Voting Intentions Research Articles

Ambivalent Social Networks and Their Consequences for Participation

Does perceived disagreement in political discussion help or hinder citizens’ political participation? Some argue that disagreement prompts reflection, perspective-taking, and tolerance. Challengers argue that disagreement fosters ambivalence and hinders participatory activities and turnout. One seminal study that tackled this dilemma formulated the ‘cross-pressures’ hypothesis (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944/1968), which posited that the more individuals are betwixt and between conflicting social positions, the longer the time for their vote intention to crystallize (and the lower the likelihood they would vote). This paper offers a critique and refinement of the cross-pressures hypothesis. First, previous studies confounded intra-individual and structural sources of cross-pressures. Second, past operationalizations of exposure to disagreement focused on the sheer amount of opposition to the individual’s point of view, rather than his or her exposure to two conflicting points of view. A new measure—network ambivalence—is proposed to capture the latter dynamic. Conceptual and methodological refinements of the cross-pressures hypothesis are tested on a representative sample of voting-age respondents in the United States, interviewed on the American National Election Study 2000 panel (N= 1,555). Results suggest that not only were these pressures hardly detrimental to participation, but they also facilitated the formation of considered electoral

Sustaining interest: are green values converting to votes?

Sustainability is fashionable and becoming more important to the general policy discourse on protecting the environment. However, despite the government's adoption of a National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development some 12 years ago, Australia's performance on crucial items such as emissions of carbon dioxide equivalents remains poor. Arguably then, for the environmental cause to be advanced substantially, not only must people's attitudes toward protecting the environment change, but also their voting intentions so as to send a signal to the major political parties. This paper presents internationally comparative research using data from the most recent waves of the World Values Survey. Changes in preferences associated with support for the environment are contrasted against changes in intentions to vote for Green political parties. Results indicate the strength and direction of the Green movement, and highlight gaps in the conversion of environmental values into votes.

Political Ambivalence towards the Parti Quebecois and its Electoral Consequences, 1970-2003

Political ambivalence towards the Parti Québécois remains a basic characteristic of Quebec electoral politics, but no attention has been paid to it by analysts. Yet the notion of ambivalence is central in Zaller's new synthesis concerning the nature of mass opinions. The ambivalence towards the Parti Québécois stems from opposite forces, that is, attraction towards it and reservations concerning its sovereignist option. While the analysis shows that those who do not reveal their vote intentions to pollsters are always a source of the underestimation of support for the Quebec Liberal Party, independently of ambivalence, the latter remains a more critical factor in many respects. First when in an election a high degree of ambivalence prevails, vote intentions for the Parti Québécois are highly overestimated in polls, which leads vote intentions for the Liberal Party to be more underestimated than usual. Second, because of this ambivalence, the Parti Québécois never reaps the benefits which satisfaction or dissatisfaction towards incumbents should yield, while the Liberal Party often does better than prevailing levels of satisfaction/dissatisfaction would entail. On the basis of that analysis, new solutions are proposed for the correction of systematic poll errors in Quebec elections, solutions which could be relevant in other similar instances. The possible importance of ambivalence in other electoral settings is finally mentioned.

The Polls in the 2002 French Presidential Election: An Autopsy

The first-round results of the 2002 French presidential election came as a shock to both French voters and people around the world. The French presidential election is a two-round system: it takes an absolute majority of the vote to be elected in the first round and, whenever no candidate is elected in the first round, a second round opposes the top two candidates of the first round two weeks later. In the months preceding the election, polls asked about not only voter intentions for the first round but also voter intentions for the second

Consideration sets, intentions and the inclusion of “don't know” in a two-stage model for voter choice

We present a statistical model for voter choice that incorporates a consideration set stage and final vote intention stage. The first stage involves a multivariate probit (MVP) model to describe the probabilities that a candidate or a party gets considered. The second stage of the model is a multinomial probit (MNP) model for the actual choice. In both stages, we use as explanatory variables data on voter choice at the previous election, as well as sociodemographic respondent characteristics. Importantly, our model explicitly accounts for the three types of “missing data” encountered in polling. First, we include a no-vote option in the final vote intention stage. Second, the “do not know” (DNK) response is assumed to arise from too little difference in the utility between the two most preferred options in the consideration set, or is considered to be a missing observation. Third, the “do not want to say” (DNWTS) response is modeled as a missing observation on the most preferred alternative in the consideration set. Thus, we consider the missing data generating mechanism to be nonignorable and build a model based on utility maximization to describe the vote intentions of these respondents. We illustrate the merits of the model as we have information on a sample of about 5000 individuals from the Netherlands for who we know how they voted last time (if at all), which parties they would consider for the upcoming election, and what their vote intention is. A unique feature of the data set is that information is available on actual individual voting behavior, measured at the day of election. We find that the inclusion of the consideration set stage in the model enables the user to make a more precise inference on the competitive structure in the political domain and to obtain better out-of-sample forecasts.

Consideration sets, intentions and the inclusion of ?don't know? in a two-stage model for voter choice

We present a statistical model for voter choice that incorporates a consideration set stage and final vote intention stage. The first stage involves a multivariate probit (MVP) model to describe the probabilities that a candidate or a party gets considered. The second stage of the model is a multinomial probit (MNP) model for the actual choice. In both stages, we use as explanatory variables data on voter choice at the previous election, as well as sociodemographic respondent characteristics. Importantly, our model explicitly accounts for the three types of “missing data” encountered in polling. First, we include a no-vote option in the final vote intention stage. Second, the “do not know” (DNK) response is assumed to arise from too little difference in the utility between the two most preferred options in the consideration set, or is considered to be a missing observation. Third, the “do not want to say” (DNWTS) response is modeled as a missing observation on the most preferred alternative in the consideration set. Thus, we consider the missing data generating mechanism to be nonignorable and build a model based on utility maximization to describe the vote intentions of these respondents. We illustrate the merits of the model as we have information on a sample of about 5000 individuals from the Netherlands for who we know how they voted last time (if at all), which parties they would consider for the upcoming election, and what their vote intention is. A unique feature of the data set is that information is available on actual individual voting behavior, measured at the day of election. We find that the inclusion of the consideration set stage in the model enables the user to make a more precise inference on the competitive structure in the political domain and to obtain better out-of-sample forecasts.

Voter Profiles and Fragmentation in the Turkish Party System

Based on the multinomial logit estimates of an individual vote intention function, we perform restriction tests to make pairwise comparisons of the voter profiles of the major political parties in Turkey. The economic variables in the model are items that represent the well known hypotheses of economic voting theory, i.e. whether individuals vote retrospectively and/or prospectively, and whether they are sociotropic and/or pocketbook. The non-economic factors include socio-demographic characteristics as well as issues and identity variables that are likely to be good predictors of the party choice. In many cases, restriction tests provide evidence refuting the general view that the Turkish party system is artificially fragmented.

The Determinants of Vote Intentions in Portugal

This paper offers new insights on theinteractions between economics and politicsin Portugal. We use two unexplored datasets consisting of monthly polls on voteintentions for the main political partiesin Portugal and responses to a consumersurvey containing a battery of questions oneconomic evaluations. The analysis coversthe interval from 1986 to 2001. We findthat: (1) right-wing governments arepenalized for higher inflation while theleft-wing ones are not, (2) left-winggovernments are more penalized forincreases in the unemployment rate; (3)voters base their evaluations ofincumbents' performances on perceptions ofpast and current economic conditions,rather than on expected future economicoutcomes.

The Media Representation of Public Opinion: British Television News Coverage of the 2001 General Election

This article examines the ideological assumptions and consequences of the media representation of public opinion through a study of television news coverage of the 2001 British general election. It discusses how a certain type of poll (the voting intention or ‘horse-race’ poll) is privileged, while other types of opinion surveys are ignored. But it also identifies less obvious means through which public opinion is invoked. First, casual and often unsubstantiated assertions about the attitude of the public are regularly made by anchors, reporters or politicians. Second, the views of individual members of the public are made to stand in for public opinion overall, either through vox pops or through the interaction of members of the public with politicians on the campaign trail. The article concludes that the consequence of the media representation of public opinion in the 2001 British general election campaign is to legitimize the hegemonic definition of politics as a sport played by political and media elites, thus reducing citizens to the limited and passive role of spectators.

Time-of-voting decision and susceptibility to campaign effects

There is mounting evidence that election campaigns matter. There are also reasons to expect interpersonal heterogeneity in the susceptibility to campaign influence. Time-of-voting decision has been suggested as a key mediating variable for campaign effects. However, there is no persuasive empirical evidence to substantiate the claim that people who decide during campaigns actually respond to campaign events or campaign-specific information. This study incorporates time of decision into dynamic models of campaign effects in order to test whether there is a significant interaction effect between time of decision and campaign persuasion. In sum, the vote intentions of campaign deciders are indeed more volatile because they respond to actual campaign events and coverage, not because they fluctuate haphazardly. People who say they decided before the campaign are, reassuringly, not influenced by campaigns.

The Dynamics of Vote Intentions in the First Round of the 2002 French Presidential Election

The Dynamics of Vote Intentions in the First Round of the 2002 French Presidential Election

Economic Voting Reconsidered

This article examines the impact of Venezuelans' economic assessments on the election of a radical reformer, President Hugo Chávez. Multinomial logit analysis of pre-electoral survey data shows that sociotropic perceptions of recent losses and high hopes for future improvements significantly boosted support for Chávez. When political judgments and issue positions are considered, people's prospective assessments retain their significant effect, whereas negative retrospective evaluations indirectly affect vote intentions for Chávez, namely, via rejection of the established political elite. These findings seem to corroborate claims of economic voting literature but cannot be interpreted in narrowly materialistic terms. Instead, the striking gulf between despair about the past and exalted hopes for the future shows the impact of Chávez's charisma. Rather than reflecting a dispassionate assessment of likely developments, people's expectations of a dramatic turnaround seem driven by the psychological need to believe that current problems must find a solution, which “Americanist” literature has documented.

PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYEES AND UNION VOTING: REVISITING THE ROLE OF GENERAL AND SPECIFIC UNION BELIEFS.

The article discusses the growing number of professional unions in the U.S. Professionals differ from non-professionals in several ways. Because of advanced and specialized education professionals expect a great deal of discretion at work. And rather than control through supervision, professionals are governed by allegiance to collegially developed codes of ethics and conduct. Because of their expertise, professionals also have more individual bargaining power than nonprofessionals. Thus the factors that affect their union voting intent, and the relative importance of these factors, may differ from those influencing the voting intentions of nonprofessionals. The concepts of schema, mental models, and social identity improve the understanding of the relationship between general and specific union beliefs. A schema is a cognitive structure used to group information in an organized fashion. Mental models are broad views that guide perceptions and behaviors. General union beliefs are an abstract construct; thus, they more closely mirror the concepts of schema and mental models. Nonunion employees would rely more heavily on general beliefs to inform their voting intentions, and to form their specific beliefs. For professionals, ideology plays a significant role in the determination of their employment-related schema, mental models, and social identity.

Percepción de la acción gubernamental e intención de voto en el ámbito del D.F. (2001-2003)

This article states that the study of citizens´ perceptions is an ideal mechanism to assess voting intentions, and therefore anticipate possible political- electoral scenarios. From the results of surveys performed in Mexico City an intention to predict the voting intention for future elections is made, showing how the act of voting is related to the evaluation that the citizens make of the national and local government

Rejecting the Myth of Popular Sovereignty and Applying an Agency Model to Direct Democracy

Successful ballot measures are commonly perceived as a pure reflection of will of the people. Yet initiatives do not appear magically on election ballots or in statute books as a result of the electorate's wishes. Rather, such measures are conceived, drafted, and vigorously promoted by identifiable initiative proponents, who often represent particular special interests and may not even live in the communities in which their measures are proposed. The myth of popular sovereignty in direct democracy should be rejected. Instead, initiative measures should be characterized as lawmaking by initiative proponents, whose general objective is either ratified or rejected by the voters. Rejecting the myth of popular sovereignty in direct democracy would alleviate many of the problems of judicial review that commentators have identified. By treating the initiative proponents as the relevant lawmakers, courts would be able to identify impermissible motives underlying a measure's enactment and continue using an intentionalist methodology of statutory interpretation without resorting to a counterproductive fiction of voter intent. On the other hand, express recognition that direct democracy involves lawmaking by initiative proponents intensifies the tension between direct democracy and representative government, the problems associated with the delegation of lawmaking authority to unelected actors, and the absence of safeguards to encourage careful deliberation and reasoned decisionmaking in the initiative process. Initiative proponents are not the only unelected lawmakers in our democracy. Administrative agencies have freely enacted binding rules based on broad delegations of authority since the New Deal. This development has always been considered constitutionally suspect, but courts have allowed it to continue unabated largely because administrative law has developed alternative safeguards to replace those provided in the legislative process by representation and the requirements of Article I, Section 7. Specifically, administrative agencies must comply with the notice-and-comment procedures of the Administrative Procedure Act, and their final rules must withstand hard-look judicial review. Those safeguards ensure that agency officials engage in careful deliberation and reasoned decision-making and have thereby legitimized agency lawmaking. A similar model is needed to constrain the proponents of ballot measures and thereby legitimize the use of direct democracy. This Article therefore draws on the agency model to propose amending state laws that regulate direct democracy to subject the proponents of initiatives to the requirements of public deliberation and reasoned decisionmaking that presently constrain administrative agencies. The Article argues that unlike previous proposals, such reforms would promote careful deliberation, improve the legislative product, and provide a heightened standard of judicial review that is well established and directly responsive to the serious structural shortcomings of the current method of lawmaking by people.

Do the Media Have a Direct Impact on the Vote? The Case of the 1997 Canadian Election

This paper establishes the methodological foundations for a systematic analysis of the direct impact of the media on the vote. We propose to combine two different approaches: the ‘linkage’ approach which relates media coverage to voting intentions, and the ‘attentiveness’ approach which compares the vote choice of those who pay most and least attention to television news. We apply these two methods to the  Canadian election. We find support for the hypothesis that, during the election campaign, voting intentions for a party increased (decreased) when media coverage of that party was systematically positive (or negative), among those who followed the news and decided how to vote during the campaign, but we find no evidence that, on election day, those more attentive to the news voted differently from those less attentive. We conclude that the media temporarily moved voting intentions during the course of the  Canadian election but that they appear to have had no direct impact on the final vote. Do the media have a direct impact on the vote? Fifty years of research on electoral behavior have left this question basically unanswered. Researchers have invested much effort in assessing the indirect effects of the media and it has become the predominant concern in the media literature. But the search for direct conversion effects has been largely neglected. The minimal media effect paradigm of the early voting literature has shifted away from persuasion to priming and agenda-setting, and researchers have become reluctant to investigate the ability of media messages to convert voters (Mendelsohn & Nadeau, ). There has been a re-awakening of interest recently for the media’s potential for persuasion, but the evidence that the media have a direct influence on voting preferences is still scarce and not very robust. This paper proposes a thorough examination of the hypothesis that media coverage has a direct influence on the vote. This article was first submitted to IJPOR on August , . The final version was received September , .  World Association for Public Opinion Research                

Who Wins? Campaigns and the Third Party Vote

The conventional wisdom among students of elections is that the choices of voters are largely driven by powelforces that have lasting effects from one election to the next‐enduring political orientations and retrospective judgments about economic performance. The authors’article revises this account by suggesting that scholars have been looking in the wrong place campaign effects. Based on analyses of the 1992, 1996, and 2000 presidential elections, it largely confirms the constraining effects of enduring electoral forces on Democratic and Republican campaigns butsugests that the personality traits of thirdparty candidates do exert signGcant iniuence on voters.

Guilt and penance: Prospective and retrospective voting in 2002

The 2002 Dutch election campaign - that at first glance seemed to be an extraordinary campaign due to the rise and assassination of Pim Fortuyn - provides an interesting case to answer the questions to what extent and in which way issues play a role in the considerations of voters to choose for a particular party. A representative panel survey study was used to tap prospective issue considerations and retrospective issue considerations of voters. In this study the dynamics of issue considerations will be assessed using a comparison of the impact of prospective and retrospective considerations on the vote intention early on in the campaign and their impact on the actual voting behavior on Election Day. Although a possible shift from prospective to retrospective issue considerations lies in the mind of voters, the basis of such a shift may be a change in media content during a campaign. A content analysis of the news provides the background for the interpretations of the results. Logistic regression analysis was used to assess the dependence of the party preference on prospective and retrospective issue considerations for each of the major parties in the Netherlands. Our findings suggest that issues, even in this campaign, played an important role in the decision-making process of voters. Furthermore, we find that a news wave on societal and economic conditions may cause a shift from prospective to retrospective considerations

The Determinants of Vote Intentions in Portugal

This paper offers new insights on the interactions between economics and politics in Portugal. We use two unexplored data sets consisting of monthly polls on vote intentions for the main political parties in Portugal and responses to a consumer survey containing a battery of questions on economic evaluations. The analysis covers the interval from 1986 to 2001. We find that: (1) right-wing governments are penalized for higher inflation while the left-wing ones are not, (2) left-wing governments are more penalized for increases in the unemployment rate; (3) voters base their evaluations of incumbents' performances on perceptions of past and current economic conditions, rather than on expected future economic outcomes.

Challenges to professionalism and union voting intentions: The case of pharmacists

Using data from a national survey of pharmacists who are members of the American Pharmaceutical Association, we examine the union voting intentions of employee pharmacists. We find that union instrumentality regarding professionalism is a primary predictor of union voting intent among these employees. In addition, this predictor mediates the relationship between the level of professionalism at a pharmacist’s current employment situation and his or her expected union vote. Also important to union voting intent are respondent beliefs about union instrumentality regarding pecuniary issues, prior union experience, as well as overall job satisfaction. Implications for employers, unions, and researchers are drawn.