Electoral Studies最新文献

It is well known that voters prefer parties whose policy positions align with their own. But do voters actually reward incumbents who implement policies preferred by the electorate? Using cross-country data covering more than 350 elections and opinion-policy congruence measures based on 166 issues, our analysis reveals an unexpected non-correlation between opinion-policy congruence and electoral success. Governments that implement (or keep in place) policies with higher levels of support in the electorate do not do better in subsequent elections. This result holds when controlling for the state of the economy, and when using other, country-specific, datasets. The study reinforces conclusions from previous research that retrospective policy voting seems to be very limited.

Today, citizens with an immigrant background make up a large minority in many western democracies. However, we still know little about how this growing group of citizens wants to be represented politically, often due to a simple lack of data. This study overcomes this obstacle by using Facebook ad campaigns to target Swedish citizens with immigrant background directly. In a series of experiments the study shows important similarities between native Swedes and citizens of immigrant origin, with both groups emphasizing substantive representation. The study also reveals substantial heterogeneity within the immigrant group: respondents show no preference for being represented by another immigrant in general. Only a shared immigrant background elicits a positive response, thus cautioning against treating “immigrant background” as a homogenous category. The results also highlight an understudied source of discrimination where respondents with immigrant background show a strong negative reaction against immigrants from certain countries.

Democracy is under threat, while polarization is rising. Empirical evidence to understand a possible link between the two is mixed, with scholars finding elite polarization increases turnout but decreases democratic satisfaction. However, these mixed results span various samples and methodologies, including elite surveys and manifestos to capture elite polarization data, but they rarely address how citizens perceive this polarization. In response, I present a new individual-level measure of perceived elite polarization, revealing the complexities of individual perceptions of elite polarization that extend beyond macro elite polarization and is applicable to any party system. The results from applying this new measure confirms that higher perceptions of elite polarization can engage citizens but reduce satisfaction by testing effects on democratic satisfaction and turnout across 34 democracies over 25 years, in addition to panel data in the United Kingdom. However, higher perceptions of elite polarization also decrease the likelihood of people being simultaneously satisfied with democracy and voting. These findings indicate that high perceived elite polarization can be detrimental to democracy and emphasizes the complexity in individual perceptions of elite polarization, underscoring the need for further study.

Politicians who seek their parties' nomination as candidates for public office start communicating their ideological profile to the selectorate months before the party decides on who will run as candidates. However, some politicians tend to steer away from their party leadership, while others stick closer to the party line. We argue that not only the mode of candidacy but one's expected chances of winning the election during the candidate selection period are defining factors in understanding why some candidates deviate further from their party leadership position than others. We use novel data on the degree of intra-party competition among the main German parties in all 299 electoral districts and on the ideological positions of candidates, measured using their Twitter statements in the run-up to the 2021 Bundestag election, to evaluate our expectations. In line with existing studies, we find that candidates who seek only their party's nomination via lists deviate less from party leadership than candidates who seek nomination as a district candidate. In contrast to our expectations, candidates who seek their nomination in an electoral district do not deviate more ideologically from their party when they can expect to win the district seat on election day based on published polls during the candidate selection period.

Among the most prevalent and costly of all illnesses worldwide, depression also has substantive consequences for democratic politics, not least because it is associated with lower voting propensity. One of the most reliable predictors of becoming depressed is a family history of depression, an intergenerational link thought to arise through multiple mechanisms that increase a person's cognitive, behavioural and affective disposition towards depression. We study if a person's voting propensity in adulthood is predicted by their parents' depressive symptomatology during early childhood and whether this is mediated by the likelihood of being depressed in adulthood. We analyse the 1970 British Cohort Study in which persons belonging to a same cohort have been systematically followed from early childhood to midlife. The results show that parents' symptoms of depression predict offspring's voting propensity, especially earlier in adulthood, although the effect is relatively small. Contrary to predictions, the effect is mostly direct.

While an extensive comparative politics literature focuses on the mechanisms that facilitate the emergence and persistence of political dynasties, we know relatively little about voters’ views on them. A survey experiment in Pakistan, a country where dynasticism is common, allows us to study how voters perceive and evaluate politicians with dynastic ties. We find that dynastic politicians are perceived as lower quality and less supportive of universalistic policies than their non-dynastic peers. Additionally, respondents report a lower preference of voting for such candidates themselves, suggesting that the “dynastic electoral advantage” documented in previous research is elite-driven. Our findings suggest that voters also perceive non-dynastic candidates needing to be more qualified to overcome the higher entry barriers created by dynasticism. These results also have important implications for the quality of representation in many developing countries, where entrenched political families continue playing key roles in national and local politics.

We argue that the relationship between authoritarian elections and repression depends on the electoral system in use. Proportional representation (PR) systems co-opt more heterogeneous political groups to contest and receive seats in the legislature and thus, dictators are less likely to use broad-based repression. Under plurality rules, by contrast, the regime has more incentives to mobilize turnout and deter collective action. Examining electoral systems from 1990 to 2010, we find that elections only reduce broad-based repression under PR systems, which are less commonly used in non-democracies. Our results highlight the importance of formal institutions in shaping political outcomes even in dictatorships.

Scandals have always been a highly salient problem in politics. In judging politicians for their misconduct, voters may arguably be biased – they may evaluate scandals based on individual motivations, such as partisanship and self-interested concerns. In this paper, we examine these two considerations in the case of two real-world corruption scandals involving a single incumbent government. In addition to testing for the effects of partisan motivations in authentic situations, we consider how scandals associated with policy goals interact with personal motivations, shaping the degree to which people penalize a scandalous government. Across two survey experiments that prime respondents about real-world corruption scandals, we manipulate question wording for some participants and measure their evaluations of a scandalous leader's performance. We find an effect for self-interested concerns when the benefits associated with the scandal are concentrated and tangible. Our findings suggest that voters hold public figures accountable for misbehaviour and that there are limits to partisan loyalties in political scandals.

The recent electoral success of right-wing populists in various democracies sparked a rich body of studies investigating the causes of populists’ mass support. These studies agree that populists’ “thick” policy positions, such as anti-immigration and social conservatism, partially explain their support, but there are mixed findings on whether populists’ “thin” rhetoric affects support for populists. This paper examines this problem by asking if combining a “thin” populism with different “thick” positions gives candidates any electoral advantage over adopting only the latter. Using an original conjoint experiment conducted in the US, it shows that populist leaders’ “thin” rhetoric alone does not affect their electoral support. However, when right-wing candidates combine “thin” populism with “thick” positions, the effect of combining these two stances on candidates’ ratings is substantially larger than adopting the same respective right-wing positions but not combining them with populism. This was found only among right-wing voters who hold populist attitudes, suggesting that populism can be electorally advantageous for right-wing candidates, but it does not lead voters to cross ideology lines because of populism.

Extant literature documents the unequal representation of the interests of low- and high-income groups in democracies. One potential explanation for this phenomenon is the electoral behavior of different groups of voters. If affluent citizens base their vote decisions more strongly on policy considerations, while the less affluent rely on forms of electoral support that are less strongly conditioned by policy or performance evaluations, this pattern could influence the ability and willingness of political elites to represent low-income citizens. We make use of the integrated CSES election data to study how, across a diverse set of countries, income levels affect the criteria voters rely on when voting: namely, proximity voting, valence considerations, and economic voting. Overall, our findings show no meaningful differences in voting criteria across income groups, nor consequences for party systems. These findings have important implications for the literature on unequal representation, as they rule out the common narrative that the affluent cast more sophisticated vote decisions.