Electoral Studies最新文献

Uncertainty is ubiquitous in elections, and candidates and parties often intentionally create uncertainty to benefit themselves. However, there is no consensus in existing research on how parties balance the trade-off between distinction and broad appeal without alienating their supporters. This paper proposes a novel theory that a party's brand structures when strategies that blur or obfuscate a party or candidate's position are effective. In particular, I argue voters respond negatively to appeals that signal brand deviation from co-partisans on issues that are central to their party's brand. Outside of the brand, the trade-offs between clarity and ambivalence will be weaker. I test these expectations in two survey experiments on a quota sample of the United States population. I find that the efficacy of blurred electoral varies by the brand centrality of an issue, the blurring strategy deployed, and the co- or out-partisan status of the receiver. These findings have implications for our understanding of how parties can navigate the costs and benefits of clear brands and blurred appeals in contemporary party competition.

In recent years, several jurisdictions have lowered the voting age, with many more discussing it. Sceptics question whether young people are ready to vote, while supporters argue that allowing them to vote would increase their specific engagement with politics. To test the latter argument, we use a series of register-based surveys of over 10,000 German adolescents. Knowing the exact birthdates of our respondents, we estimate the causal effect of eligibility on their information-seeking behaviour in a regression discontinuity design. While eligible and non-eligible respondents do not differ in their fundamental political dispositions, those allowed to vote are more likely to discuss politics with their family and friends and to use a voting advice application. This effect appears to be stronger for voting age 16 than for 18. The right to vote changes behaviour. Therefore, we cannot conclude from the behaviour of ineligible citizens that they are unfit to vote.

This paper investigates whether wildfires are linked to increases in vote share for a green party in government. We argue that natural disasters move climate change action up on voters’ agendas, consequently affecting electoral behavior. Making use of the impact of an intense wildfire season in Sweden in 2018, we analyze changes in propensity to vote for a green governing party after experiencing wildfires in the election year. The Green party’s vote share is significantly larger than expected in affected municipalities compared to unaffected municipalities, with an overall effect size of about 1 percentage point in the national election and 1.2 percentage points in the local election. These effect sizes are substantial given typical green party vote shares. Meanwhile, the incumbent Social Democratic party appears to have been electorally punished for the fires. The findings contribute to the literature on natural disasters and climate opinion, as well as on the impact of local conditions on electoral behavior.

Young people continue to be underrepresented in formal politics. Previous research indicates that being a non-middle-aged candidate negatively affects electoral success. What are the origins of this performance gap? This article explores three potential sources of age-related disadvantage: Party affiliation, individual resources, and direct party and voter support. Drawing on data from 21 OECD countries, I show, first, that many age-related disadvantages take a non-linear shape. Both young and senior candidates run for smaller, poorer, and more marginal parties. They spend significantly less money on their campaigns than middle-aged competitors, and young candidates furthermore lack political experience. Young and senior candidates are placed on lower list positions in party-centred electoral systems and receive fewer preference votes in candidate-centred systems. Thus, both parties and voters fail to effectively counter structural age-disadvantages. This article contributes to our understanding of the shape and origins of age-related electoral disadvantages and illustrates the multifaceted reasons for youth's continued political under-representation.

Much of the research on youth representation focuses on the final stage of electoral recruitment: young peoples' presence in legislatures. We expand this scope using a supply and demand framework to document the representation of young people not only in parliament but also in the candidate stage that proceeds it. Drawing on an extensive dataset of more than 3000 candidates in Canadian federal elections from 2008 to 2021, we show that young peoples’ numerical underrepresentation is not primarily a function of voter discrimination but rather a result of the small number of young candidates who come forward. We find that limited youth representation in the candidate pool translates into low representation rates in parliament. These results suggest that efforts to ameliorate youth underrepresentation in politics must be attentive to supply-side issues, including party gatekeeping, resource constraints, political ambition, and the motivations for running for office.

Given the changes in partisan dynamics in the 21st century, is partisanship still the most important driver of voting decisions in American presidential elections as posited by Bartels’s (2000) pivotal work? To answer this, we extend Bartels’s original analysis on the changing importance of partisanship in presidential and congressional voting through the 2020 presidential election. We also provide a more fully specified model of vote choice to ensure any changes in the role of partisanship are not driven by an omitted predictor variable. In the bivariate model, we show that partisanship remains relatively flat since Bartels’s analysis ended in 1996, with a spike during the 2012 election. In the model including additional covariates, we show that the impact of partisanship on presidential vote choice is higher now than at any point since 1972, although the change in importance of partisanship since 1984 is negligible. This is driven largely by including political ideology in the vote choice model. We conclude that partisanship remains the most important driver of vote choice in presidential elections, even if its power has been slightly overstated in the past.

29 October 2023 marked the centennial of the Republic of Turkey. Over the past hundred years, the country has undergone major institutional changes, experiencing periods of democracy and non-democracy, bicameralism and unicameralism, parliamentary and presidential systems, and majoritarian and proportional electoral systems. This unique range of changes provides excellent opportunities for studying various theoretically significant research questions. This article introduces a novel dataset encompassing the entire population of legislators and their parliamentary activities in Turkey over the last century. The dataset includes detailed information on (i) election results by districts, (ii) the sociodemographic and political backgrounds of 12,500 legislators, (iii) the frequency with which legislators made speeches, asked questions and introduced private members’ bills, and (iv) the content of these parliamentary activities (i.e., the policy area focus) from the period of 1920–2023. I demonstrate the usefulness of the data through descriptive analyses in three areas, political elites across space, political elites across time, and the patterns of policy prioritization in the parliament. I conclude by suggesting areas of research for future studies.

This paper contributes to a growing body of literature on affective polarization by examining the understudied role of party rhetoric on partisan divides in the electorate. Despite a recent growth of research on affective polarization in multiparty systems, no study tests the effect of negative campaigning on affective polarization outside the US. This paper tests whether negative campaigning between parties during electoral campaigns is associated with higher levels of affective polarization. Combining data from the CSES and an expert survey on party rhetoric, we analyze data from sixteen countries (seventeen elections) and eighty-six parties, and present the first large scale analysis of the effect of party rhetoric on affective polarization. Our results show that affective polarization is larger between parties adopting a negative tone. We also show more specifically that affective polarization is higher for individuals whose party attacks or is attacked by the other party. In addition, we find that the positive association between attacks and affective polarization increases with partisan strength.

Are political leaders less popular among voters than they used to be? If so, why? Many studies have mapped a decline in citizens' political trust and satisfaction with democracy, but we know less about whether leader popularity is in decline, and if so, what drives this trend. This paper examines these questions using unique data on major party leader popularity and leadership traits from the Australian Election Study collected over four decades. The results show that Australia's major party leaders have become less popular over time. We test a theoretical model which explains declining leader popularity by partisan dealignment and the role of leader integrity. The analyses show that the effect of partisanship on leader popularity has weakened over time, while leader integrity traits have become more important. These findings apply to both major party leaders that have won elections as well as those leaders that have lost elections.

Across Western Europe, the electoral base of formerly dominating parties on the left and the right has been eroding in the past decades. In contrast, both far-right parties and green parties could expand their vote share in numerous elections all over Western Europe - especially among younger voters. Still, those transformations in multiparty systems remain understudied: Are those electoral differences representing a cohort effect within the left and within the right bloc? This study uses survey data from ten Western European countries spanning over 60 years to test for cohort differences in political blocs. By applying multilevel logistic regression models and generalized additive mixed models, the analysis yields generational differences within the left and the right, with more recent cohorts being more likely to vote for greens than other left-wing and more likely to prefer the far-right over other right-wing parties. Those results shed light on the cohort-driven electoral realignment in Western Europe.