Voting Districts Research Articles

Understanding Party Realignment Dynamics: Insights from Malaysian Voters in the Batang Kali Context

ABSTRACT Malaysian politics witnesses a remarkable phenomenon of frequent shifts in voter party preferences, indicating a high level of volatility in political allegiances during elections. This study uses the Theory of Reasoned Action as a framework to examine how voting intention influences party realignment among Malaysian. It explores the impact of attitudes, subjective norms related to ethnic identity, and candidate image on party preferences. The research utilized a quantitative approach with proportionate stratified random sampling. A self-administered survey questionnaire was distributed to 450 participants, maintaining a ratio of 5:1:1 across race and voting districts. These participants represented diverse ethnic backgrounds within the Batang Kali State Constituency, Malaysia. Conducting the study in Batang Kali offers access to relevant populations and facilitates representative sampling, contextual insights, and comparative analysis. Findings suggest that voter attitudes and candidate image play significant roles in decision-making, outweighing subjective norms related to ethnic identity. Subjective norms are not the primary driver of party realignment in a multicultural context. Personal beliefs notably shape voter attitudes, with a candidate's image overshadowing the influence of voting attitude. These insights enhance our understanding of the interplay between subjective norms, attitudes, and candidate images within Malaysia's diverse social landscape, particularly in Batang Kali. The study highlights the importance of prioritizing candidate image and voters' egocentric attitudes in political campaigns over subjective norms associated with ethnic identity.

Comparing voting districts with uncertain data envelopment analysis

Comparing voting districts with uncertain data envelopment analysis

Polls of fear? Electoral violence, incumbent strength, and voter turnout in Côte d’Ivoire

How, and under what conditions, does electoral violence influence voter turnout? Existing research often presumes that electoral violence demobilizes voters, but we lack knowledge of the conditions under which violence depresses turnout. This study takes a subnational approach to probe the moderating effect of local incumbent strength on the association between electoral violence and turnout. Based on existing work, I argue that electoral violence can reduce voter turnout by heightening threat perceptions among voters and eroding public trust in the electoral system, thereby raising the expected costs of voting and undermining the belief that one’s vote matters. Moreover, I propose that in elections contested across multiple local rather than a single national voting district, the negative effect of electoral violence on turnout should be greater in districts where the incumbent is stronger. This is because when the incumbent is stronger, voters have lesser strategic and purposive incentives to vote than voters in localities where the opposition is stronger. I test the argument by combining original subnational event data on electoral violence before Côte d’Ivoire’s 2021 legislative elections with electoral records. The results support the main hypothesis and indicate that electoral violence was associated with significantly lower voter turnout in voting districts where the incumbent was stronger, but not where the opposition was stronger. The study contributes new knowledge on the conditions under which electoral violence depresses voter turnout, and suggests that voters in opposition strongholds can be more resilient to electoral violence than often assumed.

Preventive role of community-level social capital in the need for long-term care and impairment in instrumental activities of daily living: a multilevel analysis.

Individual-level social capital is an important determinant of older adults' long-term care needs; however, there is scant evidence regarding community-level social capital. Therefore, we investigated the association between community-level social capital and the prevalence of the need for long-term care among older adults. Between January and February 2018, a cross-sectional survey was conducted among all older adults (n = 13,558) aged 65 to 74 years in a rural municipality in Japan (total population, n = 72,833). A self-reported questionnaire was used to identify community-level social capital, comprising civic participation, social cohesion, and reciprocity. A multilevel logistic regression analysis was performed to estimate the odds ratios of the need for long-term care and a decline in social activity competence as assessed by instrumental activities of daily living. For the analysis, the community levels were divided into 76 voting districts and adjusted for daily life, lifestyle, socioeconomic status, health conditions, and the three social capital subscale scores at the individual level. After adjusting for the covariates, we observed a tendency that a higher community level of reciprocity was associated with a lower prevalence of long-term care needs (OR: 0.86, 95% confidence interval: 0.75-1.00), whereas a high community level of social cohesion was associated with a significantly reduced decline in instrumental activities of daily living (OR per standard deviation increase: 0.87, 95% confidence interval: 0.79-0.96). No significant association was found with civic participation. Similarly, individual-level social capital was associated with the need for long-term care and decline in instrumental activities of daily living. Our findings suggest that good community-level reciprocity or social cohesion as well as good individual social capital status may help prevent the need for long-term care among older adults.

The Influence of Urban Planning-Related Pledge Budget on Local Election Votes: A City Case in Korea

Most election pledges require a significant budget for their implementation. In the case of a candidate for the head of a local government who presented his pledges related to urban planning by subdividing them into voting districts, we tested how the size of the budget committed to the voters affected the votes. Based on the urban planning-related pledged budget, the economic utility value of one vote was estimated to be about 2050 USD. In elections for local government heads, as the pledged budget related to urban planning increased, the vote percentage and the degree of competition for votes increased positively. Moreover, when the pledged budget related to urban planning exceeded a certain level, the slope of the vote percentage curve tended to be gentle. The slope of the curve is steep in the section up to the pledged budget of 50 million USD, and the slope becomes gentle in the next section. This study was based on a specific case that was limited in terms of space and time, and it was limited to analyzing only the election pledge and election result data without considering the socioeconomic background factors of the voters.

Protecting elections by recounting ballots

Complexity of voting manipulation is a prominent topic in computational social choice. In this work, we consider a two-stage voting manipulation scenario. First, a malicious party (an attacker) attempts to manipulate the election outcome in favor of a preferred candidate by changing the vote counts in some of the voting districts. Afterwards, another party (a defender), which cares about the voters' wishes, demands a recount in a subset of the manipulated districts, restoring their vote counts to their original values. We investigate the resulting Stackelberg game for the case where votes are aggregated using two variants of the Plurality rule, and obtain an almost complete picture of the complexity landscape, both from the attacker's and from the defender's perspective.

Contextual explanations of radical right-wing party support in Sweden: a multilevel analysis

ABSTRACT With the aim of studying the role of contextual factors for explaining within-country variation in the vote share of the radical right-wing party, the Sweden Democrats, in the 2014 Swedish election, we specify and test hypotheses pertaining to social marginality, ethnic threat, the contact hypothesis, and the halo effect. We study the variation in the electoral share of the Sweden Democrats at two different levels simultaneously by performing multilevel analyses to account for the ways in which voting districts are clustered within municipalities. The main finding from our analyses is the support for the ethnic threat hypothesis, where the vote share of the Sweden Democrats is significantly higher in those areas that have seen an increase in the foreign-born population, and to some extent also in ethnically diverse areas, contradicting previous research on ethnic minority presence in fine-grained contexts. The expectation that the vote share for the Sweden Democrats should be higher in socioeconomic marginalized districts is partly supported, but we find no evidence of a halo effect, where ethnically homogeneous areas that are geographically close to heterogeneous districts were expected to have a higher vote share for the Sweden Democrats.

Distance Matters: a more than euclidean approach to visualizing gerrymandering

Distance Matters: a more than euclidean approach to visualizing gerrymandering

Do Nonprofit Missions Vary by the Political Ideology of Supporting Communities? Some Preliminary Results

Nonprofit missions reflect the values of those that create, manage, and support them. We know that the U.S. population has undergone a “big sort” that has resulted in increased community homogeneity along racial, economic, and political lines. We do not know, however, how this process has impacted the nonprofit sector, as there is little work looking at the geographic distribution of nonprofit missions as a function of the demographics of communities in which they operate. To identify the effects of community values on the nonprofit mission, we use landslide voting districts as a proxy for political ideology and propensity score matching to pair districts with statistically equivalent demographic characteristics. Nonprofits in matched voting districts are compared to identify differences in activities, mission, and funding. Missions shape how communities allocate resources to target populations and interest groups, so observed differences in mission may help explain variation in social outcomes across communities.

Foreword: Special issue on the future of applied stochastic models and data analysis

This special issue of the journal Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry consists in a choice of papers presented by participants to the 17th international conference on Applied Stochastic Models and Data Analysis, ASMDA 2017, held in London, June 6-9, 2017. Researchers, scientists, and practitioners from different parts of the world were brought together to present and discuss significant recent developments in stochastic modeling and data analysis. This issue includes eight research articles that were first presented at the conference, then selected by the guest editors, and finally undergone the peer-review process according to the standards of the journal. The first four papers deal with stochastic models with applications to finance and insurance. Ekaterina Bulinskaya proposes methods for asymptotic analysis and optimization solving in models arising in insurance and finance but not limited to these two only. Although only two simple cases are presented, the methods can be useful for solving other optimization and stability problems. Samuel Cohen, Robert Elliott, and Tak Kuen Siu give an introduction to risk neutral pricing of financial assets through a binomial model. Martingale representation, backward stochastic differential equations, and the Malliavin calculus, which are difficult concepts in a continuous time setting, are thus introduced via a standard simple discrete time model. Griselda Deelstra, Sinem Kozpinar, and Matthieu Simon consider the evaluation of spread and basket options when the underlying asset prices are driven by Markov-modulated Lévy processes with synchronous jumps. In this general regime-switching framework, lower and upper bounds to the exact option prices are obtained based upon ideas from the literature without regime switching. The obtained spread and basket option price approximations are illustrated with examples in different regime switching models. Claude Lefèvre and Philippe Picard consider a general epidemic model whose spread is partially controlled by a health organization. Thus, they show that standard life insurance principles can be applied to guarantee the insurance coverage of such an epidemic. The last four papers deal with classical themes on distributions for random variables, random vectors and random sequences, in probability, statistics and data analysis. Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan, Phalguni Nandab, and Suchandan Kayal deal with comparisons in terms of various stochastic orderings of the smallest- and largest-order statistics arising from independent heterogeneous generalized modified Weibull-distributed random variables. James R. Bozeman, Matt Davey, Sam Hutchins, Jillian Mori, Abigail Salvadore, and Kayla St. Germain propose a convexity ratio to serve as a guide to reshape voting districts that have likely been gerrymandered. Algorithms for finding the convexity ratio and designing nongerrymandered districts are proposed, applied to North Carolina and Illinois, and to reshape Texas voting districts. Comment are provided on how such a method can be used in other applications, for example, in geomarketing and on the electrical or police pistricting problem. Stéphanie Bougeard, Véronique Cariou, Gilbert Saporta, and Ndèye Niang deal with regression analysis from large data sets. A new method, called regularized clusterwise multiblock regression, is proposed, combining clustering and a multiblock component-based model associated with a well-defined criterion to optimize. A simulation study and a real example in the field of indoor air quality are presented, and an R-package, called mbclusterwise, is available. Jesus Garcia, Ramin Gholizadeh, and Veronica Gonzalez-Lopez develop a Bayesian information criterion to address the problem of deciding whether two independent samples coming from discrete Markovian processes are governed by the same stochastic law or not. A local metric between samples is thus defined for deriving the bound that must be used to take the decision. The distance is shown to be statistically sound and is applied to analyze the two lines of the production of alcohol fuel. We would like to thank all the authors for having submitted their articles and all the referees for their valuable work in the review process. We also thank the editor-in-chief of the journal ASMBI, Fabrizio Ruggeri, for his support and close implication in publishing this special issue.

Math tools send legislators back to the drawing board

*UPDATE: On June 18, 2018, after this article went to press, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled on two high-profile cases related to partisan gerrymandering. In effect, the rulings sidestepped the issue of when partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional. Both cases—one concerning voting districts in Wisconsin, the other in Maryland—were sent back to lower courts. On June 25, the SCOTUS ruled on two other cases—in Texas and North Carolina—that will mostly let stand the use of purportedly gerrymandered maps. On January 9, 2018, a trio of federal judges made history when they ruled that the boundaries of North Carolina’s congressional voting districts gave an unfair advantage to Republican candidates. It was the first case in the nation in which a federal court had declared congressional maps unconstitutional because of intentional bias in favor of one party. The case was all the more remarkable because the court decision relied in part on mathematical tools that can probe the practice of gerrymandering—the drawing of voting districts to give an intentional advantage to one party. Changing the boundaries of voting districts can have a significant impact on an election outcome. North Carolina’s 2012 election districting map (bottom) led to Republicans winning nine seats and Democrats winning four. North Carolina’s redistricting for the 2016 election (middle map) led to Republicans winning 10 seats and Democrats winning three seats. But an arguably fairer redistricting plan (top), produced by retired judges, would have led to Republicans winning seven seats and Democrats the other six in 2012; it would have been nine seats for Republicans and four for Democrats in 2016. Image courtesy of Jonathan Mattingly (Duke University, Durham, NC). It would be one of many gerrymandering cases. In February, the US Supreme Court rejected a request by Republican lawmakers to stay a lower court's decision—which …

2014 Election forecast - a post-election analysis

General elections are held every five years in South Africa. During the 12 to 24 hour period after the close of the voting booths, the expected final results are of huge interest to the electorate and politicians. In the past, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has developed an election forecasting model in order to provide the media and political analysts with forecasts of the final results during this period of peak interest. In formulating this model, which forecasts the election results as the results from voting districts (VDs) become available, some assumptions had to be made. In particular, assumptions were made about the clustering of previous voting patterns as well as the order in which VD results are released. This election forecasting model had been used successfully for a number of elections in the past and in these previous elections, with around 5%-10% of the results available, the predictions produced by the model were very close to the final outcome, particularly for the ANC, being the largest party. For the 2014 national election, however, the predictions, with close to 50% of the voting district results known (equivalent to an estimated 40% of the total votes), were still not accurate and varied by more than 1% for both the ANC and the EFF. This paper outlines a post-election analysis to determine the reasons for these discrepancies and how they relate directly to the model assumptions. The aim is to highlight how practical realities can affect the assumptions and consequently their impact on the forecasted results. Reference is made to previous election forecasts and the 2014 post-election analysis is presented.

Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in Americ by Ari Berman

Reviewed by: Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in Americ by Ari Berman Jennifer Delton Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. By Ari Berman. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. Pp. [x], 372. $28.00, ISBN 978-0-374-15827-9.) This is a highly readable, important account of the back and forth struggle between voting rights activists and their opponents since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA). The book’s purpose is to bring awareness and historical context to current attempts to limit access to voting through voter identification laws and other legislation that disproportionately affect poor and minority voters, especially in southern states. This type of legislation would never have been enacted had the VRA not been severely weakened by a 2013 Supreme Court decision that essentially nullified Section 5, which had [End Page 988] required states with a history of voter suppression to submit election law changes for approval by the federal government. Based on interviews with Justice Department officials, voting rights activists, lawyers, historians, and politicians, the book recounts the steps leading to the VRA’s gutting and the resulting repression of suffrage in our time. But it also highlights the victories, the unlikely allies, and real progress in black political access that occurred as the result of the VRA and its subsequent amendments and bipartisan renewals in 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006. One thing the reader will learn is the extent to which expansion of black voting was entangled in the consolidation of Republican power in the South. One of the first tactics employed by southern whites to maintain their power at the local level was to create new voting districts that diluted the new black vote so that blacks could vote but could not actually elect black officials, who had no chance in white-majority districts. The NAACP and black Democrats thus supported the creation of majority-black voting districts, a strategy condemned by many as affirmative action at the polls. But in 1988, Lee Atwater, George H. W. Bush’s campaign manager, supported their efforts because doing so would siphon African Americans away from white Democratic districts in the South, “making those districts whiter and more conservative” and bereft of reliably Democratic votes (p. 187). Thus, the Republican Party helped engineer the redistricting efforts that created black-majority districts and led to the election of hundreds of black officials in the South. It was a win-win situation for both and broke what remained of the white Democratic political structure. Southern Republicans since have sought to limit access to voting. But not all Republicans are part of that effort. There have been conservative Republicans, such as Wisconsin congressman James F. Sensenbrenner Jr., who supported the VRA and whose efforts helped strengthen and renew it. It is a complicated story, which Ari Berman tells with great clarity and fairness. A journalist and writer for The Nation, Berman seeks to validate the VRA’s achievements while exposing current attempts to roll back the clock. But his book also contributes to recent scholarship about the implementation and impact of 1960s-era civil rights legislation, such as Gavin Wright’s Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (Cambridge, Mass., 2013) and Frank Dobbin’s Inventing Equal Opportunity (Princeton, 2009). Dismantling segregation and white supremacy has not been a straight line of progress, even with the help of federal legislation; it has occurred fitfully, aided and abetted by whites of goodwill or who stand to gain from such progress. Even so, it is striking how much more resistance there seems to have been and continues to be against black and minority voting. The straggles to enact the VRA echo attempts to integrate the workplace; both were shaped by arguments over affirmative action, intent versus effect, quotas, and the desirability of engineering outcomes. Yet economic integration seems to have been more stable, more successful, and, at the end of the day, less contested than the arguably more basic right to vote. To be sure, workplace integration has been slow and uneven, but it has not gone backward...

Vote trading and subset sums

We analyze the complexity of vote trading problems with equal-sized voting districts. For two allied vote-swapping parties, the problem is polynomially solvable. For three parties, the problem is NP-complete.

A Self-Defining "Bourgeoisie" in the Early French Revolution: The Milice Bourgeoise, the Bastille Days of 1789, and Their Aftermath

Though recent scholars have argued that no self-defining “ bourgeois ” identities existed during the French Revolution, such perspectives do not consider the pivotal role Milice bourgeoise forces played in the Bastille insurrection and France’s broader social upheavals of mid-1789. Combatting perceived lower-class disorder, explicitly “ bourgeois ” units composed of propertied citydwellers mobilized to seize control of and direct the central uprisings that made the Revolution. In Paris, the motley insurgents of July 12 were forcibly disarmed the next day by a militia hastily organized through the city’s former Third Estate voting districts, which moved first against lower-class disorder instead of the royal forces menacing the city. Following the Bastille’s fall, in municipal revolutions across France such units formed the basis for the new National Guard, which thereafter possessed exclusive policing rights. Based upon a wide reading of participant and observer accounts from the early Revolution, this article attempts to explain the role of socially exclusionary identities in motivating collective action in 1789. The French became revolutionary not through a unified uprising of “the people,” but rather under the aegis of a socially exclusive and self-definably “ bourgeois ” force.

Fair Apportionment in the View of the Venice Commission's Recommendation

In this paper we analyze the consequences of the fairness recommendation of the Venice Commission in allocating voting districts among larger administrative regions. This recommendation requires the size of any constituency not to differ from the average constituency size by more than a fixed limit. We show that this minimum difference constraint, while attractive per definition, is not compatible with monotonicity and Hare-quota properties, two standard requirements of apportionment rules. We present an algorithm that efficiently finds an allotment such that the differences from the average district size are lexicographically minimized. This apportionment rule is a well-defined allocation mechanism compatible with and derived from the recommendation of the Venice Commission. Finally, we compare this apportionment rule with mainstream mechanisms using real data from Hungary and the United States.

Away Inside: Emigrants and Transnationalism Through the Eyes of Political Parties

This article examines how political parties in Portugal organize concerning emigrants and the subject of migration outflow, uncovering the issues and strategies that they favour. The 2009 Portuguese legislative elections offer a privileged site for empirical inquiry. Not only are emigrants able to elect members of the national parliament through particular voting districts, but also a complete period of electoral campaigning under standard institutional conditions (rather than early elections) could thus be followed in real-time by the research team. Analysis draws chiefly on electoral manifestos, campaign activities, and first-hand interviews with members of the parliament and public officials. A close tie between the capacity of parties to organize abroad and the salience of issues related to the emigrant population in party programs is exposed. It is argued that the ambigous position of external voting between the strengthening of national(istic) bonds and transnational citizenship is disputed within the party system, since attitudes towards each of these perspectives vary across parties. Parties must therefore be understood as key players in the ongoing redefinition of the political agency of migrants, bearing a significant impact on their participation and representation. Last, implications for future research are addressed.

Lightning in the Hand: Indians and Voting Rights

This review essay discusses Laughlin McDonald’s book, American Indians and the Fight For Equal Voting Rights (2010), to explore questions of disenfranchisement, dilution, and constitutional design. McDonald examines the barriers to full political equality faced by Indians in communities in five Western states and describes litigation under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 attacking these barriers. In many ways, the Indian voting rights cases resemble the cases brought, often a generation earlier, by black citizens in the South and Latino citizens in the Southwest. But as McDonald explains, Indians occupy a distinctive status within the American political order. Indians are citizens not only of the United States and the state where they reside but often also (and particularly in those regions where they are most likely to bring voting rights claims) of a separate sovereign as well – their tribe. This fact has inflected both the history of Indian disenfranchisement and the course of litigation under the Voting Rights Act. Part I describes the history of Indian disenfranchisement in light of their distinctive constitutional status. Indians’ exclusion from the political process reflected profound racism as pernicious and pervasive as the discrimination facing blacks in the South and Latinos in the Southwest. But it also involved complex constitutional and conceptual issues unique to Indians, who were excluded from citizenship, even after passage of the Fourteenth Amendment and who remained subject to distinct treatment even after citizenship was conferred. Part II then turns to the relatively recent vote dilution litigation that forms the heart of McDonald’s book. Indian voting rights cases have followed a clear path blazed by earlier cases involving blacks and Latinos. Nevertheless, themes related to Indians’ distinctive political status crop up within the litigation at various points. Finally, Part III looks beyond Indians’ claims under the Voting Rights Act to discuss issues related to internal tribal elections. Like other elections, these contests involve fundamental questions about enfranchisement and electoral design. Tribal answers to these questions sometimes depart dramatically from the rules governing federal, state, and local elections. I talk about two such departures, one related to voting by non-residents and the other related to nonequipopulous voting districts, to show how they that tie into ongoing debates extending far beyond Indian law.

A Women at the Center: Anne Dickson and the “Troubles”

The emergence of a Catholic civil rights movement in the mid-1960s presented the Unionist government of Northern Ireland with its most perplexing challenge since the state’s founding in 1921. Unlike earlier anti-Partition campaigns, in this instance civil rights advocates initially sought equal treatment within the state. The Campaign for Social Justice and its successor, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) demanded an end to gerrymandered voting districts and discrimination in government housing and public employment. In 1968 the NICRA took its protest into the streets. Large-scale, peacefully intended marches jolted the Unionist establishment and provoked a Protestant backlash. Successive leaders of the Unionist Party of Northern Ireland scrambled to find a middle ground on which to construct a sustainable solution to the growing crisis. None proved successful. Scholars have extensively chronicled the early reform efforts of leading male Unionists and the subsequent collapse of the political center. Little has been forthcoming, however, on women involved in this same struggle. Diane Urquhart has written in depth on women in the Unionist Party, but her studies do not extend beyond 1940.1 Rick Wilford andYvonne Galligan’s analyses of women in Irish politics concentrate on the 1980s and 1990s. but do not address directly the early years of the “Troubles.”2 Rachel Ward’s recent and illuminating volume on Unionist and loyalist women as political actors focuses on the

Trends and Challenges in Election Monitoring (Innovations Case Discussion:National Democratic Institute)

expertise, and ingenuity in their work around the world. Trained observers have closely watched polling stations under difficult circumstances and with limited resources. They have reported incidents of voting rights violations and circumstances that may have compromised election results. Data analysts who have gathered and collated information coming in from remote voting districts have had to deliver high-quality intelligence in very little time. Leaders of EMOs have had to communicate the results of their monitoring activities to government officials and to the international community at large—reports that have not always been welcome. Monitoring elections is, in short, a difficult task but an important one. Even in the most seasoned democracies, there is always concern for the fairness of the process. EMOs contribute to safeguarding that fairness in at least two ways. First, their mere presence may prevent election irregularities and fraud, and second, EMOs provide an assessment of the integrity of the election process. This assessment, if positive, may increase the credibility of the election results and the legitimacy of the newly elected mayor, parliament, or government. The cases described by NDI show that monitoring elections involves much more than observing and reporting alone. Election monitoring is most effective if and when it gains legitimacy both among the population and with the government. One way to gain legitimacy, as the article argues, is to present an accurate and representative picture of the whole election process, preferably before the results are officially announced by the government or election committee. In order to do that, a lot of information must be gathered in very little time from a number of places. Information and Communication Technologies have given EMOs new opportunities to improve this process. In developing countries in particular, traditional telecommunications infrastructure, including land lines, is often far from reliable. Using mobile communication technology, like radio transmitters and cell phones, enables observers to report incidents in real time. Advanced software (Geographical Information System, or GIS) allows data analysts in the EMO head-