American Elections Research Articles

Shaking the tin cup: Celebrity candidate fundraising in American elections

Shaking the tin cup: Celebrity candidate fundraising in American elections

Embracing Peace: Path to Cross-Party Collaboration in US Politics

In light of the pivotal 2024 US elections, this comprehensive study delves into the imperative of cross-party collaboration within American politics. Amidst a backdrop of heightened partisan divisions, this paper argues for a paradigm shift towards a more synergistic political atmosphere that transcends mere party affiliations. It articulates the essentiality of fostering transparency, mutual respect, tolerance, and proactive dialogue as foundational pillars for bridging ideological divides. This study not only accentuates the pivotal roles of accountability and equitable representation in cultivating mutual respect and cooperation across party lines but also spotlights the influential role of the electorate. It posits that a robust civic education is crucial for equipping citizens with the tools necessary to engage thoughtfully and critically in political discourse. By championing these core principles, this paper envisions a trajectory towards a more conciliatory and democratic political landscape, poised to invigorate the democratic spirit as the nation approaches the critical juncture of the 2024 elections. Through a combination of theoretical insights and empirical analysis, this study seeks to ignite a renewed commitment to collaborative governance, essential for the flourishing of democracy and the betterment of society at large.

The outcome of the US Election will determine the future of Big Tech and data privacy

The outcome of the US Election will determine the future of Big Tech and data privacy

The Increasing Nationalization of Local Elections: The Case of Prosecutors

To what extent are local races across the country being increasingly driven by politics at the national level? In this article, we examine the nationalization of elections for state executive branches' primary front line legal actors in the criminal courts—local prosecutors. We seek to better understand the factors influencing prosecutor election outcomes and why these types of elections have become more nationalized in recent years. More specifically, we aim to evaluate what effect this greater nationalization has had on the electoral fates of incumbent prosecutors seeking re-election. To date, there is a paucity of scholarship on prosecutor election outcomes within political science despite their importance historically and in light of recent events. This article seeks to fill an important gap in our understanding of what drives prosecutor elections in the United States. More broadly, we believe this research helps us better understand how even these local elections can be impacted by national events.

Foreign Election Interference in Africa’s De-Democratization Culture

The 2016 USA elections appear to have made Russia the “poster-boy” for election interference across the globe, allegedly using tools such as disinformation, misinformation, mal-information, email hacking, leaking of confidential information, and others. All such activities are a threat to national self-determination, democracy, and the autonomy of the people. Since then, elections in developing democracies in Africa are also alleged to have experienced interference by the usual suspect: Russia. In Africa, the actors of election interferences have been expanded beyond Russia to include foreign countries and companies in past elections in Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Ghana. The next general elections in Ghana are in December 2024. In the previous general elections in Ghana, there were no significant allegations of election interference, although, in 2020, the specter of foreign election interference emerged in the political discourse. The actions of the domestic actors to de-democratize elections were mentioned selectively. It may be simplistic to argue in favor of election non-interference in Ghana’s political business cycle every four years since 1992, but the allegations are not supported by evidence and are merely anecdotal and subjective or based on geopolitical realism. What can be proven is the de-democratization of incumbents and other domestic political actors in domestic elections through open vote-buying by politicians and vote-rigging by incumbent political leaders. In such a political dysmorphic situation, it is difficult to accuse any entity of being the mastermind of election interferences in Africa.

Hacker Attacks on Electronic Election and Vote Counting Systems: Estimation of Damages and Methods of Protection

The purpose of this study is to find the most effective and cost-efficient ways to improve the security and stability of electronic election and vote counting systems, as well as to identify the main targets of intruders and vulnerabilities of the system to prevent possible attacks. This paper describes the main types and of hacker attacks and their mechanism, assesses the consequences of damage to the structures of electronic elections in the United States, France, Germany, Northern Macedonia, and Indonesia. The vulnerabilities of electronic election systems were investigated and the technology for their detection during development and testing was provided. Recommendations were given on the implementation of preventive work to reduce the risks of hacker attacks. The study explained the motives of the crimes committed in the cyberspace of electronic election systems.

Testing Theories of States' Adoption of the Direct Primary

Understanding the origins of primary elections has important implications for evaluating their role in American elections. While there is little argument about the importance of primaries to the American electoral system, there is less agreement about why states adopted the direct primary and what they were intended to accomplish. Previous scholarship has laid out three theories: the strength of the progressive movement, parties' efforts to maintain one-party rule, and the urbanization of American society. Using comprehensive state-level data from 1892 to 1930, we test these theories of states' adoption of direct primaries. We find a strong influence of the strength of the progressive movement and the rate of urbanization on the adoption of the direct primary, but we do not, however, find any influence of state partisan competition. Our findings reinforce original arguments about the importance of the progressive movement and urbanization in the adoption of the direct primary.

2024 United States Elections: Air Pollution, Neurodegeneration, Neuropsychiatric, and Neurodevelopmental Disorders. Who Cares?

Air pollution exposures ought to be of significant interest for the United States (US) public as health issues will play a role in the 2024 elections. Citizens are not aware of the harmful brain impact of exposures to ubiquitous anthropogenic combustion emissions and friction-derived nanoparticles, industrial nanoplastics, the growing risk of wildfires, and the smoke plumes of soot. Ample consideration of pediatric and early adulthood hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, frontotemporal lobar degeneration, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and associations with neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders in the process of setting, reviewing, and implementing standards for particulate matter (PM)2.5, ultrafine PM, and industrial nanoparticles must be of interest to US citizens.

Suspended accounts align with the Internet Research Agency misinformation campaign to influence the 2016 US election

The ongoing debate surrounding the impact of the Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) social media campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential election has largely overshadowed the involvement of other actors. Our analysis brings to light a substantial group of suspended Twitter users, outnumbering the IRA user group by a factor of 60, who align with the ideologies of the IRA campaign. Our study demonstrates that this group of suspended Twitter accounts significantly influenced individuals categorized as undecided or weak supporters, potentially with the aim of swaying their opinions, as indicated by Granger causality.

From apprentice to president? Entertainment TV and US elections

This article studies the importance of entertainment TV for the selection of political leaders in the context of an important case study: Donald Trump's win in the 2016 presidential election and his previous role as host of the popular TV show “The Apprentice.” We find a positive correlation between TV ratings of The Apprentice and the county-level Republican vote share in 2016, but this correlation vanishes once we control for pre-existing voting and NBC viewership patterns. This null result is robust to different model specifications, measures of exposure to The Apprentice, and an extensive investigation of heterogeneous effects. Viewership of The Apprentice is also unrelated to Congressional election results, as well as support for Trump in survey data and the Republican primaries. These findings highlight the context-dependent importance of television for political leadership.

Agonal strategies in the american election campaign discourse (a case study of the political debates of the 2023 republican primary candidates)

The article analyses the methods of implementing the agonal strategies of political debate as one of the prototypical agonal genres of political discourse. For analysis, the speeches of politicians were selected during the 1st Republican primary debates held in the City of Milwaukee on August 23, 2023, streamed by the Fox News channel. The analysis allowed us to identify a 3-level structure of agonal strategies implemented by politicians within the framework of political debate. The 1st (basic) level of strategies – an introductive one – includes strategies for self-positioning, self-presentation and opponent defamation. The purpose of these strategies in terms of their agonal character is to position oneself as a leader worth winning the campaign, demonstrating individual undeniable advantages compared to other candidates and the expulsion of negative features of rivals. The verifying strategies of the 2nd level consist in operating with information received from the opponent aimed at producing an impact on the recipient, and include such strategies as self-defence and the opponent defamation. The additive strategy of the 3rd (highest) level combines the goals and objectives of the strategies of both lower levels; however, it has a special purpose inherent only to it – to give new meaning to the facts and phenomena reported by opponents, by introducing a new angle of tackling the problem. The main strategies at this level include ones of rational and emotional convictions realised by the tactics of introducing new facts and the new aspect ultimately aiming at establishing new semantic linkages in the recipient minds at the site of the destruction of semantic linkages, initially present in the speech of the political opponent. Thus, the study made it possible to ascertain that the genre of political debate, being a tactical repertoire of agonal behaviour strategies. is verbalised by various means, while strategies of a higher level can intersect with the lower ones’ strategies, nevertheless making explication of these strategies different, depending on the place of the strategy in the hierarchy.

A Pragmatic Study of Derogation in American Election Campaign Speeches

Language is sometimes used for influencing people negatively. This is done via the use of various derogatory strategies. Therefore, the present study deals with derogation pragmatically in American election campaign speeches. Precisely, the current work attempts to answer the following questions: (1) How is derogation approached pragmatically in American election campaign speeches? (2) Through which impoliteness strategies is derogation realized? (3) What is the target of derogation? Is it the public face or the personal face? And what are the foci of derogation? The study aims to find answers to the previous questions through reviewing the literature related to derogation and adopting an eclectic model for analyzing the data under investigation. Besides, a statistical means represented by the percentage equation is used to calculate the results. The main conclusion is that American presidential rivals use different impoliteness strategies to derogate each other; through this derogation either the public face or the personal face is threatened.

Ideological Connections: An Integrated Humanistic-Social Psychological Approach to Examining the Relationship Between Controversial Opposing Opinions

The social, economic, political, and civil unrest surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 United States election, and the increased activity of the racial justice movement has seemingly divided not just the nation but the world. Thoughts and behaviors are guided by ideological beliefs—collections of ideas or philosophies associated with power structures. I examined the overlap between positions on controversial topics and identified how ideological alignment, values, and identity characteristics influenced the holders’ views. I found significant relationships among the variables categorized as social, political, health and medical, and safety, security, and legal ideologies. The results indicated that participants’ views in one ideological category were similar to those in the other ideological categories. Finally, the current study presents models of integrating worldviews in which ideological viewpoints in the various categories align, supported by the Moral Foundations Theory, Ideological-Conflict Hypothesis, and the Rigidity-of-the-Right Hypothesis.

US election worries vex bioeconomy firms

US election worries vex bioeconomy firms

Incorporating Immigrants into Canadian Politics: An Experiment on the Effects of Attentiveness to Elections in the Country of Origin

Abstract In recent decades, Canada and other democracies have experienced a significant rise in migrant settlement. This has sparked much interest among scholars and policy makers in the forces that encourage or impede the political incorporation of newcomers. In this research note, we consider a factor that has received relatively little scrutiny, the impact of immigrants’ attention to native-country politics on willingness to participate in residential-country elections and affiliate with a political party in that country. We examine this through an original survey of Americans in Canada conducted during the 2020 US election cycle. A randomized experiment demonstrates that directing the attention of American emigrants to US campaigns can lower interest in Canadian elections and weaken attachments to a Canadian political party, particularly for those who are less integrated into Canadian society. These findings point to a potential tension between political engagement as an e migrant versus as an im migrant.

Moving the electoral goalposts: State and local strategies of electoral intervention in the U.S.

Central to the partisan divide in American politics is disagreement over the fundamental legitimacy of American elections. Due to the decentralized nature of election administration in the US, these disagreements have led to a complex web of heterogeneous electoral institutions. Scholars have made impressive progress on untangling the effects of these different institutions — unfortunately, less is known about the sources of adoption of such proposals. Using time-series cross-sectional data on the adoption of various electoral policies by state governments from 2001–2018, I examine the role of politics and identity in shaping the types of electoral interventions adopted by state legislatures during an important period of increasing politicization of such interventions. Applying dynamic panel models and constructing a novel measure of the concentration of Black population within competitive congressional districts, I find that the effects of race, competition, and ideology on electoral interventions differ across both partisan lines and issue areas.

Setting the Public Sentiment: Examining the Relationship between Social Media and News Sentiments

This study investigates whether news sentiment plays a role in setting social media sentiment to explore the dynamics of sentiment develop and diffusion within the public agenda. Based on the agenda-setting theory, this study analyzed the public and media sentiments towards the 2016 US election and the candidates using data from Twitter, CNN, and Fox News. Focusing on the Twitter messages created by the supporters of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, over 1.3 million Twitter messages were collected associated with the election, employing hashtags as indicators of support. The Granger causality test between social media and news sentiments revealed that there is a mutual influence between social media and news sentiments; CNN’s overall sentiment was influenced by the sentiment of Hillary Clinton’s supporters, whereas Trump supporters’ sentiment was influenced by Fox News’ negative sentiment. The results suggest that public sentiment is formed in response to public agenda and mass media, indicating that sentiment is a critical component in understanding public opinion. Implications for future studies and limitations are also discussed.

An American Election

An American Election

Intellectual humility as a tool to combat false beliefs: An individual-based approach to belief revision.

False beliefs pose significant societal threats, including health risks, political polarization and even violence. In two studies (N = 884) we explored the efficacy of an individual-based approach to correcting false beliefs. We examined whether the character virtue of intellectual humility (IH)-an appreciation of one's intellectual boundaries-encourages revising one's false beliefs in response to counter-information. Our research produced encouraging but also mixed findings. Among participants who held false beliefs about the risks of vaccines (Study 1) and the 2020 US Election being rigged (Study 2), those with higher IH explored more information opposing these false beliefs. This exploration of opposing information, in turn, predicted updating away from these inaccurate health and political beliefs. IH did not directly predict updating away from false beliefs, however, suggesting that this effect-if it exists-may not be particularly powerful. Taken together, these results provide moderate support for IH as a character trait that can foster belief revision but, simultaneously, suggest that alternate pathways to combat false beliefs and misinformation may be preferred.

Does Brown beat Biesiada? Name fluency and electoral success

Of the myriad cues voters rely on to evaluate political candidates, only one cue is available to all voters in all candidate-based elections — the candidates’ names. Drawing upon multiple decades of election data in local and congressional elections in the United States, I examine the relationship between the processing fluency (pronounceability and commonality) of political candidates’ names and vote share. I observe a strong, positive relationship for name pronounceability and more ambiguous results for name commonality. A one-standard deviation increase in pronounceability is associated with an increased vote share of 0.8 percentage points in congressional general elections, 1.4 percentage points in congressional primary elections, and 0.29 percentage points in local elections. Despite some sensitivity to how fluency is conceptualized, these findings suggest that the phonological characteristics of candidates’ names are consequential heuristics that voters use to evaluate candidates. Future research should seek to unpack the causal processes underlying these results by disentangling the racial and ethnic cues embedded in names.