Electoral Studies最新文献

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.

A growing literature links contemporary far-right mobilization to the “legacies” of events in the distant past, but often, the effects are small, and their estimates appear to rely on problematic assumptions. We re-analyse Haffert's (2022) study, a key example of this strand of research. Haffert claims that historical political oppression of Catholics in Prussia moderates support for the radical right AfD party among Catholics in contemporary Germany. While the argument itself has intellectual merit, we identify some severe limitations in the empirical strategy. Retesting the study's cross-level interaction hypothesis using more suitable multi-level data and a more appropriate statistical model, we find a modest overall difference in AfD support between formerly Prussian and non-Prussian territories. However, this difference is unrelated to individual Catholic religion or to the contextual presence of Catholics. This contradicts the oppression hypothesis. Our study thus provides another counterpoint to the claim that historical events have strong and long-lasting effects on contemporary support for the radical right. We conclude that simpler explanations for variations in radical right support should be exhausted before resorting to history.

Recent decades have seen a growing underrepresentation of working-class legislators and the parallel rise of professionalized “career politicians”, especially in centre-left parties. While this changing class composition of parliaments has implications for representational inequality, we know little about its reasons. I focus on the candidate nomination processes in the German Social Democratic Party to understand the priorities and practices of party selectors. Drawing on interview data with key actors in the nomination processes for the 2021 federal election, I show that the representation of marginalized groups becomes more important, but class representation is excluded from party debates. Although many selectors share the view that the candidates’ narrowing class backgrounds impede the representation of lower-class constituents, they see the reasons for this development mainly in individual obstacles beyond their control. Thus, while the nomination procedures disadvantage working-class people, they do so in a more complex way than previous studies suggest.

Can protests produce changes in electoral behavior? In this paper, we examine variations in voter turnout and electoral preferences at the local level after a protest cycle. Using data on protest occurrence during the 2019 social mobilizations in Chile and Bolivia and a difference-in-differences design, we assess the impact that street demonstrations had on voting behavior in the elections that took place the following year. We found that turnout was higher in municipalities that had protests, while the incumbent vote was lower. We argue that the effect on turnout is explained by the surge in political efficacy that emerged from the protests. Furthermore, we suggest that the protests enabled more effective blame attribution and heightened the salience of political issues, leading to changes in voter preferences. These results demonstrate the effect of protests on electoral dynamics, highlighting their role not only in mobilizing voters but also in shaping electoral preferences.

Postal voting is often considered a means to enhance electoral participation by minimising the costs associated with voting. This study leverages individual-level register data for the entire electorate of Finns residing abroad who were provided the option of voting by mail in the 2019 parliamentary elections in addition to traditional in-person voting. Analysis of their voting trajectories across three parliamentary elections (2011, 2015, 2019) using such diverse approaches as descriptive statistics, interrupted time series analysis and an improved causal identification strategy revealed that the availability of postal voting was unlikely to increase electoral participation among this particular electorate despite previously low participation rates. The observed changes in turnout resembled previous elections, where only in-person voting at polling stations was available. The findings indicate that postal voting may not effectively address low turnout or participation biases.

This paper introduces the Immigrant German Election Study (IMGES) as the first survey that explicitly targeted immigrant-origin voters in Germany. IMGES fills the gap of insufficient data in the field of immigrant-origin voters with a combination of proven and novel survey measures of the electoral behavior of people with a background from either Türkiye or from the former Soviet Union or its successor states. The study was carried out in a post-election, cross-sectional survey in 2017. Its compatibility with the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), the Ethnic Minority British Election Study (EMBES), and the Dutch Ethnic Minority Election Study (DEMES) allows for in-depth comparative analyses between immigrant-origin voters and natives across different countries. In addition to standard measures of electoral behavior, the data include measures of immigrant-specific factors relevant to voting behavior. Moreover, the dataset is not limited to voting behavior in Germany, it also includes transnational voting behavior in the respective countries of origin.

This article assesses the extent to which party youth wings participate in candidate selection and the factors that explain their (lack of) success, focusing on the interplay of formal and informal mechanisms with institutional rules. The results indicate an iceberg-shaped political recruitment ladder, with a stark compression of youth wing representation in the visible steps of candidates and MPs. More youth wing candidates are included in party lists as district magnitude increases, and there is evidence of an apprenticeship effect, with most youth wing candidates who are reselected able to improve their list position. More importantly, informal mechanisms and negotiations between youth wings and the mother party leadership emerge as a central factor in the ability of youth wings to influence candidate lists.

Political scientists frequently argue that presidential and parliamentary democracies produce different policy outcomes but fail to fully consider semi-presidential democracies. To demonstrate the importance of considering semi-presidentialism, I reanalyze an existing argument that presidential democracies have more labor mobility than parliamentary democracies because presidential democracies empower special interests who support immigration. I replicate previous analyses and find little evidence that the type of democracy affects labor mobility. Political scientists need to consider semi-presidentialism or risk erroneous inferences. Further, theories of institutions and immigration policy, and institutional theories more generally, should focus on more specific institutions rather than rely on the blunt distinctions between types of democracies.

Central to the partisan divide in American politics is disagreement over the fundamental legitimacy of American elections. Due to the decentralized nature of election administration in the US, these disagreements have led to a complex web of heterogeneous electoral institutions. Scholars have made impressive progress on untangling the effects of these different institutions — unfortunately, less is known about the sources of adoption of such proposals. Using time-series cross-sectional data on the adoption of various electoral policies by state governments from 2001–2018, I examine the role of politics and identity in shaping the types of electoral interventions adopted by state legislatures during an important period of increasing politicization of such interventions. Applying dynamic panel models and constructing a novel measure of the concentration of Black population within competitive congressional districts, I find that the effects of race, competition, and ideology on electoral interventions differ across both partisan lines and issue areas.