Round Of Elections Research Articles

Presión autoritaria y resistencia democrática en Guatemala

The results of the first and second round of elections in Guatemala in 2023 stopped the accelerated steps towards an authoritarian and corrupt prolongation that the country was going through. This unforeseen turn has given rise to the emergence of signs of a possible opening of a new cycle that would make possible the recovery of the democratization process. But also the emergence of contradictions and antagonisms that threaten the necessary changes. When the year began, the general elections to be held in June, maintained a low level of enthusiasm and public attention. There was a coincidence of analysis that it would be an election dominated by pessimism and probably with the least hope for change in the last four decades. Citizen disillusionment extended everywhere, appreciating as a distant memory the expectations generated in 2015, when anti-corruption movements gave rise to possibilities of containing the repetition of numerous abuses and enrichment of officials, politicians and businessmen, colluded in illicit networks. On this occasion, in the context of these general elections in 2023, the recurrence of official dispositions that have shown a clear tendency to close democratic freedoms and rights and the beginning of a new and prolonged authoritarian period in the country, led by illicit economic political networks, has been a cause for concern. Now, is the recovery and sustainable advance of a new democratization, repeatedly challenged by actors who seek to prevent it, viable? ECA Estudios Centroamericanos, Vol. 79, No. 774, 2024: 47-64.

European Elections and Financial Markets: Navigating Political Winds and Market Reactions

Abstract A new wave of extreme right-wing political parties entered the European political scene both on the national levels and the European supra-governmental level sparking fears about the rule of law among investors and policymakers. The European Parliament’s elections scheduled for June 2024 are seen as a crucial turning point in the continent's political landscape. Using a mix of OLS regressions and event study, this paper analyzed how stock markets and bond markets reacted to European elections. The results show that the incumbent government's fiscal record appears to influence its re-election chances in developing countries and markets price weak fiscal balances around elections. The paper assessed how government bond markets reacted to the EP’s elections rounds of 2014 and 2019. These rounds of elections have been dominated by the political parties with cantered-orientated ideologies which may not be the case for the next round of elections in 2024. The results show how EP’s elections stabilized bond markets, especially in countries with weak macroeconomic fundamentals. The results emphasize the intricate relationship between fiscal policies, political events, and financial market behaviour. Investors, policymakers, and governments should consider these findings when assessing electoral and market dynamics, particularly in the context of the upcoming 2024 European Parliament elections.

How Does Primary Election Manipulation Affect the Selection of Women Candidates? Evidence from Malawi

How does manipulation of primary elections affect the selection of women candidates for parliament? The underrepresentation of women in politics is a well-researched global phenomenon. However, as most work focuses on general elections, we overlook the disadvantages that women face in the selection process. Specifically, primary elections often provide ample room for manipulation. We argue that manipulation skews electoral contests in favor of candidates with material and inter-personal resources, who are more likely to be men. We collect unique data via on-the-ground observation of 119 primary election rounds (featuring 316 aspirants) in Malawi’s 2019 parliamentary election and interview candidates to shed light on hitherto uninvestigated internal party primaries. We show that while women running in free and fair primaries were more likely to win nominations than men, their chances were substantially reduced where primaries were flawed. The quantitative findings are corroborated by qualitative accounts of the gendered effect of primary-day manipulation in party primaries. The results have implications for debates on descriptive representation, electoral integrity, and political parties.

The Challenges of Human Security in the Horn of Africa: The Case of Somaliland.

Purpose: In the Horn of Africa the main challenges to human security in this region have originated from political and state fragility, resource scarcities, and environmental degradation. Human security is arrayed against escalating communal violence, small arms proliferation, and massive movements of people within and beyond the region. Since 1991 the people of Somaliland have successfully established a peaceful and relatively stable state and community. They have managed a process of reconciliation, demobilized the local militias, restored law and order, and held numerous rounds of peaceful elections. Peace, stability, national and state security were enhanced which allowed normal patterns of trade and other economic activities to resume. Therefore the main objective of this study is to analyze the contemporary situation of human security in Somaliland and to figure out the key challenges of human security that faced Somaliland since post 1991and its performance in subject matter. 
 Methodology: The study is exploratory as well as descriptive research designs. Where qualitative data were collected and used. For selection of respondents, non- probabilistic sampling techniques, particularly purposive sampling technique were applied.
 Findings: The study found that Somaliland had made relatively advancement for political, economic, health, personal and community securities post 1991. In addition, the study found that the environmental security challenges in Somaliland are many and complex in nature and Somaliland has chronically food insecure since 1991 due to lack of commitment of the government for realizing food security in the country, frequent natural and man-made disasters that erodes the livelihood base of the community. Also the study found that, Lack of international recognition, Terrorism activities in Somalia are major external challenges of human security in Somaliland. While a high unemployment rate, corruption, weak of governmental institutions and recurrent droughts are the dramatic internal challenges of the realization of human security in the country.
 Unique Contribution to Theory, Policy and Practice: Moreover, the study recommends that the government of Somaliland is required to engage human security notions by employing effective strategies and policy directions, to realize wellbeing of the Somaliland society which would promote both human security and state security since these two concepts are interrelated. Also the study recommends to Somaliland government should Review, evaluate and develop agricultural policies, health policies, environmental policies, economic policies and the legislative and institutional framework on a regular basis for the purpose of promoting and ensuring human security in the country.

The Elections in Crisis: Media Coverage of the Postponed 2020 Presidential Elections in Poland

In Poland, the presidential elections were primarily scheduled on May 10th, 2020. However, due to the COVID-19 circumstances, the elections were postponed and eventually took place in late June (first round) and mid-July (second round) 2020. The aim of the paper is to examine media coverage of the postponed presidential elections in Poland. In particular, the paper explores frames used by journalists in their coverage of the postponed elections. For the purpose of this study we conducted a quantitative content analysis of news items from three TV newscasts, four radio stations, and three online platforms. The material was collected on May 10th (a day of primarily scheduled the first round of elections), and June 30th (a day when the results of the first round of postponed elections were officially announced). The findings showed that both amount of the news coverage and the main frames used by the media across time differed. Although episodic frame prevailed in the media coverage on both days. thematic frame was used more often in the media coverage on the day when voting was supposed to take place, than on the day when results of the first round of presidential elections were announced. On contrary, conflict frame was used more often in the media coverage of results of the elections than on a day without election. The political orientation of the media outlets affected the way journalist employed responsibility and consequences frames.

PARTICIPAREA LA VOT LA ALEGERILE PREZIDENȚIALE DIN OLTENIA ÎN PERIOADA 1990-2019

The study proposes an analysis of voting participation in the Oltenia region for the presidential elections held from 1990 to 2019. The analysis focuses on the second round of the elections and is based on qualitative research, which involves the processing of existing data for voting participation at the regional level in the national context, and on the quantitative research, which highlights the statistical data regarding the voting participation in the Oltenia area, in the second round of the presidential elections, and comparative graphs, which highlight the electoral behavior in the regional political space.

You want me, but I no longer want you. The punishment-reward mechanism and institutional quality in Italian regions

ABSTRACT Following the principal theory concerning the foundations of voting behaviour it is possible to assert that citizens hold politicians and their parties accountable through their votes. From this perspective, if citizens perceive the quality of local institutions to be a result of the policies enacted by local authorities they may punish or reward the incumbent parties. By means of a quantitative approach, our results, based on the analysis of 15 different election rounds, show that various dimensions of institutional quality impact voting behaviour in Italian provinces. The punishment-reward mechanism suggests that political preferences change because local institutions lack quality.

“You’d be Right to Indulge Some Skepticism”: Trust-building Strategies in Future-oriented News Discourse

ABSTRACT This paper explores trust-building strategies in future-oriented news discourse, marked by a high degree of uncertainty. While current research mainly focuses on audiences’ perceptions of news credibility, this study addresses news trust from a production standpoint. We examine the trust-building efforts of media actors, focusing on their discursive labor within the context of election projections. Drawing on rich data from five election rounds in Israel and the US, we qualitatively analyzed 400 news texts and 400 tweets that were produced by 20 US and 20 Israeli media actors. This textual analysis was supplemented by 10 in-depth interviews with Israeli journalists. Our findings demonstrate three types of journalistic trust-building rhetoric in election coverage: facticity, authority, and transparency. These strategies result in a two-fold form of trust, which re-affirms traditional notions of accuracy and validity, while also challenging the ability of newspersons to obtain them in contemporary political and media cultures. Overall, these strategies hold unique opportunities and challenges for sustaining public trust in journalism and illuminate the complex communicative labor involved in building trust with news audiences. Our findings also highlight the importance of studying trust not only in relation to the past and the present, but also in future-oriented discourse.

Electoral proximity, political violence, and personal wellbeing: An experimental analysis in West Africa

AbstractDoes the threat of political violence affect wellbeing? We argue that political violence induced by elections reduces wellbeing as it provokes emotional reactions like anxiety and fear. There is a lingering effect from political violence that reemerges with new rounds of elections, and that reduces wellbeing. To test this claim, we employ an experimental analysis in Côte d'Ivoire. We motivate political violence via a treatment about the 2020 election, and the proximity of the 2020 election. We find that each has a negative effect on wellbeing. In Côte d'Ivoire, we also consider the direct effect of political violence on wellbeing, and find that it is inversely associated with wellbeing. Finally, we extend the analysis of election proximity to Nigeria during the 2023 election. The results here show that proximity is (i) inversely associated with wellbeing and (ii) that it is directly associated with the expectation of political violence. In all cases, political violence lowers self‐assessed wellbeing. We argue that this effect is likely to be greater for women than men, but find that it is generally true for the latter. We conclude the paper with considerations about its generalizability, ideas for future research, and policy implications.

Legislative performance and the electoral connection in European Parliament elections

AbstractThe absence of an electoral connection is a widely held assumption in the scholarship on the European Parliament (EP) and a cause of serious normative concern about the functioning of the European Union. Weak individual legislator accountability is part of this assumption, even if we still know little about the extent to which legislative performance matters for citizens in EP elections that allow preferential voting. This study is the first to analyse how legislative performance influences the preference vote shares of members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and whether this is moderated by their parties’ EU salience and incumbent intra‐party competition. It draws on an original dataset that combines candidate and electoral data from three rounds of EP elections held between 2004 and 2014 under open or flexible list rules with information on individual legislative activity (i.e., number of reports, parliamentary questions and speeches) and leadership positions at EP and committee level. One dimension of legislative performance, report writing, is associated with a larger share of preference votes but only for incumbents of parties assigning high salience to the EU. While MEPs win a higher share of preference votes when they face limited co‐partisan incumbent competition, this factor does not moderate the electoral connection.

Contemporaneous and lasting effects of electoral gender quotas

This paper examines several ways in which electoral gender quotas affect the political system. It uses data on reserved seat quotas for women in village councils in the Indian state of Jharkhand. Village council head positions subjected to gender quotas continue to elect more women even after the quotas are no longer binding. Gender quotas do not have spillover effects on other lower hierarchy positions in the council. They reduce electoral competitiveness, but only in the first round of elections and only at council member position. They do not affect the caste composition of the winning candidates. These results suggest that women’s representation may be achieved without large negative effects and that temporary electoral gender quotas can be an effective policy tool to increase long-run women’s political representation. The results are pertinent for affirmative action policies addressing other forms of discrimination.

Multi‐strategy‐based leader election mechanism for the Raft algorithm

SummaryRaft is a consensus algorithm that implements highly available replicas. As raft requires a leader to drive the protocol execution, it usually employs a round‐robin leader election mechanism to select a random leader among all nodes. However, when the elected leader suffers from performance issues, the protocol will temporarily lose aliveness. To address this issue, we propose a multi‐strategy leader election mechanism that allows nodes to proactively trigger a new round of election when they believe the leader suffers from performance issues, and replace this leader with a new one in a designated priority queue. The formal analysis and experimental results show that the mechanism can improve the system's throughput/latency without additional election time overhead.

Intersectional Opportunities: Majority Minority Districts and the Descriptive Representation of Latinas and Latinos

Majority minority districts are widely viewed as opportunities for racial minority groups to expand their representation in elected office. Do these districts facilitate the same opportunities for descriptive representation for women and men? I argue that majority minority districts have served as important but distinct opportunities for Latinas and Latinos to get on the ballot. Analyzing pooled data from 57,812 state legislative general elections from the mid-1990s to 2015, and during the first rounds of elections following 2000 and 2010 census-based redistricting, I find support for this view. Key factors often associated with majority minority districts’ capacity as vehicles for minority representation, such as increasingly large Latina/o proportions of district populations and incumbent networks, are more robustly related to the presence of Latinos than Latinas on the ballot. These findings bear directly on our understanding of how majority minority districts fit into a portfolio of institutions for expanding descriptive representation.

Can biased polls distort electoral results? Evidence from the lab

We introduce a new methodological approach for studying the effect of biased polls on election outcomes and apply it to a set of new experiments with 375 participants. Voters may observe and learn about the bias by playing multiple voting rounds. While in control conditions, polls are unbiased, in treatment conditions, participants view only poll results where a particular candidate’s vote share is the largest. This candidate is consistently elected more often in the treatments than in the controls, because biased polls robustly distort voters’ expectations about vote shares. This effect holds after eighteen election rounds, out of which the first three are practice rounds, but somewhat more weakly in our main treatment where voters are explicitly informed about the bias.

Reimagining the State

Reimagining the State Lisa Duggan (bio) What is the state? How do we grasp it, engage it, transform it? These are the broad questions to which this issue of WSQ is addressed. The articles and reviews here take concrete historical approaches to the dilemmas that social movements face in relation to state formations, as they are intertwined with racial capitalism and with shifting arrangements of intimacy and care. Right now, it can seem that the primary options are (1) grassroots organizing against the punitive, coercive, violent carceral and surveillance state, as in prison abolition and campaigns to defund the police; (2) social democratic reforms to claim state resources, as in the fight for universal accessible health- and childcare; or (3) organizing to protest the exploitation and violence at the nexus of corporate and state profit machines, as in protests of oil pipelines and environmental degradation. As this issue shows, the landscape of possibility is more complicated—these options overlap and are always shifting. And the deep intersections of formations of class, race, Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, religion, and ability defy any easy division between class and so-called identity politics. The materiality of everyday life draws us into the ways class is lived as race, gender is deployed by religion, and Indigenous history upends common assumptions about states and sovereignty. In this essay, I want to provide two examples of political dilemmas and interventions that illuminate some dead ends and some new thinking about social movements and the state. The first is from Latin America and the second from Palestine. [End Page 243] Latin America During spring 2021, I signed an open letter addressed to the editors of the socialist journals Monthly Review and Jacobin complaining about their coverage of the 2021 election in Ecuador. The two hundred signers of the letter are all aligned with left projects and formations. Our complaint was focused on the journals' representation of the candidate of some Ecuadoran Indigenous social movements, Yaku Pérez, and his political party, Pachakutik. They portrayed him as a Trojan horse for the left's most bitter neoliberal enemies (Signatories 2021). The election came on the heels of the unpopular government of Lenín Moreno, the successor to the decade-long dominance of Rafael Correa of the Alianza País. Moreno had moved substantially to the right of Correa's left-wing socialist, anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal government. The election of Correa had been an achievement of the "pink tide" in Latin America, but over time that government's reliance on extractivist practices for income generation, and their severe crackdown on dissenting social protest movements, generated opposition among anti-extractivist Indigenous groups. The Indigenous movement and its political party, while far from politically or ideologically monolithic, generated alternative visions for left governing, including feminist and queer components and offering an eco-socialist conception of land and resource use along with visions of radically inclusive democracy. The first round of elections in February 2021 at first looked like it would result in a runoff between Correa's candidate, Andrés Arauz, and the Pachakutik candidate, Yaku Pérez. But the surprising result was a runoff between Arauz and the neoliberal banker Guillermo Lasso. The conflict surrounding the runoff on the left was fierce (Peralta 2021). Pérez charged electoral fraud, and Pachakutik advised their supporters to spoil their ballots rather than vote for either of the two remaining candidates. Pérez had himself been assaulted, arrested, and imprisoned for protest activity. The general criminalization of protest and the extension of extractivist policies by Correaists meant that an Arauz victory loomed as an existential threat to the existence of the Indigenous movement. There could be no support for a neoliberal Lasso government either. This was a strategic gambit, not an ideological choice. But understandably the Arauz forces considered this position a profound betrayal of the overall left project. Not only Correa supporters specifically, but sections of the international left saw the failure of Pérez and his allies to support Arauz against a neoliberal banker as evidence of hidden neoliberal sympathies. Thus the Trojan horse charge. [End Page 244] The point of the open letter was to push back against that charge...

Media malaise or mobilization during repeat elections?Evidence from Israel’s three consecutive rounds of elections (2019–2020)

AbstractIn 2019–2020, Israel went through three consecutive elections in less than a year on grounds of alleged corruption by Prime Minister Netanyahu, and his lack of ability to form a coalition. This study aims to contribute to analyses of the media mobilization/malaise effect by examining the impact of such a prolonged period of campaigning on citizens’ political behavior. Thus, we conducted six online surveys using a longitudinal sample of Israeli society before and after each election. The analysis found that, despite participants’ testimonies that they were increasingly “tired of dealing with elections,” there was a significant increase in participants’ reported certainty in their vote, news consumption, participation in online political discussions, and level of political efficacy between the elections. Next, a multivariate analysis aiming to explain variations in voters’ political efficacy found that political trust, participants’ reported certainty about their vote, and political interest all explained high levels of political efficacy. The analysis provides one of the strongest reinforcements to date regarding the validity of political mobilization theory, demonstrating its relevance under challenging conditions. We discuss further implications and generalizability of our findings.

Inequality and Elections in Italy, 1994–2018

The increase in income and wealth inequality in Italy is well documented, but less attention has been devoted to its association with social and political outcomes. This article investigates the association between inequality and several variables on socio-economic conditions with the evolution of Italian politics over the 1994–2018 period. Voting in Italy’s regions for the centre-left and centre-right coalitions—with a focus on the Lega—is examined in seven rounds of general elections, before and after the 2008 crisis, which emerges as a key divide in these relationships. The centre-left vote is higher in the regions with an increase in mean wealth and employment rates and shows a reversal after 2008 in the support of part time employees. The centre-right vote is associated with impoverished middle classes and an increase in disparities of Southern regions. The associations shown by Lega voting are distinct from those of other centre-right forces. While political and cultural factors are important to understand political changes, our findings show that a more unequal and distressed society is clearly associated with changes in electoral behaviour.

Elections as a Mechanism of Peace. The Cases of Liberia and The Central African Republic

"The paper analyses the normative and empirical capacity of elections to function as a peace mechanism in the early stages of the recovery period. Accordingly, the analysis is based on a theoretical framework that draws attention to the timing of elections in post-conflict societies. Moreover, in order to operationalize such theoretical aspects, the paper focuses on two relevant case studies: the 1997 elections in Liberia (perceived as post-conflict) and the 2020-2021 elections in The Central African Republic (early peace process – not void of conflict). Accordingly, the paper poses the following research questions: How was the prospect of organizing these rounds of election received by the parties involved in the conflict? How did these rounds of election relate to the peace process? Do elections represent an adequate mechanism to achieve positive peace in post-conflict societies? Keywords: elections, peace studies, post-conflict development, peace building, systemic violence."

Youth Out of Touch? Early Assessment of Millennial Leaders’ Performance on Human Capital Development at Indonesian Districts

Starting in the second round of local election, participation of millenials has been increasing. The term refers to the young demographic cohort born between 1980 and 2002, known to have distinct characteristics to the previous generations. We gathered seventeen cases of elected millennial district heads between 2010 and 2017 and making an early observation of their impact on human capital development. Simplified difference-in-difference estimation method is applied using province average as the control group. Results show that following the winning of the millennial leaders there is a diverging trend of Human Development Index score at 0.03 and 0.07 in the first and second year, consecutively, before started converging around the third and fourth year. Lacking leadership skills and experiences, that may also be perpetrated by generational gap, are among the contributing factors to the problem. We further find that leaders not affiliated with political dynasty fare better. We check the robustness of our result using poverty data and further find that millennial leaders are also under-perform in combating poverty. This early assessment would benefit from further heterogeneity analyses as well as narrowing the control group, which is our recommendation for future research.

The Limits of Right-Wing Populism in Power and the Israeli Political Crisis of 2018–2021

Between 2018 and 2021, Israel experienced an unprecedented political crisis that saw four rounds of elections, as the country's parties failed to form a stable coalition government. This article contends that this crisis was the result of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's shift away from neoliberalism and toward a populist "anti-system" agenda. While Netanyahu's intensification of institutional subversion played a role in his success in the mid–late 2010s, it complicated relations within his party and among his political allies. The end result was years of political deadlock.