Electoral Studies最新文献

In Buckley v. Valeo (1976), the US Supreme Court ruled that campaign finance regulations “are appropriate legislative weapons against the reality or appearance of improper influence.” Using data from multiple survey experiments repeated across six CCES surveys from 2012 to 2020, we test whether varied information regarding US campaign finance institutions and laws alter public perceptions of the campaign finance system and campaign finance reform across time, including the perception of improper influence. Respondents had more negative attitudes toward candidates who received support from Super PACs. However, respondents were not moved by primed differences in expenditure limits, coordination, or donation disclosure. Ultimately, we find that the majority of Americans dislike and distrust the campaign finance system and generally remain unmoved by any experimentally-primed differences. These experimental findings remain consistent across time, indicating that attitudes toward the US campaign finance system are stable and resistant to change.

Negative partisanship, voters’ rejection of a party, increasingly garners scholarly attention. Yet we lack robust empirical evidence on the nature of the concept and how it shapes attitudes towards citizens of the “other side” of politics. In this paper I argue negative partisanship should be conceptualised as a type of social identity, beyond a mere “dislike” of a party. Leveraging a three-wave online panel administered during the 2021 German federal elections, I test the measurement properties of a multi-item scale measuring negative party identification. Further, I examine the effects of negative identities on attitudes towards other citizens by combining the online panel with a nine-country survey. I find that negative identification is at least as stable as (positive) partisanship and it predicts hostile attitudes towards out-voters. These findings suggest that, when dislike of a party becomes part of one’s sense of self, the consequences for social cohesion are particularly egregious.

It is well known that higher economic growth benefits incumbents in elections. However, in the last thirty years, US politics has been marked by substantial increases in political polarization and a decline in the number of swing voters. Accordingly, we would expect that the effect of economic growth on incumbent vote share has declined. Indeed, using a Bartik-type instrument, I present new evidence that state economic growth has a positive effect on incumbent vote share, and that this effect is smaller under conditions of polarization. Using separate state-level and individual-level data sets, I find that the effect of state economic growth on incumbent vote share is smaller when state-level polarization, or individual partisanship, is stronger. Using a swing voting propensity score, I show that swing voting propensity is strongly associated with economic voting.

The underrepresentation of young adults is widespread in the parliaments of Western democracies. Yet evidence suggests that voters do not have a negative bias towards young candidates. In this article, we focus on another factor that may contribute to youth underrepresentation: the level of competitiveness in districts where political parties nominate young people. Using data on all candidates who ran for a major political party/coalition in the 2012, 2017, and 2022 French legislative elections, we attempt to determine whether young adults tend to be nominated in districts where they have little or no chance of winning. To do so, we use three different measures of district competitiveness. Our results show that young people – and especially young women – are more likely than others to be “sacrificial lambs”. Our analyses nevertheless indicate that men aged between 31 and 35 have become almost as competitive as older people in 2022.

How does the emergence of a major new cross-cutting issue dimension reshape electoral dynamics in a stable multi-party democracy? We take advantage of recent developments in the modeling of compositional outcome variables to test rival theoretical propositions about this using data from the 2015, 2017, and 2019 parliamentary elections in England. We find that many of the long-present dynamics, such as economic voting, that were evident in 2015, were either absent or greatly reduced in 2017 and 2019. As such, we conclude that the Brexit debate did indeed crowd out “normal” political debate in 2017 and 2019.

Existing research on the electoral legacies of civil wars lacks a comprehensive understanding of the conditions under which certain expectations are valid. To bridge this gap, I explore the impact of Peru's civil war in the 1980s on contemporary electoral outcomes. Peru represents a case where the rebels were defeated by the Fujimori government, despite being responsible for a larger share of the violence. Using a unique dataset at the district level, I analyze the vote shares for Keiko Fujimori and her three primary left-wing opponents in the first rounds of the last three presidential elections. The findings indicate that Fujimori gains a premium in districts more affected by the conflict, while left-wing candidates experience an electoral disadvantage. A detailed analysis of the 2021 election shows that Pedro Castillo was able to offset this negative impact in poorer districts and those more severely affected by COVID-19.

Job insecurity is a pervasive phenomenon whose effects on support for different parties have attracted increasing attention in the literature. A growing body of research has assessed the relationship between job insecurity and the success of radical parties in Western democracies, but results are still inconclusive due to the complex nature of this independent variable. This article contributes new evidence to the current debates on this topic by analyzing how both objective labour market status and perceived job insecurity are associated with the vote for radical right and radical left parties. Our findings, based on four original surveys conducted in France, Germany, Greece and Spain, suggest that perceived job insecurity is generally associated with greater support for the radical left, but not for the radical right. In contrast, we find the relationship between objective labour market status and support for radical parties to be more ambiguous (and, in most cases, statistically non-significant).

The impact of individuals’ fairness predispositions on public support for the welfare state receives less attention than the effect of economic self-interest on this support. Amid growing income differences even in previously egalitarian Nordic countries, predispositions about what is fair in society are rapidly becoming more politically salient. We examine how fairness predispositions towards the rich and the poor are linked to the support for three dimensions regarding how redistribution ought to be organised: access, conditionality and contribution. We then disaggregate these links for different income brackets and between elites who hold leadership positions and the rest of society (citizens). Using data pertaining to Finnish citizens and elites in 2018 and 2020, respectively, we show that the two fairness predispositions are related in various ways to the support for these three dimensions, with differences across income brackets and tentative differences between elites and citizens. These findings underline the importance of considering fairness predispositions even in welfare states emphasising economic equality.

This research note investigates the development of turnout gaps in Europe, associated with four key determinants of electoral participation: income, education, age, and gender. We extend previous research on unequal turnout in two main ways. First, we include longer time series. Relying on the World Political Cleavages and Inequality Database, we are able to estimate turnout gaps in 240 elections from 20 countries, from the 1950s to 2020. Second, we suggest a method to compare education and income levels across elections, which is a prerequisite for estimating changes over time in their effects. We find clear evidence of growing turnout gaps linked with education, income, and age, while the gender gap has become close to null. Our findings are robust across a number of alternative model specifications, and they are consistent with results, for the more recent period, based on the European Social Survey.