Voting Patterns Research Articles

The Voters on the Hills: Campaign Promises Regarding Judea and Samaria and their Effect on the Voting Patterns of the Israeli Citizens in these Regions

The Voters on the Hills: Campaign Promises Regarding Judea and Samaria and their Effect on the Voting Patterns of the Israeli Citizens in these Regions

COVID-19 lockdown in Poland – changes in regional and local mobility patterns based on Google Maps data

As no effective treatment or vaccine have yet been developed, the only way to prevent the spread of SARS-Cov-2 is to introduce social distancing measures. Scientific discussion regarding their actual effectiveness and socio-economic consequences has only just begun. Both declining mobility and changes in mobility patterns are obvious effects of social distancing. The main objective of this article is to present spatial diversity of changes in regional and local mobility in Poland with the use of data gathered and provided by Google LCC. As for the regional dimension, the mobility has declined steadily in most of the analysed areas. The regional changes were more visible only in the case of the following categories of areas: grocery & pharmacy and parks. The initial correlation analysis has shown that distribution of those changes more or less reflects spatial voting patterns. Both historical and cultural factors may explain such results, including ingrained habits, collective attitudes towards politics and group values. In the local context, illustrated by the analysis of changes in travel time from housing areas in Gdańsk, Gdynia and Sopot to the business and science centre in Gdańsk-Oliwa, a noticeable yet spatially diversified decrease in drive time (by private car) has been observed. The most significant reduction in travel time was recorded in peripheral areas accessible by high-speed roads which are normally jammed during peak hours. The mobility constraints have led to highly reduced traffic congestion, and consequently, shortened the travel time.

The Effect of Community Size on Electoral Preferences: Evidence from Post-Wwii Southern Germany

Populous communities often prefer more government involvement than less populous communities, but does community size per se affect citizens' preferences for government? Endogeneity commonly prevents testing for causal effects because (i) people can select into communities while (ii) government structures can affect community size (e.g., by en- or discouraging migration and fertility decisions). This paper studies a plausibly exogenous setting from post-WWII Baden-Wurttemberg (located in Southern Germany), in which the French occupation zone prevented the entry of German expellees after 1945, whereas the U.S. occupied zone did not. Consequently, municipalities on the U.S. side, just across the border from the French zone, experienced large and relatively homogenous population shocks. Studying voting patterns in the 1949 national- and 1952 state-level elections for 828 municipalities, we find more populous municipalities systematically preferred the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), the party advocating for greater government involvement in virtually all areas of policymaking, over the CDU (Christlich Demokratische Union), the major conservative party that emphasized free markets. Our results hold when accounting for a host of potential confounding factors, county-fixed effects, pre-WWII vote shares, employing fractional response models and alternative instrumental variable specifications. Our benchmark estimates imply that a one standard deviation increase in population size (equivalent to ≈4,000 citizens) raised the SPD vote share by more than 11 percentage points.

Особенности электоральных моделей в национальных республиках Сибирского федерального округа (2007–2019 годы)

The purpose of the article is to describe electoral models in the national republics of the Siberian Federal District of the Russian Federation. The elections of the federal, regional and local levels in the republics of Tyva, Altai, Khakassia (2007–2019) are analyzed. The study is based on statistical and comparative analysis methods for three groups of indicators: 1) statistics on voter turnout and the level of support for the «United Russia» party; 2) socio-economic indicators of regional development; 3) ethnic localization of the population and the level of urbanization. The sources of research are official statistics, electoral statistics of republican election commissions. The results of the analysis allow us to identify the characteristics and differences in the electoral models of the republics based on the analyzed indicators. The Republic of Tyva represents the most conservative clientist political model with signs of institutionalization. The pattern of traditionalist electoral behavior of ethnically localized and low-urbanized communities with a high density of social ties and personal contacts, administratively controlled due to financial dependence on the Central budget and subsidies, is constantly reproduced. The Altai Republic is a less conservative model associated with the demonstrated electoral absenteeism of the majority ofthe voters. The active part of the electorate has a tendency to transform electoral patterns over the course of two cycles. The electoral patterns of the Republic of Khakassia demonstrate a non-conformist electoral pattern of the active electorate, which is due to the lower dependence of the population on budget transfers and social payments, and a higher level of income than in other republics under consideration. It should be noted that the level of support for the ruling party has gradually decreased, even with the most administrated and clientist voting patterns, and that absentee electoral behavior patterns have been transformed into a more active political position expressed through protest voting.

Understanding Voting Patterns by Class in the 2019 Indian Election

Understanding Voting Patterns by Class in the 2019 Indian Election

Mathematics of Nested Districts: The Case of Alaska

ABSTRACTIn eight states, a “nesting rule” requires that each state Senate district be exactly composed of two adjacent state House districts. In this article, we investigate the potential impacts of these nesting rules with a focus on Alaska, where Republicans have a 2/3 majority in the Senate while a Democratic-led coalition controls the House. Treating the current House plan as fixed and considering all possible pairings, we find that the choice of pairings alone can create a swing of 4–5 seats out of 20 against recent voting patterns, which is similar to the range observed when using a Markov chain procedure to generate plans without the nesting constraint. The analysis enables other insights into Alaska districting, including the partisan latitude available to districters with and without strong rules about nesting and contiguity. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Political Stubbornness and Online Local Budget Transparency in Croatia

Online local budget transparency (OLBT) has been recognized as an important feature of good governance. Accordingly, in this paper, OLBT is measured in all 128 cities and a sample of 100 municipalities in Croatia using several key local budget documents published on local government websites. Using a fixed effect Poisson panel model covering the 2013-2017 period, it is shown that along with residents’ income and fiscal capacity of local governments, political ideology and political competition determine the level of OLBT. This paper contributes to the growing body of budget transparency literature by establishing the importance of political factors as determinants of OLBT in this former socialist, fiscally centralized EU member state and reveals the curious stubbornness of the citizens who consistently vote for non-transparent politicians. The main finding is that political factors (political ideology and political competition) matters in determining OLBT, resulting in suboptimal equilibrium of local governments with low levels of OLBT. The local incumbent concludes that OLBT is not a high priority and that his/her constituency will not hold it against him/her. In this environment such a conclusion stands owing to the fact that voters who are stubborn in their voting patterns refuse to change the incumbent who created nontransparency.

Deaths of Despair and Brexit Votes: Cross-Local Authority Statistical Analysis in England and Wales.

Objectives. To test the hypothesis that deaths of despair, a marker of social suffering, were associated with greater support for Brexit in the United Kingdom's 2016 European Union referendum.Methods. We used cross-local authority regression models of Brexit vote shares on changes in suicide and drug-related death rates before (2005-2007) and after the recession (2014-2016), adjusting for sociodemographic factors. The population comprised 345 local authorities in England and Wales.Results. Mortality rates were associated with voting patterns. An increase of 10 drug-related deaths per 100 000 was associated with a 15.25-percentage-point increase in Brexit votes (95% confidence interval [CI] = 10.27, 20.24), while an increase of 10 suicides per 100 000 was associated with a 9.97-percentage-point increase in vote shares for Brexit (95% CI = 6.25, 13.70). These results were substantially attenuated after we adjusted for education, and reduced to nonsignificance for drug mortality (b = 2.18; 95% CI = -0.21, 4.57) and suicide (b = 0.94; 95% CI = -0.32, 2.21) upon inclusion of other sociodemographic factors.Conclusions. Worsening mortality correlated with Brexit votes. These phenomena appear to share similar antecedents. A rise in such deaths may point to deeper social problems that could have political consequences.

Voter Education on Radio as Determinant of Voting Pattern of Indigenous Elderly Women in Akoko Land, Ondo State, Nigeria

Indigenous Nigerian society respect and believe so much in her elderly. Males and female elderly are transmitters of traditional norms and values in a sustainable manner in each community. As such, they are the sage and kingmakers appointing, decision makers through careful and flawless selection from character check overtime, delving into family history and divination of the traditional oracle. After coronation, such leaders are never corrupt; they live up to expectation by promoting the wellbeing of the masses. However, this practice has been eroded by colonization and westernization for a democratic way of appointing leaders through voting; as such countries design voter education for her citizenry. This study thus examined voter education as a determinant of voting pattern of indigenous elderly women in Akoko land through these research questions: (i) what is the demographic characteristics of the elderly women in the study area? (ii) What kind of voter education programmes is available on the selected radio stations? (iii) What is the level of participation of the women on the programme on radio? (iv) To what extent has the women benefited from their participation in voter education programme on radio? (v) How has the voter education received influenced the voting pattern of the women? The study adopted the descriptive survey research through multi stage sampling technique by purposively selecting sixty indigenous elderly women from areas of the four Local Government ( Okorun, Ese, Agbaluku, Iwaro-Oka, Supare, Oba, Erusu, Okeagbe. Findings of the study showed that voter education in the study area impacted minimally on the respondents resulting in their skewed knowledge and voting pattern (Grand mean 2.71+2.46+2.19+2.13=116.9/4=29.2). It is recommended among others that voter education should include indigenous education, a larger coverage and quality.

European Affiliations or National Interests? Analyses of Voting Patterns on Trade Policy in European Parliament

AbstractThis article examines the determinants of voting patterns within the European Parliament for EU trade legislations including EU trade agreements. Given that trade is a very sensitive issue for particular Member States, our question is to verify whether members of European Parliament (MEP) tend to vote in line with their political affiliation or national identity prevails in voting for trade-related issues. Our results from EU trade agreements with Korea and Columbia/Peru show that MEPs tend to vote with others in their political groups in trade legislations and their voting pattern is not very different from the overall voting pattern observed in other policy areas. This trend is confirmed by both the comparison of intra-voting cohesion index and the empirical test based on the probit model. Country-specific variables do not explain well the voting behavior of MEPs in trade issues. However, it is noteworthy that some MEPs voted in line with their national interests in case of EU-Korea FTA.

Locating the Representational Baseline: Republicans in Massachusetts

Republican candidates often receive between 30% and 40% of the two-way vote share in statewide elections in Massachusetts. For the last three Census cycles, Massachusetts has held 9–10 seats in the House of Representatives, which means that a district can be won with as little as six percent of the statewide vote. Putting these two facts together, it is striking that a Massachusetts Republican has not won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1994. We argue that the underperformance of Republicans in Massachusetts is not attributable to gerrymandering, nor to the failure of Republicans to field House candidates, but is a structural mathematical feature of the actual distribution of votes observable in some recent elections. Several of these elections have a remarkable property in their vote patterns: Republican votes clear 30%, but are distributed so uniformly that they are locked out of the possibility of representation. Though there are more ways of building a valid districting plan than there are particles in the galaxy, every single one of them would produce a 9–0 Democratic delegation.

Perceptions of Political Corruption and Voting Behavior in South Korea

political corruption by holding elected officials accountable for their actions, citizens often fail to vote corrupt officials out of office in elections. This article explores how citizens’ perceptions of political corruption influence their voting behavior by testing three competing theories: nonvoting, opposition voting, and corruption voting. This study also investigates the types of voters involved in each form of voting by considering three mediating factors: economic evaluation, partisanship, and education. Empirical findings from the South Korean case suggest that, in general, the high level of perceived corruption decreases voter turnout, confirming the nonvoting theory. Second, corruption voting occurs mostly among those who positively evaluate the economy and have the same partisan affiliation as the incumbent candidate. Finally, a high level of education leads to opposition voting. In sum, the empirical evidence confirms that incumbent candidates’ and party’s political corruption does not always lead to the electoral victory of opposition parties and their candidates because the mediating factors play a role in strengthening or weakening the patterns of nonvoting, opposition voting, and corruption voting.

Israel’s Foreign Aid to Africa & UN Voting: An Empirical Examination

Abstract According to International Relations scholarship, the main formal motivation for foreign aid is usually the unexpressed expectation for improvement of bilateral relations and overall international support. There is an anticipation that aid recipients will not “forget” their donors on the international stage, in particularly during important sessions at the UNGA. We test this assertion empirically on the case of Israeli foreign aid to African countries, using data on Israeli Official Development Aid provisions between 1997 and 2014, and data on voting patterns of aid recipients in the UN General Assembly (UNGA). Our results testify that Israeli bilateral humanitarian foreign aid not only has not provided its expected diplomatic revenues, but may perhaps even hindered African states’ support in the UN. Concomitantly, our results testify that Israeli Official Development Aid (ODA) does not have the anticipated long term effects on international support towards Israel, but instead only a short-lived influence. The results are informative about the usefulness of foreign aid as a diplomatic tool, with important policy implications for decision makers in Israel and worldwide.

Index Funds and the Future of Corporate Governance: Presentation Slides

The presentation slides in this document provide an overview of our study Index Funds and the Future of Corporate Governance: Theory, Evidence, and Policy, which is forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review in December 2019. The slides build on and update our presentations at the 2019 ECGI Annual Meeting in Barcelona in which our study was awarded the ECGI’s Cleary Gottlieb Steen Hamilton Prize. The slides begin by describing the agency-costs theory of index fund incentives that we put forward. Our agency-costs analysis shows that index fund managers have strong incentives to (i) underinvest in stewardship and (ii) defer excessively to the preferences and positions of corporate managers. The slides then present a summary of our empirical findings regarding the range of stewardship activities that index funds do and do not undertake. We discuss four dimensions of the Big Three’s stewardship activities: (1) The limited personnel time they devote to stewardship regarding most of their portfolio companies; (2) The small minority of portfolio companies with which they have any private communications; (3) Their focus on divergences from governance principles and their limited attention to other issues that could be significant for their investors; and (4) Their pro-management voting patterns. The slides also present a summary of our empirical evidence regarding five ways in which the Big Three may fail to undertake adequate stewardship: (1) The limited attention they pay to financial underperformance; (2) Their lack of involvement in the selection of directors and lack of attention to important director characteristics; (3) Their failure to take actions that would bring about governance changes that are desirable according to their own governance principles; (4) Their decision to stay on the sidelines regarding corporate governance reforms; and (5) Their avoidance of involvement in consequential securities litigation. The slides explain that this body of evidence is, on the whole, consistent with the incentive problems that our agency-costs framework identifies. Finally, the slides conclude by discussing the policy implications of the theory and evidence we put forward. Our study is part of a larger project on the incentives of investment managers that also includes The Agency Problems of Institutional Investors (with Alma Cohen) and The Specter of the Giant Three.

Health as an independent predictor of the 2017 French presidential voting behaviour: a cross-sectional analysis

BackgroundIt has been suggested that poor health has influenced vote for Brexit and the US presidential election. No such research has been published regarding the 2017 French presidential election.MethodsWe performed a cross-sectional analysis using a comprehensive set of socioeconomic and health indicators, to be compared with voting outcome at the first round of the 2017 French presidential election. The 95 French departments were selected as the unit of analysis. Data were obtained from publicly available sources. The linear model was used for both univariate and multivariate analysis to investigate the relation between voting patterns and predictors. Sensitivity analyses were done using the elastic-net regularisation.ResultsEmmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen arrived ahead. When projected on the first factorial plane (~ 60% of the total inertia), Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen tended to be in opposite directions regarding both socioeconomic and health factors. In the respective multivariate analyses of the two candidates, both socio-economic and health variables were significantly associated with voting patterns, with wealthier and healthier departments more likely to vote for Emmanuel Macron, and opposite departments more likely to vote for Marine Le Pen. Mortality (p = 0.03), severe chronic conditions (p = 0.014), and diabetes mellitus (p < 0.0001) were among the strongest predictors of voting pattern for Marine Le Pen. Sensitivity analyses did not substantially change those findings.ConclusionsWe found that areas associated with poorer health status were significantly more likely to vote for the far-right candidate at the French presidential election, even after adjustment on socioeconomic criteria.

Social determinants of health and disparities in prenatal care utilization during the Great Recession period\xa02005-2010

BackgroundEarly, regular prenatal care utilization is an important strategy for improving maternal and infant health outcomes. The purpose of this study is to better understand contributing factors to disparate prenatal care utilization outcomes among women of different racial/ethnic and social status groups before, during, and after the Great Recession (December 2007–June 2009).MethodsData from 678,235 Washington (WA) and Florida (FL) birth certificates were linked to community and state characteristic data to carry out cross-sectional pooled time series analyses with institutional review board approval for human subjects’ research. Predictors of on-time as compared to late or non-entry to prenatal care utilization (late/no prenatal care utilization) were identified and compared among pregnant women. Also explored was a simulated triadic relationship among time (within recession-related periods), social characteristics, and prenatal care utilization by clustering individual predictors into three scenarios representing low, average, and high degrees of social disadvantage.ResultsIndividual and community indicators of need (e.g., maternal Medicaid enrollment, unemployment rate) increased during the Recession. Associations between late/no prenatal care utilization and individual-level characteristics (including disparate associations among race/ethnicity groups) did not shift greatly with young maternal age and having less than a high school education remaining the largest contributors to late/no prenatal care utilization. In contrast, individual maternal enrollment in a supplemental nutrition program for women, infants, and children (WIC) exhibited a protective association against late/no prenatal care utilization. The magnitude of association between community-level partisan voting patterns and expenditures on some maternal child health programs increased in non-beneficial directions. Simulated scenarios show a high combined impact on prenatal care utilization among women who have multiple disadvantages.ConclusionsOur findings provide a compelling picture of the important roles that individual characteristics—particularly low education and young age—play in late/no prenatal care utilization among pregnant women. Targeted outreach to individuals with high disadvantage characteristics, particularly those with multiple disadvantages, may help to increase first trimester entry to utilization of prenatal care. Finally, WIC may have played a valuable role in reducing late/no prenatal care utilization, and its effectiveness during the Great Recession as a policy-based approach to reducing late/no prenatal care utilization should be further explored.

Robust and secure zero-watermarking algorithm for color images based on majority voting pattern and hyper-chaotic encryption

Robust zero-watermarking is an effective and distortion-free technique for copyright protection and has become a research hotspot in the field of digital watermarking. In the face of weak robustness and security of existing schemes, this paper presents a novel robust and secure color image zero-watermarking algorithm based on majority voting pattern and hyper-chaotic encryption. In the proposed algorithm, firstly an original color image is decomposed by one-level discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and the corresponding low-frequency components of three channels are partitioned into blocks. Then, to resist strong attacks, we construct a distinguishable robust binary feature matrix extracted from all blocks and color components by using a combination of Frobenius norm in the singular value decomposition (SVD) domain and majority voting pattern. To promote security, a binary copyright logo is confused and diffused by hyper-chaotic Lorenz system. Finally, it performs a bitwise exclusive-or operation on the binary feature matrix and the encrypted copyrighted logo to obtain a zero-watermark signal. Experimental results indicate that in addition to the high-level security, the proposed zero-watermarking algorithm also has a stronger robustness against common geometric and non-geometric attacks, including rotation, scaling, filtering, JPEG compression and noise addition, compared with some existing typical zero-watermarking and traditional watermarking methods.

Perceptions of Political Corruption and Voting Behavior in South Korea

While regular and competitive elections are expected to lower political corruption by holding elected officials accountable for their actions, citizens often fail to vote corrupt officials out of office in elections. This article explores how citizens’ perceptions of political corruption influence their voting behavior by testing three competing theories: nonvoting, opposition voting, and corruption voting. This study also investigates the types of voters involved in each form of voting by considering three mediating factors: economic evaluation, partisanship, and education. Empirical findings from the South Korean case suggest that, in general, the high level of perceived corruption decreases voter turnout, confirming the nonvoting theory. Second, corruption voting occurs mostly among those who positively evaluate the economy and have the same partisan affiliation as the incumbent candidate. Finally, a high level of education leads to opposition voting. In sum, the empirical evidence confirms that incumbent candidates’ and party’s political corruption does not always lead to the electoral victory of opposition parties and their candidates because the mediating factors play a role in strengthening or weakening the patterns of nonvoting, opposition voting, and corruption voting.

Trading Liberties for Security: Groupthink, Gender, and 9/11 Effects on U.S. Appellate Decision-Making

Does groupthink affect court deference to the government in times of heightened security concerns? We argue that male judges serving in homogeneous panels in federal appellate courts modified their behavior post-9/11, but that the presence of a female on the panel mitigated these effects. Using data on the U.S. Court of Appeals from 1978 to 2008 in search-and-seizure cases, we argue that women can safeguard against groupthink effects that otherwise trend toward a more deferential, less rights-oriented approach in times of heightened security. Our findings suggest women mitigate their male colleagues’ shift toward more deferential decisions by affecting panel outcomes that are more consistent with peacetime decisions. These results suggest the important role women exert in collegial panels beyond direct voting patterns. In times of heightened security concerns, panel diversity can avoid groupthink that might stand in the judiciary’s way of providing an effective check on executive and legislative power.

Migration and political institutions: Other side of the hill

AbstractThe present paper examines the effect of migrant population on political institutions in their host societies using data from the local elections in Hong Kong. The share of the population that has migrated from mainland China is found to have a positive effect on the pro‐government votes in local elections. This effect continues to exist after demographic characteristics are controlled. Further investigation suggests that the effect of migrant population on voting patterns varies across periods of migration to Hong Kong. These findings contribute to the published literature in two ways. First, they provide evidence that the effects of migration on political development are two‐way. Migration not only influences the political institutions in migrants’ home countries, but also shapes the political institutions in their host regions. Second, they also pave the way for future research on why and how periods of migration influence migrant populations’ voting patterns in their host regions.