Similar Voting Research Articles

Identifying Brexit voting patterns in the British house of commons: an analysis based on Bayesian mixture models with flexible concomitant covariate effects

Abstract The results of some divisions related to Brexit held in the House of Commons are investigated. In particular, a new class of mixture models with concomitant covariates is developed to identify groups of members of parliament with similar voting behaviour. The methodological novelty lies in the flexibility introduced by the use of smooth functions to model the effect of concomitant covariates on the component weights of the mixture. Results show this approach allows to quantify the effect of the age of members of parliament, as well as preferences and competitiveness in the constituencies they represent, on their position towards Brexit.

From Decentralization to Oligopoly: A Data-Driven Analysis of Decentralization Evolution and Voting Behaviors on EOSIO

As one of the most popular blockchain systems, EOSIO has been widely used in decentralized applications (DApps). Compared with traditional proof-of-work (PoW)-based blockchain systems like Bitcoin, EOSIO achieves a high transaction throughput and an alleged decentralization with the Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus protocol. However, recent reports claimed the existence of voting collusion and manipulation during the DPoS consensus procedure of EOSIO, which may greatly decline the decentralization degree, fault tolerance, and reliability of the whole system. In this article, we obtain data from up to 135 000 000 blocks of EOSIO and conduct a data-driven decentralization analysis. Specifically, we characterize the decentralization evolution of the two phases in DPoS, namely block producer election and block production. Moreover, we study the voters with similar voting behaviors and propose methods to discover abnormal mutual voting behaviors in EOSIO. The analysis results show how EOSIO gradually evolves from decentralization to oligopoly and our methods can effectively capture abnormal voting phenomena in the EOSIO, which can also provide important insights for the design and maintenance of other DPoS-based blockchains.

Roll-call voting under random seating assignment

AbstractSocial connections between individuals can profoundly impact their political behavior. A growing body of research on legislative politics examines how spatial proximity to fellow legislators affects voting behavior within the institution. However, studies that examine this question often suffer from a fundamental identification problem in which proximity effects may reflect actual behavioral diffusion between members or, instead, homophily, in which legislators of a similar political feather flock together. We overcome this observational equivalence by exploiting a unique random seating lottery for seating assignments in the world's oldest existing parliament, Iceland's national legislature, Alþingi. Utilizing this naturally occurring randomization, we employ spatial analyses of more than 20,000 estimates of spatial dependence and find little evidence that seating proximity leads to similar voting behavior by members in this legislative context.

Renegotiating in good faith: How international treaty revisions can deepen cooperation

International agreements are often understood to help governments make credible commitments to future policy by limiting their ability to renege on their promises. Renegotiations of agreements are accordingly viewed as a threat to cooperation, since renegotiations call past commitments into question. But we know little about the frequency or nature of treaty renegotiations. When are international agreements renegotiated, and what effect does renegotiation have on international cooperation? Do most renegotiations indeed aim to backtrack on past commitments? Using the topical context of the trade regime, I collect new data on international treaty revisions, covering 310 preferential trade agreements signed since the year 2000. Around a quarter of these agreements have been amended in some form, and the supermajority of amendments result not in scaled back agreements, but in deeper commitments. Survival analysis shows that ‘like-minded’ countries with a shared language and similar voting patterns at the UN General Assembly are most likely to revise their commitments. In contrast, I do not find evidence to support the view of PTA revisions as ‘backsliding’ on past commitments. The effects of revisions on trade cooperation support the more cooperative view of revisions. An error-correction model shows revisions are associated with a long-run increase in export volumes. Renegotiations are not breakdowns in international relations, but opportunities for governments to renew their commitment to cooperation.

Group identification and perceived self-group similarity: differentiating projection from introjection

ABSTRACT Two studies demonstrate a technique that can clarify to what degree individual differences in perceived self-ingroup similarity reflect differences in projecting the self onto the group (self-anchoring) and/or introjecting the group onto the self (self-stereotyping). In preregistered Study 1 undergraduates described their values and those of fellow students. In Study 2 (a reanalysis of Denning & Hodges, 2022) citizens described their personalities and those of compatriots with similar voting preferences. Across both studies, ingroup identification predicted perceived self-ingroup similarity. Decomposing each participant’s self-ratings and ingroup-stereotype-ratings into normative (average) and distinctive (non-normative) profiles suggested this was primarily attributable to projecting the self-concept onto the group, but in Study 2's intergroup conflict situation perhaps also attributable to ingroup enhancement and introjecting ingroup-stereotypes.

M. V. Hood III and Seth C. McKee. Rural Republican Realignment in the Modern South: The Untold Story

Popular and academic impressions too often oversimplify the migration of rural voters to the Republican Party. The examination of Rural Republican Realignment in the Modern South is anything but an oversimplification. Hood and McKee examine the realignment office by office, year by year, state by state through the lens of intersectional identities: geographic and racial. This strategy creates space for often-overlooked elements of the realignment, such as the chaos of dealignment in the 1970s, the role of federalism in pacing the realignment, and the ideological differences between urban and rural white Southerners that are masked by similar voting patterns. Though the authors focus on white voters in the “small-town South” (STS), the juxtaposition between urban and STS white voters illuminates the role of geography in the Southern realignment. Because urban whites were more motivated by economic policy over racial policy (specifically Jim Crow policies), their migration to the Republican Party began in the mid-twentieth century. It wasn’t until the Democratic Party elites had fully adopted pro-racial equality policies that STS whites were properly motivated to sever their longtime allegiance to the Democratic Party. This framework allows the authors to decompose Republican gains in the South into urban and rural changes in voting behavior.

An Autonomous Global Star Identification Algorithm Based on the Fast MST Index and Robust Multi-Order CCA Pattern

Star identification plays a key role in spacecraft attitude measurement. Currently, most star identification algorithms tend to perform well only in a scene without noise and are highly sensitive to noise. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a star identification algorithm based on the maximum spanning tree (MST) index and multi-order continuous cycle angle (CCA) intended for the lost-in-space mode. In addition, a neighboring star selection method named dynamic eight-quadrant (DEQ) is developed. First, the DEQ method is used to select high-confidence neighboring stars for the main star. Then, the star image is regarded as a graph, and the Prim algorithm is employed to construct the MST pattern for each guide star, which is then combined with the K vector index to perform the main star candidate search. Finally, the Jackard similarity voting for the multi-order CCA of the main star is used to identify the main star, and the global neighboring star identification is conducted by the multi-order CCA of neighboring stars. The simulated and real star images test results show that compared with five mainstream algorithms, when the position noise is 1 pixel, the number of false stars is five, the magnitude noise is 0.5, and the identification accuracy of the proposed algorithm is higher than 98.5%. Therefore, the proposed algorithm has excellent anti-noise ability in comparison to other algorithms.

Constructing the abortion debate: a comparative news values analysis of print media discourses in Ireland and Argentina

ABSTRACT Socio-political transitions prompt shifts in public sphere discourses on key issues (Krzyżanowski, Michał, Anna Triandafyllidou, and Ruth Wodak. 2009. ‘Introduction’ in the European Public Sphere and the Media: 1–14. London: Palgrave Macmillan.). Opportunities to change abortion legislation constitute examples of this in stimulating renewed debates around gender and human rights. Media discourses on abortion are worthy of study for their ideological role in transmitting messages and shaping public opinion. This comparative study investigates mainstream media discourses on the Irish referendum for the legalisation of abortion (May 2018) and a similar vote in the Argentine Senate (December 2020). Using the methodological approach of Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA) (Bednarek, Monika, and Helen Caple. 2017. The Discourse of News Values: How News Organizations Create Newsworthiness. New York: Oxford University Press.), this article explores news values in media coverage leading up to and directly after the vote in the two countries. Both corpora demonstrated a shift in news values before and after the key events although this was more pronounced in the Irish context. Mainstream media news values in Ireland promoted legislative change overall while Argentine newspapers differed in their construction of news values reflecting their opposing positions on the proposed legislation.

A Spatial Analysis of the Voting Patterns in the South Korean General Elections of 2016

In this study we analyze the spatial patterns in the South Korean voting behavior in the context of the 2016 general election along with the socio-economic determinants of the South Korean voters’ choice. To this end we applied spatial econometric analysis to a unique dataset on the outcomes of the 2016 general elections in South Korea at a highly disaggregate level of 229 provinces. Our empirical model accounts for three types of spatial dependence in the data that has to do with the fact that geographic proximity may imply similar voting behavior. Our empirical findings align well with the existing evidence on South Korean voting behavior, in particular regarding the influence produced by the voters’ region of origin, and their age. Surprisingly, we do not find economic characteristics such as the regional income per capita or the rate of unemployment to produce a statistically significant effect on South Korean voters’ choice. However, our results imply that a sound fiscal policy by the local government may act as a signaling device distinguishing between a conservative and a liberal political agenda. Our finding of the older voters leaning towards the conservative edge of the political spectrum suggests that the “silver democracy” now actively discussed in the South Korean media is increasingly assuming more conservative traits.

Analysing Spatio-Temporal Voting Patterns in Brazilian Elections Through a Simple Data Science Pipeline

Since 1989, the first year of the democratic presidential election after a long period of a dictatorship regime, Brazil conducted eight presidential elections. Short and long-term shifts of power and two impeachment processes marked such a period. This instability is a research case in electoral studies, mainly regarding the understanding of citizens' voting behavior. Comprehending patterns in the population behavior can give us insight into phenomena and processes that affect democratic political decisions. In light of this, our paper analyses Brazilian electoral data at the municipal level from 1998 to 2018 using a simple data science pipeline, which consists of five steps: (i) data selection; (ii) data preprocessing; (iii) identification of spatial patterns, in which we seek to understand the role of space in the election results employing spatial auto-correlation techniques; (iv) identification of temporal patterns, where we investigate similar trends of votes over the years applying a hierarchical clustering method; and (v) evaluation of results. We study the presidential elections focusing on the right and left-wing parties most relevant for the period: the Brazilian Social Democracy Party~(PSDB) and the Workers' Party~(PT). We also analyse the congressman election data regarding parties ideologically to the right and left in the political spectrum. Through the obtained results, we found the existence of spatial dependence in every electoral year investigated. Moreover, despite the changes in the political-economic context over the years, neighboring cities seem to present similar voting behavior trends.

Does Issue Alignment Matter? The Electoral Cost and Reward of Agricultural Representation in Urban and Rural Areas

There is plenty of evidence that legislators think that aligning with voter preferences benefits their re-election. But whether or not legislators are constrained by demand, we have limited knowledge. This article tests whether issue representation in a generally salient field affects legislators’ electoral performance. The analysis uses data from five consecutive Hungarian elections (1994–2010), and investigates the effect of agricultural interpellations on the legislators’ vote shares under varying district demand. The findings indicate that congruence between district demand and legislator action matters when the issue is of great salience, and during times of anti-party sentiments within the electorate. While more interpellations are rewarded in rural districts, MPs can lose a lot of votes by asking agricultural interpellations in an urban area. At the same time, not submitting interpellations in rural constituencies does not result in similar vote loss. The results suggest that for re-election seekers taking action is the way to go only if it is calibrated to district demand.

Analysis of Parliamentary Debate Transcripts Using Community-Based Graphical Approaches (Student Abstract)

Gauging political sentiments and analyzing stances of elected representatives pose an important challenge today, and one with wide-ranging ramifications. Community-based analysis of parliamentary debate sentiments could pave a way for better insights into the political happenings of a nation and help in keeping the voters informed. Such analysis could be given another dimension by studying the underlying connections and networks in such data. We present a sentiment classification method for UK Parliament debate transcripts, which is a combination of a graphical method based on DeepWalk embeddings and text-based analytical methods. We also present proof for our hypothesis that parliamentarians with similar voting patterns tend to deliver similar speeches. We also provide some further avenues and future work towards the end.

Does energy aid improve energy efficiency in developing countries?

The study examines the effect of energy aid on the energy efficiency of 70 developing countries in the period 1990–2016. We consider two-stage least squares identification strategy to examine the energy aid-energy efficiency nexus empirically. Energy aid is instrumented by similar voting preferences between donors and recipient countries in the United Nations General Assembly. Our finding suggests that energy aid has a significant positive effect on the energy efficiency of aid recipient countries. The result is robust with different sensitivity checks, such as using alternative measures of energy efficiency, alternative measures of energy aid, alternative estimation methods, and dropping outliers.

CNNs Based Viewpoint Estimation for Volume Visualization

Viewpoint estimation from 2D rendered images is helpful in understanding how users select viewpoints for volume visualization and guiding users to select better viewpoints based on previous visualizations. In this article, we propose a viewpoint estimation method based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for volume visualization. We first design an overfit-resistant image rendering pipeline to generate the training images with accurate viewpoint annotations, and then train a category-specific viewpoint classification network to estimate the viewpoint for the given rendered image. Our method can achieve good performance on images rendered with different transfer functions and rendering parameters in several categories. We apply our model to recover the viewpoints of the rendered images in publications, and show how experts look at volumes. We also introduce a CNN feature-based image similarity measure for similarity voting based viewpoint selection, which can suggest semantically meaningful optimal viewpoints for different volumes and transfer functions.

Can aid for financial sector buy financial development?

Most of the aid literature focuses on the potential growth effects of aggregate aid, with mixed results. Considering that donors have repeatedly asserted the multidimensionality of their purposes, a much-disaggregated analysis of aid effectiveness is necessary. The effect of aid targeted to financial sector is examined empirically for almost 70 developing countries during the period 1980–2016. The effectiveness of aid targeted to financial sector is assessed here within the framework of cross-country regression. Numerous indicators of financial development, particularly private credit provided by the banking sector, are considered as outcome variables. Further, this analysis exploits an instrumental variable based on the fact that donors provide large amount of aid targeted to financial sector to countries which have similar voting positions in the United Nations General Assembly. The analysis suggests that aid targeted to financial sector has a significantly positive effect on financial development. This result is robust with different sensitivity checks such as using alternative measures of financial development, measures of aid, estimation methods and dropping outliers. The finding has strong policy implications for donor countries and international aid organisations.

When the team’s jersey is what matters: Network analysis of party cohesion and structure in the Canadian House of Commons

Are parties “high discipline, low cohesion” in Westminster legislatures? This study applies network analysis to voting behavior among members of parliament (MPs), a novel approach that measures not deviation from party-line voting, but rather whether MPs with similar voting patterns are co-partisans. We study the Canadian Parliament from 2006 to 2015, during which time the governing party under Prime Minister Stephen Harper maintained tight central control and discipline, a likely source of elevated cohesion. We find that “low cohesion” generally holds, and parties do not always conform to commonsense expectations about how cohesively they “should” behave in various parliamentary situations, though they show themselves capable of learning over time. Moreover, we find that party cohesion stems less from shared voting behaviors and more from simple partisan identity. Further research should consider to what extent parliamentary behavior is based mainly on party alignment.

Ebb tide in blue: Recent sub-national elections in the Australian federation

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the extent and nature of nationalization of state and territory elections in Australia, both in terms of how similar state and territory voting patterns are to federal results, as well as ‘second-order’ effects that indicate how much dissatisfaction with the existing federal government spills over into state and territory elections. We include assessments of campaign issues and impacts in order to see how far voters hold both federal and state and territory governments accountable. While we find both similarities in voting patterns between the two tiers and small second-order effects in the regions, we argue that swings were linked to national policy paralysis in the face of major issues that impacted differently across sub-national electorates. Coalition decline was exacerbated by leadership instability and increasing concern by its parliamentarians at their fading political popularity.

The Impact of Intraparty Electoral Reforms on Party System Nationalization

Abundant research demonstrates that electoral rules have an impact on party system fragmentation. Building on these findings, and adopting a dynamic approach, this article investigates the effect of changes of the ballot structure on party system nationalization and shows that this effect is conditioned by levels of ethno-geographic concentration and political decentralization. Specifically, candidate-centered reforms hamper party system nationalization by making parties less likely to obtain similar vote shares across constituencies, whereas party-centered reforms tend to foster it. Moreover, concentration of ethnic groups at the district level or considerable political decentralization exacerbates the impact of candidate-centered changes. These effects are demonstrated through an analysis of an original dataset of electoral reforms and party system nationalization as measured with different indices across fifty-nine democracies and more than five hundred legislative elections.

A new approach to decrease the computational complexity of e‐voting protocols

AbstractOne of the most important methods of remote e‐voting is based on the ElGamal homomorphic cryptosystems. These systems are secure enough provided that the discrete logarithm problem is secure. However, one of their main challenges is the limitation on the number of voters. In this paper, a new scheme is suggested so as to increase the number of voters by designing parallel voting subprotocols. The required time for the tally computing process for 10 subprotocols decreases to less than 20% of the time in a similar scheme. The necessary memory space and the number of random integers do not show a significant change in comparison with those of similar voting protocols. Also, the communication complexity is of order O(Nt), which seems reasonable. The security comparisons show an acceptable rate of security in a reasonable length of keys for the proposed protocol. Simulations show that the number of covering voters in this protocol is 10 times more than that of a similar protocol.

Spatial effects and party nationalization: The Geography of partisan support in Mexico

Nationalization captures the degree to which parties receive similar vote shares throughout the national territory, and is therefore explicitly interested in spatial aspects of party competition. This paper draws on spatial econometrics to analyze how parties compete across space. On the basis of a geo-referenced dataset of support for three major Mexican parties during the 2012 election, the analysis examines why there are spatial patterns of party support beyond what would be expected on the basis of district composition. The paper shows that spatial context has an independent effect on cross-district party performance, and that party support in one district increases the likelihood of party support nearby, thus highlighting why more explicit attention to space is important to understand the origins of nationalization.