Electoral Studies最新文献

Age is possibly the strongest known individual-level socio-demographic determinant of participation in elections. Despite its substantial influence in shaping electoral outcomes, evidence-based understanding of the steep decline in turnout at older ages is scarce. We suggest that time-related proximity to death and the associated decline in cognitive and physical functioning may explain this relationship. With full population data on the participation of the 65+ year-old electorate in the 1999 parliamentary elections in Finland linked to a more than 21-year mortality follow-up, we demonstrate that the remaining lifetime is a more powerful predictor of voting than age, often by an order of magnitude. These results offer a novel theoretical principle into understanding the fundamental age-related decline in electoral participation at older ages: It is not the time from the cradle, but the time to the grave, that counts more.

Electoral divides mobilized by the far right and the new left typically have an important spatial component. An urban-rural cleavage (originally theorized by Lipset and Rokkan) seems to have re-surfaced. This paper argues that a cleavage perspective on spatial political divides remains insightful but that the urban-rural cleavage needs to be re-conceptualized for the knowledge society era. Building on cleavage theory and using novel Swiss survey data, the study shows that spatial divides today can be understood as conflicts that are largely sectoral and educational at their core (rooted in the knowledge-based economy). However, these divides may become politically mobilized and perceived through a lens of place. Categories like ‘urban/rural’ can structure people's mental maps of society, even when they inaccurately capture political conflicts' structural and geographical underpinnings.

If anti-immigration parties perform well in national elections, the media also in other countries will cover their success. This initiates a process of cross-national influence, which we argue polarizes public opinion abroad. This article examines the case of migration attitudes and how they are shaped by national election outcomes in other countries. We analyze data from the European Social Survey (ESS), and individual-level data from the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES) in the context of the 2017 federal election in Germany. The combined findings from these analyses support our argument: citizens' polarization in one country is influenced by foreign anti-immigration parties’ electoral success. Our research holds direct implications for the understanding of public attitudes toward migration, how public opinion is formed, political polarization, and cross-country political diffusion processes.

Much work has shown that, at all levels, Black citizens tend to be descriptively underrepresented in government. We take up the question of Black descriptive representation at the level of the county legislature, gathering data on the composition of North Carolina’s 100 county commissions. We propose an alternative measure of descriptive representation, termed “seats above expectation”, and apply a counterfactual simulation approach to gauge the effects of at-large and ward-based elections. We find that Black citizens are underrepresented statewide: there are four fewer Black county commissioners than we would expect, based on the current county board sizes, demographics, and institutional arrangements. However, we find that universal implementation of ward-based elections would increase the statewide total of Black county commissioners by 20 in expectation, a 17% increase over the baseline. Because our methodological approach does not require a natural experiment or policy change, scholars can estimate average treatment effects (ATEs) of ward-based elections on minority descriptive representation across a wider array of locales.

We investigate the distributive preferences of elected leaders in local democracies, who are tasked with ”everyday assistance” and personally know their constituents. In this setting, economic distribution is driven more by leader preferences and less by efficiency concerns, as in the lower information setting typically described in the literature. In local democracy, we argue voters can explicitly select leaders who prefer to distribute to a broad group of supporters, who further conform to norms of targeting the most needy among supporters. In this article, we develop a novel behavioral measure that isolates leaders’ distributive preferences from direct electoral benefit, which we implement in villages across the Indian state of Rajasthan. We find elected leaders prefer to distribute 94% more to supporters and 17% more to supporters one standard deviation below the mean village wealth. This suggests local elections are consistent with significant distribution to the poor, albeit with political biases.

A growing literature posits that vote buying dynamics depend on characteristics of the context and its voters. We explore vote buying in Nepal using a multi-methods approach combining survey experiments, semi-structured interviews, and focus group discussions. We find that vote buying in Nepal aligns somewhat with other contexts. A list experiment reveals approximately 25% of Nepali voters receive a voter-buying offer and, in an unmonitored but contingent exchange, the same percentage vote for the offeror candidate or party. Cash and other private goods are the most common offers. In contrast to findings from other contexts, however, voter education level is the strongest predictor of refraining from vote buying in Nepal, and wealth is not a significant predictor. Our list experiment also finds that, in Nepal, clientelism appears to be a socially undesirable activity. Overall, our results support the increasingly dominant viewpoint that vote buying is highly context dependent.

When do electoral incentives encourage candidates to target immigrants with discriminatory rhetoric? I address this question through a novel dataset of refugee-related tweets by elites in Lebanon, the country hosting the most Syrian refugees per capita globally. I find that Lebanon’s 2018 election, the first under a new set of electoral rules, precipitated an increase in anti-migrant tweets. However, the electoral campaign did not affect candidates’ rhetoric uniformly, but rather fueled xenophobic discourses specifically among Christian candidates, whose voter base is particularly hostile towards refugees, and especially among Christians facing the fiercest electoral competition. This paper makes three contributions: theoretically, it elucidates the consequences of partisan competition for xenophobia; conceptually, it relaxes an assumption common in the ethnic institutions literature that ethnic composition is fixed over time; and empirically, it demonstrates how social media data can be harnessed for expanding a nascent literature on migration politics in the Global South.

This article compares the relationship between candidate age and political selection on the local and national level of politics. On which level are young candidates more likely to be selected by parties and elected by voters? Using register data from Finland, covering over 100,000 candidates from 2011 to 2021, we test two competing hypotheses: the “stepping stone” hypothesis relating to the traditional pipeline theory of political representation, and the “parachute” hypothesis, which represents a non-hierarchical approach to political careers. Our findings provide slightly more support for the latter hypothesis. While national elections are more competitive, comparatively more young candidates are running in these contests. We also find that the electoral disadvantage for young candidates is slightly larger in municipal than in national elections. Based on election survey data, we show that is this due to age affinity effects within the electorate, where senior voters’ candidate preferences have greater weight.

We investigate whether the presence of fiscal rules might limit the insurgence of a Political Budget Cycle (PBC) in investment spending at municipal level. Data based on the balance sheets of Italian municipalities are explored for the period 1999–2012. We investigate the effect of the Domestic Stability Pact (DSP) and rely on the fact that, since 2001, this tax rule has not been binding for municipalities with under 5,000 inhabitants. Our main contribution consists of exploiting this quasi-experimental setting by means of a difference-in-discontinuities estimation strategy in order to obtain unbiased estimates. In comparison with existing results, our study makes three observations. Firstly, the easing of fiscal rules generates an increase in capital expenditure only in the year immediately before elections. Secondly, this increase only arises for those investments which produce immediately-visible effects. Finally, the size of the electoral cycle shows a 136 percent increase in these investments which is more than five times larger than that reported in the literature.

Of the myriad cues voters rely on to evaluate political candidates, only one cue is available to all voters in all candidate-based elections — the candidates’ names. Drawing upon multiple decades of election data in local and congressional elections in the United States, I examine the relationship between the processing fluency (pronounceability and commonality) of political candidates’ names and vote share. I observe a strong, positive relationship for name pronounceability and more ambiguous results for name commonality. A one-standard deviation increase in pronounceability is associated with an increased vote share of 0.8 percentage points in congressional general elections, 1.4 percentage points in congressional primary elections, and 0.29 percentage points in local elections. Despite some sensitivity to how fluency is conceptualized, these findings suggest that the phonological characteristics of candidates’ names are consequential heuristics that voters use to evaluate candidates. Future research should seek to unpack the causal processes underlying these results by disentangling the racial and ethnic cues embedded in names.