Electoral Studies最新文献

According to the empowerment hypothesis, minority politicians encourage minority participation. The relationship between representation and participation has been extensively analyzed for several ethnic minorities and women, but there are no studies for indigenous populations in Latin America. This paper evaluates the link between descriptive representation and electoral registration of Mapuche, a deprived indigenous minority from the South of Chile that is as large as ten percent of the total population. We implement a panel estimation that controls district effects using a national dataset of more than three million new registrations in Chile for five municipal elections. We found that Mapuche mayors are significantly associated with higher Mapuche participation during the first year of the mayoral period. Since registration in Chile occurs throughout the representatives’ term, and we use registrations long before the next election, our evidence suggests that office-holding affects participation by channels other than electoral campaigning. To shed light on the channels, we describe the symbolic and substantive mechanisms used by Mapuche mayors to empower their communities.

In this paper, we report on the findings of a correspondence audit study to examine the responsiveness of political candidates on social media in relation to ethnicity. This study examines how responsive political candidates are to private social media messages (i.e., Facebook). Drawing on established theoretical insights, we focus on responsiveness of candidates to a citizen with a Dutch and non-Dutch name. More specifically we take into account political leaning and ethnicity of the candidate itself. We also pay attention to the technical side of the social media platform and how this affects responsiveness. We found no effect for discrimination based on ethnicity. Notably, we did observed a significant effect of the technical specifications of Facebook, which influence responsiveness at large.

The way people feel towards other voters has garnered enormous attention with the rise of affective polarization, or hostility across political lines. As this literature grows increasingly comparative, scholars often rely on the widely available feeling thermometer towards political parties. This carries the strong assumption that (dis)affect towards parties (“vertical”) extends to voters (“horizontal”). We test this assumption using 14 independent samples covering 10 countries. Firstly, we ask whether people differentiate between parties/politicians and their voters. We find that individuals consistently differentiate between elites and voters, though this is conditional on whether evaluations are towards in- or out-groups. Secondly, we examine which factors are associated with a greater gap in evaluations. We find that differentiation may be more related to the type of party-voter group being evaluated rather than individual-level features. Put together, these findings suggest researchers should be cautious when equating vertical and horizontal affective polarization.

The person-positivity bias states that evaluations of real-life individuals are more positive compared to evaluations of collectivities or impersonal objects. This paper aims to test the prevalence of a person-positivity bias in a political context in two respects: (1) we examine whether voters develop stronger negative affective reactions towards other-minded collective actors (i.e. political parties) compared to individual actors (i.e. politicians), and (2) we investigate whether the provision of personalized individuating information tempers the development of negative feelings towards politicians. A survey experiment conducted among a representative sample of the Flemish population (N = 1200) reveals patterns of vertical affective polarization. However, our study did not find significant evidence that voters dislike other-minded collective actors more than other-minded individual politicians. Also the extent to which individual MPs are personalized has little effect on voters' affective evaluations. Taken together, this study highlights that ideological (dis)agreement is primarily steering voters’ evaluation of political actors.

Members of Congress routinely post memes, photos, and other images on social media to communicate with constituents and the public. Yet, we know little about how they express home style through visual imagery. In this paper, we seek to understand how members of Congress communicate with their constituents through visual imagery on social media, a mode of communication that has become increasingly relevant in the digital age. Through a deep learning classification of over 250,000 images, we study how US House and Senate members express home style through images to gain trust among their constituents.

Early voting procedures boost voter participation and have therefore been suggested as institutional remedies for the problem of unequal turnout. Scholars have, however, raised concerns that making voting more convenient may actually lead to a less representative electorate. We contribute to this debate by leveraging large-scale Swedish registry data to analyze persons expecting a child around the time of the election. Our results indicate that politically engaged high-status voters are more likely to use the opportunity to vote in advance when faced with the risk of not being able to vote on election day. Given the large number of obstacles to election-day voting that individuals face throughout life, it is therefore conceivable that efforts to make voting more convenient and less costly for citizens may in the end lead to less representative electorates.

Many jurisdictions in the United States have recently adopted single-winner ranked choice voting (RCV) to replace first-past-the-post plurality elections. This study contributes to the literature examining the potential consequences of changing to RCV by modeling the relationship between electoral systems and voter turnout. We propose that RCV may increase turnout by incentivizing increased contacts with voters. Previous attempts at assessing the relationship between RCV and turnout in the US have been limited by a lack of individual-level turnout data measured across all cases where RCV is and is not used. The study utilizes large, unique data from administrative voter turnout records that overcomes this limitation. We find significant and substantially higher probabilities of turnout in places that use RCV, and find evidence that campaigns in RCV places have greater incidences of direct voter contacting than in similar places that do not use RCV.

The growing fragmentation of party systems confronts mixed-member proportional electoral systems with a trilemma. Combining the goals of proportionality and of a guaranteed representation of district winners makes it ever more difficult to also achieve a third goal: the fixed size of parliament. Against the background of electoral reform in Germany, this paper studies how citizens position themselves in this trilemma. Using original survey data, we find that all goals are popular and no combination of goals commands majority support. In a context where institutional reform becomes politicized, the trilemma is thus not only a logical, but also an empirical constraint. Moreover, abstract preferences in the trilemma systematically predict how voters evaluate the status quo and specific reform proposals. At the same time, voters are receptive to the logical constraints of the system: Informing respondents about the trilemma trade-offs in an experimental setting makes them more accepting of reform proposals.

The mass-elite congruence in politics is key to a healthy democracy. Existing research uses the match between citizens' ideological positions and those of political elites and parties to assess satisfaction with democracy over time and across countries. However, mass-elite ideological congruence does not necessarily guarantee mass-elite overlap in ideological polarization, the implications of which for democratic satisfaction are little known. Accordingly, our article examines the link between the mass-elite ideological polarization congruence and democratic satisfaction in a multinational context. We reason that when polarized electorates feel let down by their parties' depolarization, these ideologically polarized people would grow frustrated with the disconnected democratic system (seen as ineffective in meeting citizens' expectations and delivering meaningful political alternatives). Then, we find that electorates who do not consider their affiliated parties to be as ideologically polarized as themselves tend to be dissatisfied with the way democracy works in their countries. Our additional inquiries suggest that this democratic dissatisfaction parallels ambivalence in democratic commitment. We also find that the perception of no differences between parties, and affiliation with populist and losing parties amplifies these disappointed polarized electorates’ dissatisfaction with democracy.

Religious and regional cleavages have been key for understanding Canadian elections, and particularly the domination of the Liberal Party of Canada. While the conventional wisdom has been that these two cleavages are the most important sociodemographic factors in explaining citizens' vote choice, scholars have not paid a lot of attention to religious voting in recent elections. In this research note, we provide the first systematic post-2011 analysis of religious voting in Canada. We do so by leveraging recent Canadian Election Studies. We examine the relationship between voters’ religious affiliation and level of religiosity and vote choice. We show that both facets of religious voting matter, but that their impacts vary across parties and regions. The findings inform scholarship on Canadian politics as well as comparative analyses of sociodemographic cleavages in electoral democracies.