Swing Voters Research Articles

Hegemony in Political Communication: The Swing Voter Phenomenon in the 2020 Regional Election in Karangasem Regency, Bali

The 2020 Regional Election in Karangasem, Bali was marked by a significant swing voter phenomenon. The incumbent pair Mas Sumatri and Sukerana, predicted by surveys to win with 53.9% against Dana-Dipa with 37.2% during the campaign, actually suffered a crushing defeat with 43.4%, while Dana-Dipa won with 56.6% according to the official results from the Karangasem KPU. Additionally, there was a need to increase political participation, as the Karangasem KPU data showed that out of 377,873 registered voters, only 269,501 exercised their right to vote. This means there were 108,372 voters who did not vote. This research examines the swing voter phenomenon in the 2020 Regional Election in Karangasem by addressing hegemony factors as the cause of swing voters in the 2020 Regional Election in Karangasem, Bali, Indonesia. Data were analyzed using the concept of hegemony. The results of this research are: first, the hegemonic factors of the incumbent's policies causing swing voters and the counter-hegemony by the community against the incumbent government's policies. Second, the political communication strategies of the candidates to minimize swing voters in the 2020 Regional Election in Karangasem.

The Electoral Consequences of Tax Increases: Are Parties Punished for Raising Taxes?

Do governments presiding over tax increases lose votes? One assumption is tax increases affect incumbent parties equally but we also expect asymmetric responses with differing penalties for left- and right-wing parties. Influential literature also assumes voters incapable of assigning responsibility to policymakers or holding them accountable. We find that tax increases are more costly to a left-of-centre party. Previous research assessing this is hampered by a lack of comparable cases; however, our tests are conducted with results from thousands of English local elections across decades. We find tax increases by labour-controlled councils corresponded with a significant vote swing against labour. There were no effects of rate increases on votes for conservative-controlled or Lib Dem-controlled councils. These results have implications for how democratic elections may produce responsive governments, and we discuss why there may be an asymmetry, where there is more electoral responsiveness to tax increases by governments of the left.

Health aspects of the presidential election in the United States.

The prospect of a Biden-Trump rematch had raised concerns. The argument of Trump on the older age of Biden led to a boomerang effect when the latter was replaced by the much younger Kamala Harris whose mixed African and Asian ancestry should lead to her support on international issues. Swing voters might be attracted by her potential as the first female president. Assertive on the politically controversial issue of abortion, Kamala Harris already spent a substantial part of her vice-presidency on women issues. Her promotion of sexual and reproductive rights during the presidential campaign augurs well for restoring those priorities on the American political agenda.

Political Communication and Capital Toward Swing Voter Cause in Regional Head Elections 2020 in Karangasem Regency, Bali

A striking swing of voters marked the 2020 Regional Elections in Karangasem Bali. The incumbent pair, Mas Sumatri and Suari, who were predicted by a survey of 53.9% to win against Dana-Dipa by 37.2% during the campaign, actually showed a crushing defeat of 43.4% and a Dana-Dipa victory of 56.6%, according to the official results from the Karangasem General Election Commission (KPU). This study examines the phenomenon of swing voters in the 2020 Regional Elections in Karangasem by raising the problem of capital factors as the cause of swing voters in the 2020 Regional Elections in Karangasem and the political communication of candidates in minimising voter swing in the 2020 Regional Elections in Karangasem. This research uses a qualitative approach through observation techniques, interviews, document studies, and literature studies in its data collection. The data were analysed using capital theory in social practice. The results of this study show that the determinant factor, namely capital, occurs in the dynamics of swing voters and political communication in the 2020 Regional Elections in Karangasem by candidates delivering their vision and mission as their political communication messages. This research contributes as a reference related to the phenomenon of swing voters and the political communication strategies of candidates who contest to minimise swing voters. Keywords: Capital, swing voter, political communication, 2020 Regional Head Election, Karangasem Regency Bali.

“Gender wars” and populist politics in South Korea

The 2022 South Korean presidential election campaign saw populist politicians, especially conservative parties, leverage gender conflicts and misogyny to attract young male swing voters. But there has been limited scholarly attention to the connection between gender and populist politics, particularly in South Korea, with research primarily focused on women's voting patterns, their political party representation, and on populist politics in the US, Europe, and Latin America. Existing research identifies that common strategies employed by populist politicians include anti-feminist discourses, reference to crises in masculinity, and appeals to emotion and affect. This paper examines how South Korean populist politics has utilized gender conflicts since democratization, considering the evolution of ‘gender wars’ in the South Korean context. It specifically delves into the strategies employed by conservative populist politicians from the People Power Party (PPP) during the 2022 election campaigns. These strategies, although similar to those of right-wing populists in Europe and the US, emphasized three key issues unique to South Korea: compulsory military service, low fertility rates, and the dismantling of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. This South Korean case contributes significantly to academic discussions about populist politics and gender, contextualized within the local political, social, and cultural context.

Jam-Barrel Politics

Abstract This paper studies the executive-legislative exchange of centrally allocated benefits (jam) for legislative support in Colombia using data from road building projects, legislative roll-call votes, and a leaked database which uncovered the assignment of road contracts to individual legislators. We draw hypotheses from a model in which an executive spreads jam to sway legislators. We document that assigned projects had excess costs, legislators targeted were more likely to be swing voters in congress, and legislators increased their support for the executive after their contracts were signed. The results are driven by legislators representing remote regions and constituencies with weaker political institutions.

Farewell President! Political favoritism, economic inequality, and political polarization

This paper examines the effect of political favoritism on economic inequality in the short run and political polarization in the long run. We exploit the sudden death of an authoritarian leader – President Chiang Ching-Kuo of Taiwan – in 1988 to generate plausibly exogenous variation in partiality. We find that Chiang’s nationalist regime conducted political favoritism broadly toward political immigrants via cronyism (allocating public sector positions) and also differentially toward specific subgroups of political immigrants via wage discrimination (offering higher wages to these subgroups within the public sector). Favoritism led to a 7.2 percent immigrant wage premium, which accounted for nearly three quarters of the immigrant–native wage gap at the time. This in turn propelled overall income inequality by 4.5 percent. Moreover, political favoritism breeds political polarization in the long run by pulling apart the political views of immigrants and natives. Compared with natives, immigrants who were exposed to favoritism tend to adopt political positions that are aligned with the nationalist party today: they are more likely to support unification with China, and are more inclined to trust the mainland Chinese government and its citizens. Exposed immigrant (native) swing voters are also more (less) likely to vote for the nationalist party today.

Determinants of swing voting in Africa: evidence from Ghana's elections

ABSTRACT An increasing number of African countries are experiencing electoral power shifts, indicating that more voters are switching loyalties between parties and candidates. Theories that pin electoral change in Africa on clientelism, patronage, and ethnic cleavages fail to account for the dynamics surrounding these shifting loyalties. This study probes the factors that pry swing voters away from core supporters in African elections. Using data from a nationally representative sample of over 3000 voters across Ghana, we find evidence that voters exempted from positive clientelist inducements (gifts) were more likely to cast swing votes. We also find that voters exposed to negative clientelism (wary of violence or forceful forfeiture of benefits after elections) were more likely to cast swing votes. Nonetheless, voters wary of violence but who have received gifts in exchange for their votes were less likely to swing their vote, indicating that negative clientelism is only effective when accompanied by positive inducements. Finally, we find that voters who prioritize parties’ performance records were more likely to switch their votes from one party to another. Our results imply that the rising political power shifts on the continent are driven by an increasing share of voters unencumbered by clientelist inducements and a rising determination to prioritize national interests over parochial benefits.

Democratic contestation, organised labour, and pension reform in Ghana and Malawi

AbstractWhat explains variation in African states' commitment to pensions? This article argues that differences in the structure of contestation and legacies of state‐labour relations matter. When competition is confined to fewer and more stable parties, social welfare appeals gain currency to mobilise swing voters and makes it more likely that pensions will become a subject of political competition. However, legacies of labour accommodation can strengthen certain elements of pension reform, but also reinforce certain policy mindsets such as contributory insurance. These ideas are developed with case studies of Ghana and Malawi. The cases utilise process‐tracing evidence to demonstrate how specific structures of contestation and labour legacies led to divergent pathways of pension reform. The article highlights the significant challenges involved in strengthening pensions in Africa, and therefore the limited potential for a reconstitution of state‐citizen relations based on pension access.

Partisanship, attribution and approval in a public health shock

Political scientists have long agreed that partisanship can bias how voters evaluate government performance and attribute responsibility. However, less is known about how – and to what extent – these biases work across different types of voters, or how they respond to positive or non-partisan policy outcomes. In this research note we address these questions, focusing on how voters respond to a positive, non-partisan public health shock: the successful early rollout of Covid-19 vaccinations in England. Through a pre-registered information experiment embedded in the British Election Study (N > 6000), we test how voters respond to claims that the quasi-independent National Health Service, rather than the government, deserved credit for the success of the programme. On average, subjects do attribute less responsibility to government, but this has no downstream effect on general approval. Exploratory heterogeneity analyses suggest that government and opposition supporters, as well as historic swing voters, respond homogeneously to our intervention. Our findings are not fully explained by rational or selective frameworks of responsibility attribution, and add nuance to existing experimental work on the political effects of the pandemic.

What Makes Swing Voters Participate in Protests? The Effects of Voting Patterns and Election Cycles on Participation in Candlelight Protests in South Korea

This paper aims to analyze how the traits of candlelight protest participants have changed from 2004 to 2017 in South Korea. While previous studies have typically identified these traits of the candlelight protesters based on a single survey, this paper examines the change of protest participants using a multi-level analysis. This study argues that voter type and election cycles have a significant impact on an individual's decision to participate in candlelight protests. To be specific, swing voters are less likely to participate in a candlelight protest when the next election is scheduled either too soon or too far. Core liberal voters with a high degree of motivation are more likely to take part in a candlelight protest when the distance from the next election is close, while core conservative voters with a low degree of motivation are not affected by the distance from the next election. This study contributes on both sub-fields, voting behaviors and contentious politics, by combining individuals' voting patterns with political opportunity structures. Survey data (2004, 2010, 2017) conducted by the Korean Political Science Association (KPSA) and the Korean Social Science Data Center (KSSDC) provide empirical support for the arguments.

Poverty, Partisanship, and Vote Buying in Latin America

ABSTRACTElectoral contests in Latin America are often characterized by attempts by political parties to sway the outcome of elections using vote buying—a practice that seems to persist during elections throughout the region. This article examines how clientelist parties’ use of vote buying is jointly shaped by two voter traits: poverty and partisanship. We hypothesize that clientelist parties pursue a mixed strategy, broadly targeting their core voters but also poor swing voters. While most of the existing evidence comes from single-country studies, this study adds cross-national evidence from multilevel regressions of survey data from 22 Latin American countries. Empirically, we find that poverty matters mainly for swing voters. For partisans, the effect of poverty on vote buying is weaker. These results suggest that poverty plays an important role in vote-buying strategies—but also that partisanship moderates clientelistic parties’ vote-buying strategies during electoral campaigns.

Closing The Gap: The Politics of Property Rights in Kenya

Politicians and scholars alike have advocated for land reform as a tool to address political instability and poverty. Yet in many cases of land reform, governments provide land but withhold property rights. Why do leaders withhold these rights, and when do they grant previously withheld rights? The authors argue that land rights are a distributive good that leaders relinquish conservatively and selectively to build popular support. Using microlevel data from Kenya—a country in which successive governments have distributed most of the country’s arable land through land reform—the article finds that leaders under democratic regimes are more willing to formalize rights than those under autocratic regimes. Further, the logic of land formalization changes with regime type. Whereas autocrats prioritize land formalization among core supporters, elites facing elections prioritize pivotal swing voters. The article demonstrates how the provision of property rights is primarily a function of political calculations rather than state capacity.

Win big, buy more: political parties, competition and electoral clientelism

ABSTRACT Political parties use electoral clientelism to mobilise their core voters and to persuade swing voters to support them. Earlier research shows that clientelism occurs more often in highly competitive elections. Against these conclusions, this article argues that a large margin of victory can drive the use of electoral clientelism irrespective of the type of constituency. The analysis uses county-level data from the 2020 election campaign in Romania and shows that electoral clientelism is used more in those constituencies with a clear winner. These effects are robust when controlling for socio-economic vulnerability and the percentage of the urban population.

Clientelism and Ethnicity as Constraints to Party Organization Change: The AKP in Turkey and Change in District Presidencies

Based on the existing literature, the study tests the relevance of electoral and intra-party alliance concerns on party organization change for the AKP in its 2017 District Congress. We believe that both the electoral and intra-party alliance concerns the party faced in 2017, make it a suitable case to test the basic hypothesis of the study. The dataset used in the analysis consists of secondary data on 971 districts present in Turkey. District presidency change is employed as the key independent variable to estimate organization change. The result of the logistic regression indicates that the effect of increasing percentage of swing voters and members of the former alliance, despite being valid, have moderate positive effects on the AKP’s decision to change its organization. The insignificancy of the electoral safety of the party in the district reveals that in 2017 the AKP changed its organization regardless of the nature of the electoral competition it faces. Interestingly, results indicate that socioeconomic development and ethnic presence in districts are also significant factors that constrain organization change in the AKP. Based on these results we suggest that change in party organization becomes a more difficult issue in parties with strong clientelistic networks where political parties built electoral support through the conditional distribution of resources to voters. Similarly, ethnicity also acts as a constraint due to the peculiarity of the relations political parties develop with these groups. As such clientelism and ethnicity seem to have constraining effects on the abilities of parties to change their organizations. The results highlight the necessity of further research to generalize the validity of the effectiveness of clientelism and ethnic groups on political parties’ organization change on different settings.

Targeting hunger or votes? The political economy of humanitarian transfers in Malawi

Do electoral considerations play a role in the targeting of humanitarian transfers? We analyze the targeting of direct cash and food transfers distributed in Malawi in response to an exceptionally poor harvest following a late and erratic rainy season of 2015/16. Combining household survey data on transfers with a remotely sensed measure of drought and with the results of the 2014 and 2019 parliamentary elections, we show that transfers were disproportionately targeted at marginal constituencies. Rather than distributing the transfers based solely on need or mobilizing its tribal base, the government attempted to persuade swing voters to support its candidates in the next elections. We find no evidence that this strategy was successful at increasing the vote of ruling party candidates in subsequent elections.

Impact of electoral competition, swing voters and interest groups on equilibrium policy platforms: Exploring the strategic forces at work

This paper constructs a stylized model of election between two opportunistic candidates who can influence equilibrium policy platforms in exchange for monetary contributions provided by two distinct lobby groups. Two key features are embedded which give rise to a dual uncertainty in the model: the existence of partisan spread across voter groups as well as the embezzlement of campaign funds received by the electoral candidates from the interest groups. We derive and compare the equilibrium platforms of the two office-seeking candidates in three scenarios: none of the above uncertainties exist (benchmark case), only uncertainty about voters’ preferences exist (swing-voter case), and both the uncertainties exist (swing voters and lobby groups case). We find that an opportunistic candidate’s swing-voter tax platform is always lower than the benchmark tax platform. Additionally, the equilibrium tax choice of electoral contenders in the swing voters and opposing lobby groups case is found to be greater than the tax level chosen under the swing-voter case if the lobby group advocating a greater level of tax is sufficiently well-organized such that it outweighs the relative swing-voter effect in that group. Furthermore, we find that when an electoral candidate transitions from being highly corrupt to becoming relatively more honest, the equilibrium level of public good provision adjusts in conformity with the well-organized group’s economic preferences. Finally, if the strength of relative lobbying effect is weaker, a lower partisan bias within that group induces an electoral candidate to choose a tax platform closer to that group’s policy bliss point.

Political alienation and voter mobilization in elections

AbstractThe paper examines candidates' choice between policies that increase the number of supporters and policies that foster their participation. Voter turnout is decided at the group level, in response to candidates' policies. A convex utility function captures the alienation of citizens who are far from all candidates. In equilibrium, extreme policies are adopted as a mobilization strategy, if citizens are sufficiently polarized and inclined to alienation. Otherwise, a standard result of convergence to the center obtains, in line with the persuasion of the swing voters.

"누가 스윙 투표자인가?: 2021년 서울 · 부산시장 보궐선거에서의 유권자 투표행태 분석"

본 연구에서는 연속된 두 번의 선거에서 각기 다른 정당을 지지하는 유권자를 스윙 투표자로 규정하고 ‘왜’ 그리고 ‘누가’ 스윙 투표자가 되었는지를 2020년 21대 총선에서의 투표 선택 결과와 2021년 서울·부산시장 보궐선거 결과를 바탕으로 분석하고자 한다. 보궐선거 당시에 정권 심판론이 우세하였다고 하더라도, 총선에서 압도적으로 승리했던 더불어민주당이 불과 1년 만에 서울과 부산 두 지역에서 큰 격차로 완패하였다는 것은 그 사이에 유권자의 투표선택에 많은 변화가 생겼다는 것을 의미한다. 본 연구의 분석 결과에 따르면 첫째, 이번 보궐선거에서 청년층과 남성은 이해관계에 따라 전략적으로 특정 정당에 지지를 보내기도 하고 철회하기도 하는 스윙 투표자로서의 역할을 수행하였다. 둘째, 보궐선거 당시에 정부가 구체적인 성과를 보여주지 못한 정책들에 대해 부정적으로 평가한 유권자들이 회고적 판단을 통해 스윙 투표를 하였다. 마지막으로, 중도적 이념성향을 가진 유권자, 유권자와 더불어민주당 사이의 주관적 이념거리를 멀게 인식하는 유권자, 그리고 정당에 대해 양가적 태도를 취하는 유권자가 특정 정당을 지속적으로 지지하기보다는 스윙 투표를 선택하였다. 결국, 정치적 양극화가 심화된 시기에 선거의 승패에 결정적인 영향을 미칠 수 있는 스윙 투표자를 이해하는 것은 선거에서 정당이 민주적 책임성과 반응성을 향상시키는 데 중요한 정치적 함의를 갖는다.

Measuring Swing Voters with a Supervised Machine Learning Ensemble

AbstractTheory has long suggested that swing voting is a response to cross-pressures arising from a mix of individual attributes and contextual factors. Unfortunately, existing regression-based approaches are ill-suited to explore the complex combinations of demographic, policy, and political factors that produce swing voters in American elections. This gap between theory and practice motivates our use of an ensemble of supervised machine learning methods to predict swing voters in the 2012, 2016, and 2020 U.S. presidential elections. The results from the learning ensemble substantiate the existence of swing voters in contemporary American elections. Specifically, we demonstrate that the learning ensemble produces well-calibrated and externally valid predictions of swing voter propensity in later elections and for related behaviors such as split-ticket voting. Although interpreting black-box models is more challenging, they can nonetheless provide meaningful substantive insights meriting further exploration. Here, we use flexible model-agnostic tools to perturb the ensemble and demonstrate that cross-pressures (particularly those involving ideological and policy-related considerations) are essential to accurately predict swing voters.