Theory Of Voting Research Articles

Pocketbook Voting in India’s 18th Parliamentary Elections (2024)

The economic theory of voting has long remained a cornerstone in the study of voting behaviour, especially in economically developed democracies. At the heart of it is the assumption that economic contexts shape voting choice and influence electoral outcomes as management of the economy is an important function of governments and that citizens hold elected representatives accountable for the nation’s as well as family’s economic situation. Voters support ruling party candidates when they think the incumbent government has delivered on the economic front—creation of employment opportunities, keeping price of essential goods and services under control, rise in income across social layers and so on. In India, much of the analysis of voting behaviour is focused on shifting allegiance of support across social constituencies—particularly caste and religion. Economic factors of voting choices have received little attention to the extent as if they do not matter. However, analysis of NES (2024) data suggests that economic factors swayed a significant chunk of voters and thus influenced the final electoral outcomes. Anchored in economic theoretical context of voting behaviour, this article particularly examines whether there was pocketbook voting and whether it influenced the electoral outcomes of the 18th general election to Lok Sabha (2024). The findings show that pocketbook voting had significant and substantial effect on political preference.

Politicians’ Theories of Voting Behavior

While political scientists regularly engage in spirited theoretical debates about elections and voting behavior, few have noticed that elected politicians also have theories of elections and voting. Here, we investigate politicians’ positions on eight central theoretical debates in the area of elections and voting behavior and compare politicians’ theories to those held by ordinary citizens. Using data from face-to-face interviews with nearly one thousand politicians in 11 countries, together with corresponding surveys of more than twelve thousand citizens, we show that politicians overwhelmingly hold thin, minimalist, “democratic realist” theories of voting, while citizens’ theories are more optimistic and policy oriented. Politicians’ theoretical tendencies—along with their theoretical misalignment from citizens—are remarkably consistent across countries. These theories are likely to have important consequences for how politicians campaign, communicate with the public, think about public policy, and represent their constituents.

Vote choice in the context of lethal police violence: A research note

Do police-caused deaths predict presidential vote choice in the US? This study explores the relationship between lethal police violence and vote choice in the 2020 presidential election using individual-level data from Harvard University's Cooperative Election Study (CES), which has been linked with aggregate-level data on police killings, civilian homicide rates, and socioeconomic, political, and public health characteristics. Consistent with the issue ownership theory of voting, this study finds that voters living in areas characterized by lethal police violence are significantly more likely to vote for the Democratic Party above and beyond their individual-level attributes and other contextual conditions. These findings and supplemental analyses raise critical questions concerning the political salience of fatal force in presidential races in the post-2020 era. Findings also support the need for further criminological inquiry into the effects of different forms of violence on American political behavior.

중위투표자 관점에서의 공공사회복지 지출 분석

This paper analyzes the growth of public social expenditures in Korea from a public choice perspective. Specifically, based on the median voter theory, we conduct an empirical analysis of social insurance expenditures such as national pension, national health insurance, and public social expenditures using time series data from 1993 to 2022. The empirical results support that changes in the budget constraint for lifetime utility maximization of the median voter, including financial assets, remaining life expectancy, and remaining working year, are associated with an increase in public social expenditure. In addition, macroeconomic variables such as the real interest rate, real economic growth, and the tax base per recipient are also found to affect public social expenditure. This paper suggests that as the age of the median voter increases, public social expenditures, including national pensions and national health insurance, are bound to increase both naturally and politically.

Popular autocrats: why do voters support Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary? A quantitative analysis

AbstractAuthoritarian populism has become an increasingly prevalent subtype of hybrid regime and is characterized by weakened democratic institutions and a leader who relies on populist appeals. Authoritarian populist regimes limit citizens’ freedom, undermine accountability and the rule of law, and are likely to be more corrupt than democratic regimes. Nevertheless, certain authoritarian populist regimes appear to enjoy broad popular support. Based on the European Social Survey database and my calculations of respondents’ personal income tax rates, I investigate the factors that influenced voters’ support for Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary from 2010 to 2020, which may be considered an exemplary case of an autocratic populist regime. The analysis shows that voters’ support for the government was influenced by their perceptions of the economy and government performance, political beliefs (i.e., policy congruence and ideology), and basic human values (i.e., self-transcendence and conservation). By contrast, changes in voters’ individual economic conditions were not found to be associated with their support for the government. The findings indicate that, in addition to explanations of government support that specifically focus on hybrid regimes, economic voting theory, which originated from and has typically been applied in democratic contexts, also provides viable explanations for understanding support for authoritarian populist regimes. More broadly, the findings also lend support to the altruistic and expressive voter hypotheses.

Service to demands and corruption tolerance: brazilian voters' perception of “rouba, mas faz” policy

Purpose: The research aimed to verify the influence of meeting public demands on the perception of tolerance of Brazilian voters towards the “rouba, mas faz” policy. Although a social unison of rejection of corruption in politics is perceived, there is a possibility that voters relax this disapproval in the face of the results that managers offer to communities. Methodology: Study of quantitative approach, as for the procedures, a survey was used, with a questionnaire and study of scenarios, of tolerance to “rouba, mas faz”, as a research instrument. To analyze the data, descriptive statistics and presentation in percentages were used for the answers to assertions and scenarios. Results: The results indicate that Brazilians demand honest politicians, although for almost 25% of the population every politician is corrupt, without distinction; for 80% of respondents the main cause of problems in Brazilian public management is political corruption; approximately 70% of voters do not use transparency portals to decide their vote, although 80% claim to research the candidates' history before making their decision. Contributions of the Study: Aspects related to the median voter theory were perceived, since, although Brazilian voters demonstrate intolerance to corruption, the profile with the average characteristics of the population tends to vote for that candidate who promises to meet their needs. In addition, in general terms, 7% of the sample would re-elect a very corrupt politician, as long as he is very productive, while 24% would tolerate corruption, as long as it occurs on a small scale and is accompanied by works and benefits to society, implying that there is, in general terms, to a certain degree, the influence of meeting public demands on voters' tolerance of the “rouba, mas faz” policy in Brazil.

Gradual de-idealisation and progress in political science: a case study

This article contributes to the discussion regarding the relationship between idealisation, de-idealisation and cognitive scientific progress. In this, I raise the question of the significance of the gradual de-idealisation procedure for constructing political science theories. I show that conceptions that assume the reversibility of the idealisation process can be an extremely useful theoretical perspective in reconstructions of political science modelling and analyses of scientific progress in political science. I base my position on the results of the methodological reconstruction of Richard Jankowski’s theory of voting. My reconstruction and results of empirical studies show that by gradually removing simplifying assumptions, models can emerge that more accurately identify the determinants of the voting decision and the corresponding relationships. In the case I analysed, the transition from coarse-grained to fine-grained models likely demarcates the line of scientific progress.

Building Edge Detection Technology From Remote Sensing Image Based On NSCT And Tensor Voting

An edge detection technology based on the combination of non-downsampling contour wave transform (NSCT) and tensor voting is proposed, which aims to obtain more accurate and detailed edge information of buildings in remote sensing images. Firstly, NSCT is used for image decomposition to obtain the subband frequency information of different scales and angles. Then, position encoding is performed on these subband coefficients to obtain second-order symmetric tensors at the corresponding positions. Tensors of different scales and angles at the same position are weighted and summed to complete feature fusion. Finally, the edge features of the image are obtained based on tensor voting theory. The experimental results show that compared to common edge detection technologies, such as Canny, Fast Edge (Fast edge detection using structured forests) and HED (Holistically-Nested Edge Detection), our method can more accurately and intensively reflect the boundaries of buildings and the edge information of roofs, providing better support for the analysis of building types and architectural styles. Compared to the HED method, which is based on deep learning, our method improves PSNR and SSIM metrics by 0.98 and 0.03, respectively.

The Italian payback effect: the causal impact of the great recession on political discontent

ABSTRACT Grounding on the theories of economic voting and political opposition, this paper investigates whether the Italian Local Labour Markets (LLMs) most affected by the Great Recession reacted in the ballot box voting against the domestic institutions or in favour of anti-European parties. We exploit a recent econometric technique in the counterfactual framework, which adopts a non-parametric generalisation of the difference-in-differences estimator. Our findings show a causal negative impact on the share of Berlusconi’s party, the incumbent party during the crisis, statistically significant in those LLMs with the lowest institutional quality and in the Centre and in the Islands of Italy. We find no causal effect on the anti-European vote whatsoever. People living in the LLMs that suffered the most the effects of the Great Recession used their vote to harm the party in charge, which they deemed responsible for the economic consequences, with a payback effect.

After a Storm Come Votes: Identifying the Effects of Disaster Relief on Electoral Outcomes

The retrospective voting theory suggests that citizens vote for governing parties in response to distributive benefits. Knowing this, governments may reward voters by providing particularistic benefits—i.e., pork—prior to elections. Previous studies, however, do not account for the endogeneity. We address this problem by focusing on disaster relief and exploiting exogeneity of disaster. In particular, by using maximum hourly rainfall as an instrumental variable for disaster relief, we analyze the causal effect of disaster relief on incumbent’s electoral outcomes. Our analyses of Japanese data in the past few decades indicate that disaster relief increased governing parties’ vote share. Specifically, when the disaster relief per capita increases from zero to its mean, the predicted value of the governing parties’ vote share increases by 2.8 and 5.4% points in the lower and upper chambers, respectively. The finding is consistent with retrospective voting behavior. Moreover, our results imply that the incumbent’s electoral gain is brought about by persuading voters from oppositions to governing parties rather than by mobilizing supporters of governing parties.

Deliberative Democracy and Incompatibilities of Choice Norms.

Deliberative democracy aims at reaching collective decisions through mechanisms that involve flexible opinions, variable alternative sets and information gathering in the process of decision making as opposed to exogenously fixed alternative sets and preference rankings. Deliberative democracy includes elements derived from bargaining and negotiation. Among its virtues, some proponents of deliberative democracy have included the possibility that several important negative results of the theory of voting can be avoided. The basic stratagem is to dismiss the universal domain condition typically assumed in social choice results. Thus, the validity of the results escaped from is obviously not in question. The position taken in this paper is that, while in some respects plausible, the escape argument is based on a too narrow view of the incompatibility results of the social choice theory. Some fundamental paradoxes remain beyond the reach of the deliberative techniques and are even exacerbated by them. That said, the deliberative approach can certainly be adopted for making voting alternatives more meaningful to those involved.

Economic voting goes local: evidence from the Italian regions

AbstractThis article investigates the pattern of economic voting at the regional level in Italy. It focuses on the elections held in 18 out of 20 Italian regions from 1995 to 2020. Retrospective voting is examined by using the theory of economic voting, measured at the subnational level. By providing some inferential models and controlling for the impact of phases of recession, this article tests the hypothesis whereby the incumbent regional government is rewarded (or punished) by voters in the event of a good (or poor) state of the regional economy. It mainly considers macroeconomic variables, focusing on the relationship between the unemployment rate (at both national and regional levels) and the electoral performance of the incumbent executive. The empirical analysis shows that, particularly during periods of ‘quiet politics’, economic voting also occurs at the local level and thus the regional unemployment rate affects regional rulers' electoral outcomes.

Crossing the Line: Evidence for the Categorization Theory of Spatial Voting

Abstract Bølstad and Dinas (2017) propose a model of spatial voting, based on social identity theory, that suggests supporting a candidate/policy on the other side of the ideological spectrum has a disutility that is not accounted for by common spatial models. Unfortunately, the data they use cannot speak directly to whether the disutility arises because individuals perceive their ideology as a social identity. We present the results of an experimental study that measures the norm against crossing the ideological spectrum; tests the cost of doing so, controlling for spatial effects; and demonstrates that this cost increases with the salience and strength of identity norms. By demonstrating the norm mechanism for the disutility of crossing the ideological spectrum, we provide strong support for B&D's model.

Participation in Polish Local Elections: Sheer Rational Choice or Social Embeddedness Fate?

In this article, a modest attempt is undertaken to connect the rational choice theory mechanism with the sociological theory of voting, as efforts to juxtapose both theories are still rare, although some cited accomplishments offer interesting insights. Our dependent variable is participation in a local election in Poland. The local government elections in Poland seem to offer a setting particularly well-suited for a test of the rational choice hypothesis and its relation to sociological explanations of voting behavior. The essential contribution of the article derives from our conviction that social embeddedness and rooting into the social milieu and local community matter for both the cost of participating in a local election and the cost of deciding whether to participate. In the world of post-cleavage politics, individualization of political behavior and involvement in (new) social networks play an increasingly important role. The general finding can be summarized as follows: the social embeddedness of citizens does enhance the probability of participation in an election; however, it does not substitute for the impact of rational motivation factors, nor does it significantly decrease the latter’s net impact on our dependent variable.

A Theory and Test of Pledge-Based Voting: The Limited but Real Effects of Election Pledges on Citizens’ Vote Choice

Do voters decide on the basis of the election pledges political parties make? Although this is a key assumption in most democratic theories and, seemingly, among parties who issue dozens of pledges during campaigns, the scientific literature does not provide a clear answer to this question. This article develops a theory of pledge-based voting and a research design that allows for studying the electoral effects of pledges in real-time as the campaign unfolds. Based on a novel experimental design embedded in panel surveys administered during and after the 2019 Danish national election campaign (N = 6233), we estimate that the most salient pledges affect vote choice by between 1.1 and 2.1 percentage points averaged across the electorate. While modest, these effects can be decisive in the often highly competitive context of modern elections. The findings have implications for our understanding of political behavior, party politics, and normative theories of democracy.

Saving lives or saving the economy? Support for the incumbent during the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia

ABSTRACT The spread of COVID-19 sparked debates about whether incumbents should focus on saving lives or the economy. Politicians’ decisions in this dilemma could determine whether they remain in office. “Saving the economy” is predicted to affect re-election chances positively in economic voting theory. However, a public health crisis can shift the electorate’s preferences in favor of expanding healthcare support at the cost of the economy. We examine whether there is a trade-off between “saving lives” and “saving the economy” for the incumbent in receiving higher political support. Based on two experiments conducted in Russia, we measure if individuals are more likely to support, vote for, and extend the power of the incumbent based on their policies. Although both experimental factors encouraged support, the economy-driven policy had a larger effect on voting than the healthcare-driven one.

Spatial voting in non-partisan cities: A case study

In spatial voting theory, voters choose the candidate whose policy preferences are most like their own. This requires that (a) voters and candidates have policy preferences that can be meaningfully summarized in terms of low-dimensional “ideal points” on a left-right scale; (b) voters are able to discern, either directly or through relevant cues, the ideal points of the candidates who are running for office; and (c) voters incorporate this information into the choices they make at the ballot box. Perhaps more than in any other elections, it is not clear that any of these requirements are met in non-partisan municipal elections: policy preferences may not be ideologically structured, information may be inadequate, and voters may choose candidates for reasons other than ideology. This makes non-partisan municipal elections an especially hard test for spatial voting theory. Using novel data from both municipal candidates and eligible voters in a major non-partisan municipal election in Canada, we show that municipal policy attitudes are ideologically structured and that these municipal policy ideal points are strongly related to mayoral and council vote choice. Thus, despite the institutional and informational obstacles, spatial voting can play an important role in non-partisan municipal elections.

Housing Performance and the Electorate

The electorate is concerned with personal financial and macroeconomic conditions in addition to policy issues and tends to hold the incumbent party accountable when voting. The performance of the United States’ largest asset class, residential real estate, should influence individual voter behavior. According to economic voting theory and the “homevoter” hypothesis, homeowners will be more supportive of policies that are perceived as beneficial to their property value. We investigate this relationship in the US residential real estate market by evaluating the effects of heterogenous county-level housing market performance on voter behavior in national presidential elections and find counties with superior house price performance in the four years preceding an election are more likely to “vote-switch” to the incumbent party. Counties with relatively inferior house price performance in the four years leading up to the election are more likely to switch their vote from the incumbent to the challenging party. The relationship is strongest in the years closest to an election and in counties that rank in the higher quartile of housing price performance. Election outcomes in “swing” counties are particularly vulnerable the local real estate economy. To our knowledge, this is the first study to link heterogeneous local residential real estate performance over a series of national election outcomes.

The link between subjective well-being and electoral participation: Cross-national perspective

The article examines the relationship between subjective well-being and elections turnout. The purpose of the article is to determine how subjective well-being affects turnout. To achieve the purpose, the link between subjective well-being and electoral participation should be studied along with the influence that political regime has on this link. The majority of previous research papers indicate that there is a positive relationship between the studied variables. Most of these studies were based on data from specific democratic countries. Little attention has been paid to cross-national comparison and to countries with less developed democratic institutions. According to the theory of retrospective voting, voters tend to use elections to reward or punish the incumbent. Thus, it can be hypothesized that subjective well-being increases the likelihood to participate in elections, and that the democratic context strengthens the link between subjective well-being and voters turnout. The joined dataset of the European Social Survey and World Values Survey is used for the empirical analysis. Multilevel binary logistic regression is used as the main method of analysis. The results of the study show a statistically significant relationship between the high level of subjective well-being and voter turnout. People with higher levels of subjective well-being are more likely to vote in elections. In democratic countries, this relationship is stronger. These findings support the conclusions of previous research and confirm a modified version of the retrospective voting theory, which uses subjective well-being as a predictor of electoral behavior.

Expressive voting versus information avoidance: experimental evidence in the context of climate change mitigation

We theoretically and experimentally investigate the effect of self-serving information avoidance on moral bias in democratic and individual decisions in the context of climate change mitigation. Subjects choose between two allocations that differ in payoffs and contributions to climate change mitigation. We vary the observability of the environmental contribution, as well as the decision context associated with different levels of pivotality. If the contribution is directly observable, we find evidence for lower pivotality leading to higher levels of “green” decisions, as predicted by the low-cost theory of voting. This effect disappears if subjects can avoid information on the contribution. Instead, we find evidence for the exploitation of moral wiggle room via information avoidance in larger democracies as well as in the consumption context. Our results indicate that information avoidance substitutes expressive voting as an instrument to manage cognitive dissonance on the part of the voter. Hence, moral biases in elections might be less likely than previously thought.