, as they can be an effective tool for managing the consciousness of the masses, therefore the peculiarity of the modern election process is technology and digitalization of preparation methods, organization and conduct of election campaigns. Skillful use of information technology has allowed take the relationship between candidate politicians and potential voters to a new level, transforming them into a partnership. It is mentioned that modern opportunities let address voters directly, but not everyone in general. The efficiency of political slogans increases when they are not addressed to all people at once, but are distributed depending on the target groups of individuals, their interests and needs. The article highlights the statistics on social networks, which have turned into an effective tool for the struggle for voters in 2019 in Ukraine. It is said that the Internet as the means of obtaining information in 2018 for the first time ahead of television. The advantages of information technologies as an effective election tool are given. The expansion of the scope for using information technologies in the political environment is projected, by means of which there will be a systematic communication between the politicians and the electorate.

Future Conservative Electoral Prospects : Time for Tory Socialism ?

At the 2019 UK general election, under Boris Johnson’s leadership, the Conservatives won a landslide victory with 43.6 per cent of the vote. But what are the Conservative Party’s electoral prospects after the Brexit deal and 2019 general election? Research and polling have demonstrated that the British public are conservative on social and cultural issues, but lean to the left on economic issues. Prima facie a successful electoral strategy would be to implement the ideological narrative of ‘Tory socialism’. This article states the factors that may hinder the party pursuing such an ideology, such as MPs’ commitment to economic and social liberalism. The article concludes that the Conservatives are unlikely to adopt a wholesale version of Tory socialism, as it is likely to increase tensions around three important cleavages. Nevertheless, any electoral narrative will have to balance the tensions and cleavages within the party and its potential voter base. This balancing act may prove a difficult task, and may yet define the premiership of Boris Johnson.

Czech Republic on the Eve of Parliamentary Elections 2021: Party Programs

In the summer of 2021, the ANO movement, led by Prime Minister of the Czech Republic A. Babiš, regained the positions lost at the beginning of the year and topped the rating of the country's political forces. The article examines the main program documents of the key contenders for the composition of the Cabinet following the results of the autumn parliamentary elections. The author notes the use of non-traditional methods of attracting potential voters by ANO. In turn, his opponents, realizing the futility of using anti-corruption rhetoric, focused on creating an image of the prime minister as a politician, which casts doubt on the pro-European course of development of the Czech Republic. Such suspicions were not well-founded. They were based, firstly, on the fact that he pursued a multi-vector foreign policy, and, secondly, on the fact that the internal one contained national-conservative elements inherent in the governments of Poland and Hungary.

Polarization, candidate positioning, and political participation in the U.S.

Although there is clear evidence of growing ideological divides between the Democratic and Republican Parties, there is a lack of consensus about how this polarization impacts political participation. Using data from the 2010–2018 election cycles, we test how candidates’ distances from each other and distances from constituents are related to both voting and non-voting behavior. We fail to find evidence that the distance between candidates in and of itself depresses activity. Distance from a copartisan candidate can lower the likelihood of participation, but this is often offset by the greater likelihood of participation that comes with increased distance from an outparty candidate. Together, these results suggest that rather than demobilizing potential voters, polarization is instead motivating individuals by clarifying which candidate they do not want. Such findings are consistent with evidence of significant levels of negative partisanship and offer further insight into how candidate positioning impacts the electorate.

COMMUNICATION WITH VOTERS: FACTORS OF EFFECTIVE INTERACTION

The present paper is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of communication between politicians and potential voters, its relationship with agitation specific to different target audiences, including the use of modern means of communication. Factors that contribute to successful communication are considered and presented, depending on the specifics of the audience. The problem of effective communication in Ukrainian society is relevant in many areas. Research on this issue takes place in the scientific sphere, non-profit organizations, the public sector, the political environment. The article analyzes the effectiveness of the use of various means of communication with a potential voter, variations in the content and form of information in the interests of increasing political influence. The possibility of analyzing information policy and its adjustment is considered separately. The study of the specifics of the application of various communication technologies demonstrates the possibility, based on objective data, to increase the effectiveness of political communication. As a result, it becomes possible to adjust the tactics of communication between the government and the population, forecasting, detecting and combating dangerous manipulations for society, determining the potential audience of politicians. The analysis provides effective tools for exposing manipulative technologies of political influence. It is proved that the effectiveness of various means of communication is due to external and internal factors inherent in a certain category of potential voters. Among them are the factors of traditionalism of a certain political worldview for a particular area, age and marker status of the target audience, the density and living conditions of the audience, its number, education and financial status.

Inexperienced or anti-establishment? Voter preferences for outsider congressional candidates

Do US voters prefer inexperienced candidates? Candidates who have never held elected office before have had greater success in recent presidential and congressional elections. However, it could be that voters prefer the type of anti-establishment rhetoric that such candidates use more than the lack of experience itself. We conduct a 2x2 factorial experiment that manipulates a fictitious congressional candidate’s experience and rhetoric toward the political system. Results from a nationally representative Qualtrics sample and two follow-up studies from Mechanical Turk show that respondents evaluate the candidate more positively when he uses anti-establishment rhetoric instead of pro-establishment rhetoric. Though the findings are mixed, we find weak and inconsistent evidence that respondent prefer inexperienced candidates to experienced ones. The results suggest that outsider candidates receive an electoral boost by using anti-establishment messaging, but that candidates’ political résumés matter less to potential voters.

Bi-layer voter model: modeling intolerant/tolerant positions and bots in opinion dynamics

The diffusion of opinions in social networks is a relevant process for adopting positions and attracting potential voters in political campaigns. Opinion polarization, bias, targeted diffusion, and the radicalization of postures are key elements for understanding the voting dynamics’ challenges. In particular, social bots are currently a new element that can have a pronounced effect on the formation of opinions during electoral processes by, for instance, creating fake accounts in social networks to manipulate elections. Here, we propose a voter model incorporating bots and radical or intolerant individuals in the decision-making process. The dynamics of the system occur in a multiplex network of interacting agents composed of two layers, one for the dynamics of opinions where agents choose between two possible alternatives, and the other for the tolerance dynamics, in which agents adopt one of the two tolerance levels. The tolerance accounts for the likelihood to change opinion in an interaction, with tolerant (intolerant) agents switching opinion with probability 1.0 (\(\gamma \le 1\)). We find that intolerance leads to a consensus of tolerant agents during an initial stage that scales as \(\tau ^+ \sim \gamma ^{-1} \ln N\), who then reach an opinion consensus during the second stage in a time that scales as \(\tau \sim N\), where N is the number of agents. Therefore, very intolerant agents (\(\gamma \ll 1\)) could considerably slow down dynamics towards the final consensus state. We also find that the inclusion of a fraction \(\sigma _{{\mathbb {B}}}^-\) of bots breaks the symmetry between both opinions, driving the system to a consensus of intolerant agents with the bots’ opinion. Thus, bots eventually impose their opinion to the entire population, in a time that scales as \(\tau _B^- \sim \gamma ^{-1}\) for \(\gamma \ll \sigma _{{\mathbb {B}}}^-\) and \(\tau _B^- \sim 1/\sigma _{{\mathbb {B}}}^-\) for \(\sigma _{{\mathbb {B}}}^- \ll \gamma \).

Parties beyond national borders: exploring the activities of Israeli political parties abroad

In recent decades it has become a common practice for political parties to have active branches operating outside of their countries. The main reason for this practice is to mobilize potential voters living abroad. Israel, however, is a country in which citizens cannot vote abroad yet some parties nevertheless invest resources for sustaining their activities and branches outside of the country. Using the Israeli case, we aim to uncover additional incentives for parties to be present and active abroad. To do so, we map the activities of Israeli parties abroad and analyse their incentives, relying on documents and in-depth interviews with the parties’ directors of external relations. We find that parties’ activities can be divided into two basic groups. The first one includes diaspora-oriented activities, focusing mainly on maintaining ties with the Jewish communities abroad and gaining control over the institutions of the Zionist organizations. The second is focused on the Israeli state, by both improving the position of the party domestically and promoting Israel internationally according to the party’s ideology.

Orbán’s political jackpot: migration and the Hungarian electorate

ABSTRACT PM Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary is often seen as one of the paradigmatic cases of illiberalism and an intense contestation of immigration. This paper argues that the Hungarian government’s strong focus on immigration and its hardline positions on the issue proved to be a political jackpot for the governing party. Besides presenting the claims and frames Fidesz has used regarding migration since 2015, three analytical aspects are covered in this article, based on Eurobarometer, European Social Survey and Hungarian domestic polling data. First, the trends in the perception of the importance of migration for the Hungarian voters are compared to the European public opinion. Second, the changes in the attitudes of Hungarians to immigration are also analysed in European comparison. Third, I also present what role the fears related to immigration played at the 2018 parliamentary elections. On the whole, the Hungarian centre-right successfully politicised the issue of migration, and acted as an agenda-setter rather than a follower. It was able to sustain a sense of crisis between 2015 and 2018; it exacerbated the rejection of immigration in society; and it was successful in entrenching migration as one of the top fears among its potential voters.

Justified Representation for Perpetual Voting

We study the social choice setting of perpetual voting where, based on voter preferences, decisions have to be taken over a finite horizon of consecutive points in time (e.g, days). We consider two complementary settings: a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Static</i> setting, in which voter preferences remain static over time, and a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Dynamic</i> setting, in which voter preferences may change over time. We adapt the well-established Justified Representation and Proportional Justified Representation axioms, commonly used in the social choice literature, to perpetual voting, resulting in two axiomatic variants for the static setting and four variants for the dynamic setting. We show that all of the axioms are always satisfiable, and that simple preference aggregation methods can be used to satisfy the axioms in both cases. We then conduct a large human study ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N=190$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) aimed at identifying what potential voters (i.e., ordinary people) deem as desirable outcomes in simple perpetual voting settings. Our results show that approximately half of our participants consider different interpretations of fairness that correspond to our axiomatic framework. Taken jointly, our results can be used to help the research community identify appropriate aggregation methods to use in practice.

Emergency Patient Voting Initiative in a Community Hospital During a Global Pandemic:: Lessons and a Call-to-Action for Expanded Voter Access.

The 2020 United States general election remained extremely polarized despite occurring during the midst of a global coronavirus pandemic. Acutely hospitalized persons in the days to weeks leading up to the general election are exceptionally vulnerable to voter disenfranchisement and not among the population typically discussed during election seasons. As residents in the Christiana Care Family Medicine Residency Program in Wilmington, Delaware, we organized an emergency ballot registration and absentee voting project for hospitalized patients in our community hospital during the days to weeks leading up to the 2020 general election. We experienced multiple challenges to registering and aiding patients with ballot applications, including but not limited to communication with an overworked New Castle County elections office and coordination of receiving and returning completed ballots. However, we did notice a positive trend in the number of patients acutely hospitalized in the days-weeks leading up to Election Day who had already cast their vote through the expanded mail-in voting campaign in the setting of the COVID19 pandemic. As physicians, we have a unique position and opportunity to not only educate patients and potential voters on voter registration, but also assist these members of our community in the registration process first-hand. In addition to these physician responsibilities, we feel strongly that the state of Delaware should continue the expansion of mail-in/absentee voting for all residents in addition to new initiatives such as extended voter registration period and early in-person voting.

ПОЛИТИКО-ПСИХОЛОГИЧЕСКИЙ АНАЛИЗ ЛИЧНОСТНОГО ПОТЕНЦИАЛА МОЛОДЫХ ПОЛИТИЧЕСКИХ ЛИДЕРОВ РОССИЙСКИХ ПАРЛАМЕНТСКИХ ПАРТИЙ

The article presents a systematic analysis the personal potential of young political leaders of contemporary Russian parties, which has been studied in recent years by an Associate Professor of the Department of Public Relations, Tourism and Hospitality of the Faculty of History, Political Sci- ence and Law of Russian State University for the Humanities. The research were was carried out according to political and psychological methods of a verbal and projective type, supplemented by training of public self-presenta- tion of young representatives of parliamentary parties among their potential voters. As part of the study, a political and psychological profile of each potential young party leader was compiled, highlighting their value orientations and readiness to work in public politics. The article reveals the basic motives contributing to choosing the politics by young people as a professional sphere for the formation of their own personality. Also, the values orientations of young party leaders are compared with their political self-identification. Fol- lowing the results of the research works, the author of the article concludes that the existing leadership potential of young representatives of Russian parliamentary parties is not always manifested in the public practice and requires serious adjustments in terms of training in specific communication techniques, and coming into politics is determined by the desire for personal self-realization.

The Boundary Problem of Rights Restoration

By conditioning the restoration of felons’ political rights on the repayment of legal financial obligations, states have kept millions of potential voters from participating politically—profoundly altering the shape of the American electorate. Courts have upheld the practice by treating the conferral of political rights to non-members of the political community as an exercise of legislative grace subject to few constraints. Critics argue that the practice conditions political participation on wealth status and is therefore subject to heightened review. This Essay traces the disagreement back to a first-order question overlooked by both sides: how should the juridical status of a disenfranchised citizen’s “lost” rights be understood? The conventional position, which I call the “expulsion” view, imagines that a sentence of disenfranchisement casts a citizen outside the democratic community, thereby voiding all prospective constitutional interests predicated on political membership. However, disenfranchisement is better characterized as the subordination—not the wholesale elimination—of a citizen’s constitutional interests in voting or otherwise participating politically, just as incarceration suppresses but does not eliminate a person’s constitutional interest in physical liberty. From this it follows that disenfranchised citizens retain a stake in political participation and suffer cognizable harm when return to full political membership is inflected by wealth status. Redescribing the disenfranchisement-to-restoration process in this way aligns with the Richardson Court’s reading of Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment and sharpens the constitutional symmetry between fee-based restoration and paradigmatic forms of wealth discrimination like poll taxes. By framing re-enfranchisement as a constitutional default and drawing attention to disenfranchised citizens’ enduring claim to political presence, this account may also be of use in popular restoration efforts currently underway outside the courts.