Electoral Studies最新文献

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.

We evaluate the tendency for different voting methods to promote political compromise and reduce tensions in a society by using computer simulations to determine which voters candidates are incentivized to appeal to. We find that Instant Runoff Voting incentivizes candidates to appeal to a wider range of voters than Plurality Voting, but that it leaves candidates far more strongly incentivized to appeal to their base than to voters in opposing factions. In contrast, we find that Condorcet methods and STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff) Voting provide the most balanced incentives; these differences between voting methods become more pronounced with more candidates in the race and less pronounced in the presence of strategic voting. We find that the incentives provided by Single Transferable Vote to appeal to opposing voters are negligible, but that a tweak to the tabulation algorithm makes them substantial.

This research note uses district-level panel data from 1870s Sweden to estimate the effect of the electric telegraph on electoral turnout. We argue that the telegraph contributed to higher turnout since it connected local communities to a national communication network, making people more aware of election campaigns and national political issues and more motivated to vote. Previous studies of the turnout effects of new telecommunication technologies have examined the radio, television, and the internet, with mixed results. Unlike these later technologies, the telegraph was almost exclusively used to transmit information, not entertainment, and it did not replace an existing telecommunication technology. Our empirical findings suggest that the telegraph had a positive effect on turnout, but only in areas with local newspapers that could benefit from the speedy access to national news.