Voting Decisions Research Articles

German Public Attitudes Towards Asylum Seekers, Immigrants in the Workplace, Inflation, and Local Budgets: Evidence from a Representative Survey of the German Population

This paper provides background information and basic descriptive statistics for a representative survey of the German population conducted on our behalf by GfK in the first quarter of 2018. The survey covers various topics, including: 1) attitudes towards asylum seekers; 2) migrating workers in the workplace; 3) inflation and monetary policy; and 4) the role played by local budgets in local voting decisions. We also collect a broad range of socio-demographic and psychological indicators.

The Corporate Governance Role of Retail Investors

Retail investors seem to be turning into minor actors on the U.S. and European corporate governance scene. Nevertheless, the issue of activating retail votes is becoming increasingly supported in the U.S., where a growing body of scholarship emphasizes the need to re-engage retail investors and explores a variety of possible means for retrieving the lost shareholders. Against this backdrop, this Article shows why supporting retail voting in the European and U.S. corporate landscape is not trivial. It then analyzes the potential constraints on retail shareholder engagement in the voting process posed by the current European regulatory framework and comparatively assesses whether, and if so how, the U.S. proposals for activating passive retail investor votes can provide a blueprint for a similar pattern in Europe. To encourage retail votes, minimizing cognitive costs of informed voting as well as psychological limitations associated with decision-making is necessary. Hence, this Article argues that helping retail shareholders overcome decision-making costs by widening the scope of the tools available in order to allow them tag along with more expert third parties—whether institutional investors, the controlling shareholders or the board of directors—to direct their voting decisions might usefully broaden the reach of the existing regulation in terms of its potential to increase shareholder participation.

The impact of parental status on the visibility and evaluations of politicians

In increasingly personalised electoral contests, voters use evaluations of candidates’ personal characteristics in their vote decisions, and candidates deploy personal information about themselves which they believe convey a positive message in their communications with voters. We expand the study of candidate characteristics to include parental status, examining the public’s view of politicians with and without children and the behaviour of politicians in their communications with voters. Men and women are equally likely to refer to their children regardless of party. We find a preference for candidates who are parents and no punishment effect for women politicians with children. Our findings, from a British study, contradict some of the research from the United States which finds that voters’ reactions to candidates’ parental status vary depending on candidate gender; as such, our results suggest that political and cultural context are important factors determining the role gender plays in political behaviour.

How I learned to stop worrying and love polarization

ABSTRACTThis paper presents theoretical and experimental evidence of increased voter satisfaction due to moderate candidate platform divergence. The formal model combines the traditional proximity treatment of voter satisfaction with a disutility stemming from the likelihood of “incorrect” voter decision-making. The result is a voter utility function for the candidate field which is non-monotonic in platform divergence. I confirm the main result of the formal model through a voter survey where hypothetical candidate positions were varied from very moderate to very partisan. Respondents preferred moderate policy divergence to both minimal and extreme divergence. In tandem, these results recast moderate ideological differentiation as a desirable, rather than pejorative, element of politics and campaigning.

Bayesian regularized neural network decision tree ensemble model for genomic data classification

ABSTRACTMachine learning techniques have been widely applied to solve the classification problem of highly dimensional and complex data in the field of bioinformatics. Among them, Bayesian regularized neural network (BRNN) became one of the popular choices due to its robustness and ability to avoid over fitting. On the other hand, Bayesian approach applied to neural network training offers computational burden and increases its time complexity. This restricts the use of BRNN in an on-line machine learning system. In this article, a Bayesian regularized neural network decision Tree (BrNdT) ensemble model, is proposed to combat high computational time complexity of a classifier model. The key idea behind the proposed ensemble methodology is to weigh and combine several individual classifiers and apply majority voting decision scheme to obtain an efficient classifier which outperforms each one of them. The simulation results show that the proposed method achieves a significant reduction in time complexity and maintains high accuracy over other conventional techniques.

Comprehensive Retrospective Voting in Mixed Electoral Systems: Evidence from the 2016 Korean Legislative Election

AbstractPerformance-based retrospective voting is a fundamental mechanism of democracy. A good deal of scholarship has examined this electoral mechanism, but the extant studies have two omissions. First, there is little research that considers several retrospective evaluations together using an incumbent voting model. Second, there is little research that examines the difference in the effects of voters’ retrospective evaluations on two different ballots in mixed electoral systems. To fill these omissions, this article tests a comprehensive retrospective performance voting model in a mixed electoral system. Specifically, this article examines the effects of voters’ retrospective economic evaluations of economic performance at the national and personal levels, human rights, corruption, welfare protection, and foreign policy on vote choice for the incumbent party in the 2016 Korean legislative election in which voters had two ballots: one for the party list vote and one for the district vote. By using multinomial logistic regression models, this article finds that among the six retrospective evaluation categories, judgments of national economic performance at the national level, human rights, and foreign policy have a statistically significant impact on the likelihood of voting for the incumbent party in party list vote choice, whereas only voters’ evaluation of foreign policy matter in the district level vote decision. The results imply that Korean voters consider various aspects of government performance, such as the conditions of human rights and relationships with other countries, rather than just focusing on the economy. The retrospective voting behavior of Korean voters differs between party list and district level ballots.

Corruption and Ideological Voting

This article examines the effect of corruption on ideological voting. Linking previous studies of political corruption with theories of ideological voting, it argues that when corruption is high, voters place less importance on ideology when voting than they otherwise would. The reason for this effect is related to voters’ reduced ability to accurately perceive parties’ positions and to their low political efficacy in these contexts. Using data from ninety-seven elections from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, the study shows that in countries with high levels of corruption, voters consider ideology less in their voting decisions, partially because they face difficulties identifying parties’ ideological positions and/or they do not believe parties can implement their electoral programmes. These relationships hold even after controlling for socio-economic and political confounders and for voters’ increased likelihood of abstaining when corruption is high.

The Contingent Effects of Candidate Sex on Voter Choice

A prominent explanation for why women are significantly underrepresented in public office in the U.S. is that stereotypes lead voters to favor male candidates over female candidates. Yet whether voters actually use a candidate’s sex as a voting heuristic in the presence of other common information about candidates remains a surprisingly unsettled question. Using a conjoint experiment that controls for stereotypes, we show that voters are biased against female candidates but in some unexpected ways. The average effect of a candidate’s sex on voter decisions is small in magnitude, is limited to presidential rather than congressional elections, and appears only among male voters. More importantly, independent voters display the greatest negative bias against female candidates. The results suggest that partisanship works as a kind of “insurance” for voters who can be sure that the party affiliation of the candidate will represent their views in office regardless of the sex of the candidate.

The (ir)rationality of mediated leader effects

There is a lively debate whether to consider vote decisions based on leader evaluations a threat to democracy, as this has long been assumed to constitute irrational decision-making behavior. Empirical evidence indicating that leader effects are not necessarily expressions of irrationality has recently mounted up, though skepticism towards leader effects remains resilient especially when considering voters being influenced through media coverage of party leaders. This paper studies some of the core assumptions of the ‘irrationality of leader effects’ thesis, by testing the conditionality of mediated leader effects based upon four voter characteristics: education, political interest, ideological distance to the leader's party and political cynicism. Two datasets are combined: a manual content analysis of leadership images in television coverage and a five-wave panel-dataset in the four months preceding the 2012 Parliamentary elections in the Netherlands. The results are mixed: one the one hand, being influenced by leadership images through the media is not a shortcut for voters who are incapable of understanding politics, while ideological considerations and other political attitudes are not completely excluded from the decision-making process, but, on the other hand, mediated leader effects are found to be strongest for voters who care least about politics. Thus, the empirical evidence can be brought to bear on both sides of the discussion, and, hence, does not conclusively settle the issue how mediated leader effects must be considered in relation to the irrationality of the vote decision.

Causal evidence in risk and policy perceptions: Applying the covariation/mechanism framework

Today's information-rich society demands constant evaluation of cause-effect relationships; behaviors and attitudes ranging from medical choices to voting decisions to policy preferences typically entail some form of causal inference (“Will this policy reduce crime?”, “Will this activity improve my health?”). Cause-effect relationships such as these can be thought of as depending on two qualitatively distinct forms of evidence: covariation-based evidence (e.g., “states with this policy have fewer homicides”) or mechanism-based (e.g., “this policy will reduce crime by discouraging repeat offenses”). Some psychological work has examined how people process these two forms of causal evidence in instances of “everyday” causality (e.g., assessing why a car will not start), but it is not known how these two forms of evidence contribute to causal judgments in matters of public risk or policy. Three studies (n = 715) investigated whether judgments of risk and policy scenarios would be affected by covariation and mechanism evidence and whether the evidence types interacted with one another (as suggested by past studies). Results showed that causal judgments varied linearly with mechanism strength and logarithmically with covariation strength, and that the evidence types produced only additive effects (but no interaction). We discuss the results' implications for risk communication and policy information dissemination.

Vote-motivated candidates

We study stochastic voting models where the candidates are allowed to have any smooth, strictly increasing utility functions that translate vote shares into payoffs. We find that if a strict Nash equilibrium exists in a model with an infinite number of voters, then nearby equilibria should exist for similar large, but finite, electorates. If the votes are independent random events, then equilibria will not depend on the utility functions of the candidates. Our results have implications for existing models of redistributive politics and spatial competition, as the properties of pure-strategy equilibria in such games carry over to equilibria in games with arbitrary candidate preferences. On the other hand, candidate utility functions will matter if the individual voting decisions are correlated. In the presence of aggregate uncertainty, such as changing economic conditions or political scandals, the preferences of parties and candidates with respect to shares of votes will have an effect on political competition.

Mary Jane Rocks the Vote: The Impact of Climate Context on Support for Cannabis Initiatives

Recent research on direct democracy has focused on the spatial component of voter decision making, finding that when the benefits from a proposed initiative are geographically dependent, support for the initiative in that area increases. However, the existing research has yet to fully specify the factors that lead to benefits for geographically adjacent individuals. Using a unique wave of direct democracy initiatives, and developing a new measure for “climate context,” we test the link between climates favorable for cultivation and the support for the legalization of recreational cannabis. Employing spatial regression analysis and geographically specific voting data for ballot measures in Arizona, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington from 2010 to 2016, we find there is an observable relationship between climate and support for legalization, indicating that when climate attributes are favorable for cultivation, support for these measures increase. Our findings suggest that climate context is an important, and previously unspecified, factor for ballot measures with a climatic component.Related Articles Smith‐Walter, Aaron, Holly L. Peterson, Michael D. Jones, and Ashley Nicole Reynolds Marshall. 2016. “.” Politics & Policy 44 (): 1053‐1088. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12187/full Gash, Alison, and Michael H. Murakami. 2015. “.” Politics & Policy 43 (): 679‐722. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12128/full Dyck, Joshua J., and Annika Hagley. 2012. “.” Politics & Policy 40 (): 195‐200. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2012.00346.x/full Related Media . 2017. “Support for Marijuana Legalization Reaches a Record High—and Even a Majority of Republicans Back It.” http://www.businessinsider.com/support-for-weed-legalization-just-hit-an-all-time-high-2017-10 Factsheet: Harkinson, Josh, Brett Brownell, and Julia Lurie. 2014. “.” Mother Jones. March/April. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/03/marijuana-pot-weed-statistics-climate-change/ Film Clip: Brownell, Brett. 2017. “Half‐Baked Idea? Legalizing Marijuana Will Help the Environment.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/would-legalizing-pot-be-good-for-environment/

Low-Information Voting: Evidence From Instant-Runoff Elections

How do voters make decisions in low-information contests? Although some research has looked at low-information voter decision making, scant research has focused on data from actual ballots cast in low-information elections. We focus on three 2008 Pierce County (Washington) Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) elections. Using individual-level ballot image data, we evaluate the structure of individual rankings for specific contests to determine whether partisan cues underlying partisan rankings are correlated with choices made in nonpartisan races. This is the first time that individual-level data from real elections have been used to evaluate the role of partisan cues in nonpartisan races. We find that, in partisan contests, voters make avid use of partisan cues in constructing their preference rankings, rank-ordering candidates based on the correspondence between voters’ own partisan preferences and candidates’ reported partisan affiliation. However, in nonpartisan contests where candidates have no explicit partisan affiliation, voters rely on cues other than partisanship to develop complete candidate rankings.

Measuring Voter Decision Strategies in Political Behavior and Public Opinion Research

Measuring Voter Decision Strategies in Political Behavior and Public Opinion Research

LOBBYING AND ELECTIONS

ABSTRACTI analyse the interaction between post‐election lobbying and the voting decisions of forward‐looking voters. The existing literature has shown that in models with citizen candidates from a dispersed distribution of preferences, lobbying has no influence on implemented policy. In my model with ideological parties, lobbying is shown to have an effect on policy. In terms of welfare, I show that the median voter and the majority of voters can be better off with lobbying.

Do Votes Speak Louder than Motives? Moral Judgments and Tolerance in the 2016 Presidential Election

AbstractWhen judging a voter's decision, does that voter's reason for casting their vote influence moral and interpersonal judgments about them? In the context of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, past research suggests two competing predictions. First, people regularly account for an actor's intentions when forming judgments of the actor, indicating that judgments may vary according to a voter's motives. However, people are unlikely to see nuance among outgroups, especially amid divisive political partisanship, suggesting that judgments would ignore information about voters’ motives. In Study 1, results supported the first prediction, showing that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump supporters distinguished between different voting motives when making moral and interpersonal judgments of outgroup voters. In Studies 2 and 3, when some voters’ motives became more extreme, Clinton and Trump supporters again distinguished between voting motives for outgroup and ingroup voters, respectively, albeit in a different pattern of results.

Book Review: Image and Emotion in Voter Decisions: The Affect Agenda by Renita Coleman and H. Denis Wu

A Journal Article by Dr. Kioko Ireri, an Assistant Professor of Journalism in the School of Science and Technology in USIU- Africa

Value-based prediction of election results using natural language processing: A case of the New Zealand General Election

In this article, we report the results of a study that tested a values-based method of predicting political election results. The study was carried out on the 2014 New Zealand General Election, randomly selecting a stratified sample from a consumer panel. The survey of 858 participants used open-ended questions to invoke and capture values relevant to the election. By using corpus linguistic analysis techniques, terms were ranked by weighting based on a log-frequency entropy method. Lexicons for Lasswell and Kaplan’s societal value framework reduced the corpus of term-weighted documents to a workable number of eight user-defined societal value-topics. The topics were regressed onto the individual voting decision using a multinomial logit (MNL) regression. The mean absolute deviation (MAD) from the actual vote was 1.8%, much less than the margin of error of 3.5% expected from sampling error alone. The methodology was successful in predicting the outcome for the minor parties with good accuracy, for example, the prediction for the then newly formed Internet-Mana was out by about 0.5%. The framing-balanced, value-based predictions exhibited reasonable stability, considering they were made six weeks before Election Day. Thus the values relevant to the voters and a good prediction of the voting behavior became evident ahead of the official campaign period, which started four weeks before Election Day in New Zealand. Our study concluded that the value-based prediction shows promise for improving the quality of political journalism and public engagement in the period of election campaigns, and will assist greatly in focusing public debate more on values that are influential on citizens’ voting decisions.

Polling in a proportional representation system

We study the effects of opinion polls on election results in proportional representation systems. Moderate voters have preferences over the vote shares received by the parties so that an agent’s optimal voting decision might depend on the other agents’ behavior. A voter’s information about other voters’ behavior can be improved through a series of opinion polls. We show that the mass of undecided voters decreases monotonically with the number of polls, but may not necessarily disappear. Voters who remain undecided have centrist ideologies. On average a series of polls brings the society closer to complete information even though specific polls may push the election result away from the complete information case.

Explaining Time of Vote Decision: The Socio-Structural, Attitudinal, and Contextual Determinants of Late Deciding

In the last decades, Western democracies have witnessed an increase in the proportion of voters who make their electoral choice late in the campaign. Consequently, scholars have paid considerable attention to this phenomenon and attempted to identify the factors which influence time of vote decision. This article reviews the literature on the determinants of decision timing. Several studies suggest that women and young citizens are more likely to be late deciders. Besides, party identification has been shown to hasten the electoral decision, whereas attitudinal ambivalence and network cross-pressures have been found to delay the crystallisation of vote intentions. Moreover, previous work reveals that strategic voters decide later than do their sincere counterparts. Special attention is also devoted to the debate on whether the phenomenon of late deciding can be seen as the consequence of a lack of political sophistication or as the product of a high level of political engagement.