Voting In National Elections Research Articles

Widać zabory? Analiza zróżnicowania przestrzennego nieważnych głosów w wyborach centralnych w Polsce w latach 2004–2019

The percentage of invalid votes in national elections in Poland, has not been studied as extensively as in the case of local elections. There are many research gaps in this area, starting with the description of the spatial patterns of this diverse phenomenon. This article has this main goal: to describe the spatial patterns of the percentage of invalid votes in the elections to the Sejm, the European Parliament and the President of the Republic of Poland in the years 2004–2019. The key of this study is a long-term analysis of the above-mentioned problem, as well as a look at the changes taking place in space-temporal terms. For this purpose, the methods of comparative map analysis, spatial classification and statistical analysis: Kruskal-Wallis and Student’s t-tests were used. The most important conclusion from this work is the universality of spatial patterns of the percentage of invalid votes in the case of elections to the Sejm and the European Parliament and some differences in the case of presidential elections. The persistence of interregional differences is also noticeable, but we can observe strengthening of these differences in the case of parliamentary and presidential elections, and weakening in the case of elections to the European Parliament. The article also presents an explanation for the significant increase of invalid votes in the Bydgoszcz district in the 2005 Sejm elections, which was caused by the unusual design of the brochure ballot card.

The Role of Political Belief in COVID-19 Vaccine Resistance, Virus Transmission, and Closure Policy Response.

We employ unique panel data on the universe of COVID-19 vaccination and infection cases in Israel to examine the role of political belief in COVID-19 vaccine uptake, virus transmission, and closure policy response. The paper identifies political beliefs based on statistical area votes in national elections held in Israel on the eve of the COVID-19 outbreak in March 2020. Unlike the U.S. and elsewhere, pandemic policy intervention in Israel was broadly supported by politicians across the belief spectrum. As such, household response to virus risk was not biased by contemporaneous partisan disagreement and debate among political leaders. Findings show, all things equal, that in the wake of emergent and localized virus risk, voters in politically right-of-center and religious areas displayed substantially higher odds of both vaccine resistance and virus transmission as compared to their left-center counterparts. Moreover, political belief is highly salient to aggregate pandemic outcomes. Model simulation shows that had all areas responded to virus risk with the more risk-averse behaviors of left-of-center areas, the number of vaccinations nationwide would have increased by 15 percent. That same scenario results in a full 30 percent reduction in total infection cases. Results also show that coercive policy measures such as economic closure were more effective in reducing virus transmission among less risk-averse right-wing and religious areas. Findings provide new evidence of the role of political belief in household response to health risks. Results further underscore the importance of timely, targeted messaging and intervention among divergent political belief groups to reduce vaccine hesitancy and enhance disease control. Future studies should explore the external validity of findings, including the use of individual voter data, if available, to evaluate political belief effects.

Come Together: Far-Right Parties and Mainstream Coalitions

AbstractWhile far-right parties tend to receive a small minority of votes in national elections, their presence in ruling coalitions is becoming much more common. In this article, I ask under what conditions mainstream parties are willing and interested in forming a coalition with a far-right party, given the potentially high costs associated with having such a partner in government. I characterize such moves as the co-optation of a growing political rival in an effort to minimize electoral threat. That is, as far-right parties become more threatening to the electoral success of a mainstream party, they will invite the party into their government, in an effort to stave off said threat. This characterization borrows from the literature of authoritarian co-optation to build on our current understanding of parliamentary coalition-building. Quantitative analysis utilizing cross-national, survey and spatial data is employed to support this theory.

The “Orthodox Belt” on Russia’s Electoral Map in 2011–2021

The article explores the relationship between Orthodox religiosity and voting in Russia in 2011–2021. Using the theoretical framework of de-secularization from above which claims that church structures play a key role in the religious renaissance policy, we argue that the rise of the political influence of the ROC (Russian Orthodox Church) may be explained by its capacity for the dissemination of traditional values that ultimately results in votes for United Russia and President Vladimir Putin in national elections. This study reveals the emergence of a new area on Russia’s political map, that of the Orthodox belt, which combines higher levels of Orthodox religiosity and pro-Kremlin voting in national elections. Using multiple empirical strategies, we construct an index of religiosity on the regional level and identify the Orthodox Belt regions, test the relationship between Orthodox religiosity and voting in the national elections in 2011–2018, and test the differences in value orientations and electoral support between the Orthodox Belt regions and others. We conclude that non-Orthodox Belt regions in Russia with higher Orthodox religiosity, conservatism, and loyalty are an emerging trend in the Russian political geography.

From the Red Belt to the Bible Belt? Religiosity and Voting in Russia since 2011

AbstractThe article explores the relationship between Orthodox religiosity and voting in Russia in 2011–2018. Using the theoretical framework of desecularization from above, which claims that church structures play a key role in the religious renaissance policy, we argue that the rise of the political influence of the ROC (Russian Orthodox Church) may be explained by its capacity for dissemination of traditional values that ultimately results in votes for United Russia and President Vladimir Putin in national elections. This study reveals the emergence of a new area on Russia’s political map—the belt – into Belt, which combines higher levels of Orthodox religiosity and pro-Kremlin voting in national elections. Using multiple empirical strategies we construct an index of religiosity on the regional level and identify the Orthodox Belt regions, test the relationship between Orthodox religiosity and voting in the national elections in 2011–2018, and test the differences in value orientations and electoral support between the Orthodox Belt regions and other ones. Finally, two model regions of the Orthodox Belt—Tambov and Lipetsk—are explored. We conclude that non-Orthodox Belt regions in Russia with higher Orthodox religiosity, conservatism, and loyalty are an emerging trend in Russian political geography.

Intergroup contact and nation building: Evidence from military service in Spain

We study the long-term effects of intergroup contact on nation building by exploiting a national lottery that randomly allocated conscripts to different military areas across Spain. For men born in regions that feature a weak Spanish identity, we find that being assigned to military service in a different region substantially increases self-identification as Spanish, increases the likelihood of voting in national elections and reduces the probability of voting for a regionalist party. Moreover, in support of intergroup contact as the main mechanism behind these results, we find that movers are more likely than nonmovers to have friends from other regions.

Party expats? Mapping transnational party branches of French, German and UK parties

Today many parties interact with members and supporters outside their national borders. One way parties do so is by establishing transnational party branches. However so far, there is a lack of theoretical and empirical research exploring this transnational aspect of party activity. This paper provides a first insight into why parties develop transnational branches, and how it affects their organization. It argues that the development of party branches abroad differs across countries due to the incentives provided by the national legal framework on voting and donations from abroad. In turn, the role and functions of the transnational branches vary depending on this legal framework. Looking at the two transnational branches of the two mainstream parties in France, Germany and the United Kingdom, this paper first briefly outlines the different national legal frameworks and the scope and size of transnational party branches. It then focuses on how they are organized, their role and function, and how this shapes their relationship to their homeland party. This explorative research is mainly based on legal and secondary data. The paper finds that the parties studied differ substantially in location, number and membership size for their transnational branches. Furthermore, the organizational links and the control by the national party over transnational party branches is the highest where parties have the most to gain in terms of votes in national elections and donations.

Voting Transitions in the 2019 Valencian Autonomous Community’s Elections

The political fragmentation following the 2008 Financial Crisis and its economic, social, political and institutional fall-out have led to a growing left-right polarisation of politics and a weakening of the middle ground. The effective number of parliamentary parties is at an all-time high both inthe Spanish Parliament (Congreso) and in the Valencian Autonomous Parliament (Corts). Voters are spoilt for choice and switch party more often. This paper uses transfer matrices to analyse the shifting voting patterns in the European, General, Regional, and Local elections held during 2019 in The Valencian Country. The most salient result is the ever-shifting pattern at each end of the political spectrum. On the right wing, there is the steady advance of Vox. On the left wing, UP and Compromís draw from virtually the same pool of fickle voters, with UP picking up most votes in national elections and Compromís winning hands-down in regional and local elections.

Retelling the Story of the 2017 French Presidential Election: The Contribution of Approval Voting

This paper proposes an alternative reading of the politics of the 2017 French presidential election, using an unstudied source of information on voters’ preferences: experimental data on approval voting. We provide a new narrative of the election process and outcome. The principal approach for understanding the political context has for many decades been a distinction between left and right-wing political forces. We introduce a method for generating an endogenous political axis, and construct three indices so that we might understand how and why the conventional approach has become progressively irrelevant. We find no gender effect, but instead an age effect. Voters, especially those who belong to generations at the beginning or the end of their working life, use their vote in national elections to support radical change; and the younger the voters, the less they conform to a left-right axis. However, this desire for change does not represent a rejection of existing parties, as the official results would suggest. Rather, the approval results suggest an erosion in the voters’ minds of barriers between distinct political camps, and between traditional and populist parties.

Compulsory voting and political participation: Empirical evidence from Austria

We examine whether compulsory voting influences political participation as measured by voter turnout, invalid voting, political interest, confidence in parliament, and party membership. In Austria, some states temporarily introduced compulsory voting in national elections. We investigate border municipalities across two states which differ in compulsory voting legislation using a difference-in-differences approach. The results show that compulsory voting increased voter turnout by 3.5 percentage points but we do not find long-run effects. Once compulsory voting was abolished, voter turnout returned to pre-compulsory voting levels. Microdata evidence suggests that compulsory voting tends to crowd out intrinsic motivation for political participation which may explain why compulsory voting is not found to be habit-forming.

Do Authoritarian Elections Help the Poor? Evidence from Russian Cities

Do local elections under autocracy help the poor? We argue that local appointees in electoral authoritarian regimes have political incentives that undermine public service provision; regime leaders’ preoccupation with national electoral control encourages them to overlook local governance problems if subnational officials can still deliver requisite votes in national elections. Using geographic and temporal variation across Russian cities (2002-2012) in the elimination of mayoral elections, we investigate how mayoral appointments affect the maintenance of aging housing infrastructure. We find that, compared to elected mayors, appointed mayors allow more of their Soviet-era housing stock to become dilapidated and unsafe. Moreover, bad housing increases more in cities where appointees deliver high vote shares to the ruling party in national elections. Thus, while local elections under authoritarianism can improve local governance, the holding of semi-competitive national elections can actually undermine incentives for local appointees to provide public goods.

Courting the First Nations Vote: Ontario’s Grand River Reserve and theElectoral Franchise Actof 1885

This article begins with an examination of the controversy caused in 1885 by the Macdonald government’s expansion of the dominion franchise to First Nations reserves in eastern Canada, a controversy that revolved around the liberal tenet that the right to vote should be intrinsically linked to independent property ownership. It then discusses the role of the Grand River Six Nations and Mississaugas in the elections and by-elections that took place in the Ontario ridings of Brant South and Haldimand between 1886 and 1897, the year before the Laurier government abolished Macdonald’s Electoral Franchise Act, with the result that treaty status Indians would not regain the vote in national elections until 1960. The picture that emerges is of an Indigenous community torn between conflicting forces, with traditionalists opposing participation in Canada’s elections, reformers supporting the franchise as well as the Conservative Party, and a third group who argued that the Liberal Party was more sensitive than the Tories to First Nations demands for increased responsibility and autonomy.

The curious, context‐dependent case of anger: Explaining voting intentions in three different national elections

AbstractCollective action is typically studied in social protest contexts and predicted by different motivations (i.e., ingroup identification and efficacy beliefs, and outgroup‐directed anger). Assuming that voting to some extent reflects a form of collective action, we tested whether these three different motivations predicted voting in Dutch, Israeli, and Italian national election contexts. Based on previous meta‐analyses on voting and collective action, we hypothesized that identification with and efficacy beliefs regarding this party would motivate voting across the different elections (i.e., context‐independent effects). As for anger, we predicted more context‐dependent effects, depending on whether the anger is targeting the previous government or at the political system at large. Results were largely in line with predictions, showing the relatively context‐independent motivational power of party identification and efficacy beliefs, and clearly context‐dependent effects for anger. Specifically, we found little support for a similar motivational power of anger targeting previous government policies, but anger targeting politics in general demotivated Dutch and Israeli participants to vote (interpreted as an expression of political cynicism), while curiously motivating Italian participants to vote (interpreted as a desire for system change from “old” to “new” politics). We discuss these findings in the context of voting in national elections, and recommend further integration of the voting and social protest literatures.

Provincial dynamics in the 2017 national elections in Ecuador

This article focuses on the provincial dimension of national politics in Ecuador. Based on an empirical analysis of the party vote shares for the different elections of February 2017, it aimed at understanding why parties dominate the elections in some provinces while remaining peripheral actors in others. This territorial heterogeneity of the vote in national elections was measured using a set of three quantitative indicators: the electoral success of provincial parties, the provincial-national incongruence of the vote and the provincialization of party systems. This article concludes that the provincial distribution of the votes remains one of the key elements in order to understand national elections in Ecuador and that it relies on a subtle combination of province-specifc factors, party characteristics and party strategies.

Education, religion, and voter preference in a Muslim country

Using a unique survey of adults in Turkey, we find that an increase in educational attainment, due to an exogenous secular education reform, decreased women’s propensity to identify themselves as religious, lowered their tendency to wear a religious head cover (head scarf, turban, or burka) and increased the tendency for modernity. We also find that education has a negative impact on women’s propensity to vote for Islamic parties. The effect of female education on religiosity is driven by those who reside in urban areas. There is no statistically significant impact of education on male religiosity and tendency to vote for Islamic parties. Increased education does not influence the propensity to cast a vote in national elections for either men or women.

On seeing and being seen

The paper addresses John Roemer’s recent work on Kantian optimization and Kantian equilibria. Roemer argues that the standard economic theory of Nash equilibria is incapable of accounting for cooperative behavior such as recycling, reporting one’s income honestly, and voting in national elections. Instead we should assume that a cooperator is motivated to do what would most benefit her if all did the same. In commenting on this proposal, the first section of the paper summarizes Kant’s original formulation of the categorical imperative and relates it to psychological and historical studies of magical thinking. The next section distinguishes between unconditional and conditional norms of behavior and, within the latter, between the social norms of cooperation that can be triggered when what the agent does is being observed by others and the quasi-moral norms of cooperation that can be triggered when an agent observes what others do. To illustrate these ideas, the paper cites many experiments and historical case studies, the most important being the non-consumption, non-importation, and non-exportation movements in the American revolution. The concluding section summarizes Roemer’s own empirical work, and discusses critically his argument that his findings can be explained by assuming that agents are conditional Kantians.

If Immigrants Could Vote in the UK: A Thought Experiment with Data from the 2015 General Election

AbstractThe distribution of voting rights in the UK is an artefact of history rather than a product of clear legal or philosophical principles. Consequently, some resident aliens (i.e. immigrants) have the right to vote in all UK elections; others can vote in local elections but are excluded from national elections; still others are excluded from all elections. In England and Wales alone, roughly 2.3 million immigrants are excluded from voting in national elections. This exclusion is inconsistent with the founding principle of democracy and distorts political discourse. What if all immigrants could vote in national elections? We estimate that up to ninety‐five parliamentary seats could have been won by a different party in the 2015 general election. More substantially, enfranchising all immigrants would require re‐drawing UK constituency boundaries. The new electoral map would increase the relative power of urban constituencies and would incentivise some political entrepreneurs and parties to temper anti‐immigration rhetoric.

The supranational dimension of voting in national elections across six european democracies: rethinking albert hirschman’s exit, voice and loyalty

This article examines Albert Hirschman’s exit, voice and loyalty hypothesis within a supranational context. It makes use of an original 2012 data set drawn from ‘The Europeanisation of Everyday Life: Cross-border Practices and Transnational Identities among EU and Third Country Citizens’ (EUCROSS) project, which was conducted across six European Union (EU) democracies. The article finds that supranational loyalty to an entity other than one’s own nation state enhances citizen participation in national elections, while greater transnational mobility has no significant impact on national voter turnout. These findings have two important implications. First, supranational loyalties do not always discourage individuals from honouring their national political commitments. Second, member state nationals who are loyal to the EU may not show up at the supranational ballot box if national institutions are perceived to be more powerful to influence decision-making in Brussels.

Partisan bias, electoral volatility, and government efficiency

Electoral agency models suggest that government efficiency improves when voters penalize poor performance, and party competition is balanced. Uncertainty in the electoral mechanism dilutes the incentive to produce efficiently. We test this proposition using panel data on local governments. The dataset includes a broad set of indicators on service output and quality, which facilitates the measurement of cost efficiency. We use historical data on local voting in national elections to measure partisan bias, while electoral volatility is measured on past variations in neighboring municipalities. The empirical analyses show that partisan bias lowers cost efficiency, particularly in municipalities with large electoral volatility.

Terrorism and Voting: The Effect of Rocket Threat on Voting in Israeli Elections

How does the threat of becoming a victim of terrorism affect voting behavior? Localities in southern Israel have been exposed to rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip since 2001. Relying on variation across time and space in the range of rockets, we identify the effect of this threat on voting in Israeli elections. We first show that the evolution of the rockets’ range leads to exogenous variation in the threat of terrorism. We then compare voting in national elections within and outside the rockets’ range. Our results suggest that the right-wing vote share is 2 to 6 percentage points higher in localities that are within the range—a substantively significant effect. Unlike previous studies that explore the role of actual exposure to terrorism on political preferences and behavior, we show that the mere threat of an attack affects voting.