Endogenous party structure

This paper proposes a model of two-party representative democracy on a single-dimensional political space, in which voters choose their parties in order to influence the parties’ choices of representative. After two candidates are selected as the median of each party’s support group, Nature determines the candidates’ relative likability (valence). Based on the candidates’ political positions and relative likability, voters vote for the preferable candidate without being tied to their party’s choice. We show that (1) there exists a nontrivial equilibrium under natural conditions, and (2) the equilibrium party border and the ex ante probabilities of the two-party candidates winning are sensitive to the distribution of voters. In particular, we show that if a party has a more concentrated subgroup, then the party tends to alienate its centrally located voters, and the party’s probability of winning the final election is reduced. Even if voter distribution is symmetric, an extremist party (from either side) can emerge as voters become more politically divided.     

Voter turnout in a multidimensional policy space

Many factors influence the likelihood of citizens turning out to vote. In this paper we focus our attention on issue voting, that is, on the likelihood that different policies offered by politicians affect the probability of voting. If voters consider both the benefits and the costs of voting, rational voters will only vote when politicians offer differentiated policies. In a multidimensional policy space this implies that citizens only vote when they perceive enough difference on the issues they care about the most. We investigate the role of voter abstention due to indifference in a unidimensional and a multidimensional policy setting using data from the US National Election Studies for 1972–2000 and find support for our predictions: voters perceiving a small difference between the platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties are less likely to vote; and voters who perceive the two parties as more different on a larger number of issues are significantly more likely to vote.     

An economic offer they cannot refuse! Economic expectations on incumbent government support in Core and periphery European countries

The importance of economic conditions on election outcomes is well established. This paper supplements the standard approach to economic voting by assessing government support from a highly debated perspective of European spaces: Core countries and Periphery countries (Central Eastern European and Southern countries). The paper reveals that the economic conditions perceived by voters in the future are expected to differently affect incumbent government support depending on the macroeconomic position of the country. This paper finds that, contrary to Core countries' electors, voters in periphery countries are keener to support the incumbent governments if the economic outputs are positive. It concludes that positive economic expectations are strongly and positively associated with incumbent government support, regardless of previous vote choice, while negative economic expectations are strongly and negatively associated with government support.     

Political parties' use of web based marketing: some preliminary findings relating to first‐time voters in the 2005 general election

• This paper examines the marketing of political parties, via websites, in the 2005 UK general election with specific reference to first‐time voters (age 18–24). Common perception views young voters as predominantly politically apathetic and less likely to vote than older generations. However, research literature suggests given the right message and medium, the group will engage in the political process. Could the Internet provide a path to engaging younger voters and will websites become a key marketing vehicle for political parties?
• Young voters were asked to review political party websites using an extended web assessment method (EWAM), which is an evaluation tool created to determine both the importance and presence of website evaluation criteria. Preliminary research suggests that respondents felt the Internet had a significant role to play in the election process and marketing of campaign messages. However, while political parties scored well in relation to the technical/software aspects of website design, participants felt website material had little appeal and were ineffective in influencing voter intent.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Party loyalty as habit formation

In most democracies, at least two out of any three individuals vote for the same party in sequential elections. This paper presents a model in which vote‐persistence is partly due to the dependence of the utility on the previous voting decision. This dependence is termed ‘habit formation’. The model and its implications are supported by individual‐level panel data on the presidential elections in the USA in 1972 and 1976. For example, it is found that the voting probability is a function of the lagged choice variable, even when the endogeneity of the lagged variable is accounted for, and that the tendency to vote for different parties in sequential elections decreased with the age of the voter. Furthermore, using structural estimation the effect of habit is estimated, while allowing unobserved differences among respondents. The structural habit parameter implies that the effect of previous votes on the current decision is quite strong. The habit model fits the data better than the traditional ‘party identification’ model. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The paradox of gender voting: An exploratory analysis

Voting studies have documented that white collar workers tend to vote for conservative parties and blue collar workers for parties that advance working class interests. In the United States during the era (1980–1992) of Republican Presidents Reagan and Bush, women who worked in white collar jobs tended to vote for the Democratic party and men for the more conservative Republican party. This shift created the paradox of gender voting, which this article explains. The effect of gender on vote is small but attains statistical significance due to the suppressor effect of occupation. Two interpretations of the gender effect are tested: thematerialist holds that women's occupation and class identification affect this gap; thepost-materialist suggests that affluence is pivotal. The materialist interpretation fits the data from the survey of the national election of 1984 — the middle-most election of the three won by the Republicans— but the post-materialist interpretation may explain the vote of the very affluent.To Morris Rosenberg and Roberta Simmons, fine sociologists who clarified the suppressor effect and causes of self-esteem.     

Ambiguity in Electoral Competition

The paper proposes an explanation to why electoral competition induces parties to state ambiguous platforms even if voters dislike ambiguity. A platform is ambiguous if different voters may interpret it as different policy proposals. An ambiguous platform puts more or less emphasis on alternative policies so that it is more or less easily interpreted as one policy or the other. I suppose that a party can monitor exactly this platform design but cannot target its communications to individuals one by one. Each individual votes according to her understanding of the parties’ platforms but dislikes ambiguity. It is shown that this electoral competition has no Nash equilibrium. Nevertheless its max–min strategies are the optimal strategies of the Downsian game in mixed strategies. Furthermore, if parties behave prudently enough and if the voters aversion to ambiguity is small enough, these strategies do form an equilibrium.     

Strategic participation and the median voter result

In a seminal paper on electoral equilibrium under majority rule, Ledyard (1984) demonstrates that strategic participation by voters results in an electoral equilibrium at the proposal that maximizes the utility of a randomly selected voter. Palfrey and Rosenthal (1985) limit the usefulness of this result by showing that strategic participation rates are miniscule in large electorates, and that the incentive to participate vanishes completely as the electorate grows without bound. The most reasonable modification of Ledyard’s approach that circumvents these criticisms is to allow for a negative cost of voting. We show that when voters can have even an arbitrarily small negative cost of voting, there is an electorate sufficiently large so that any proposal is defeated or tied by the median proposal. This observation raises questions about the existence of electoral equilibrium under strategic participation, and is relevant to the efficiency of elections.     

Can People Explain Their Own Vote? Introspective Questions as Indicators of Salience in the 1995 Quebec Referendum on Sovereignty

Most scholars doubt that voters are able to explain their own vote. We argue that introspective questions whereby respondents are invited to tell, in their own words, the reasons why they vote the way they do, provide useful information on which considerations are most salient in their voting decisions. We show that open-ended questions about reasons for voting Yes or No in the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty help us to sort out subgroups of voters for whom a given consideration is more salient.     

A positive correlation between turnout and plurality does not refute the rational voter model

Many papers have tested the prediction of the rational voter model that, ceteris paribus, turnout will be low when potential voters expect the winner's plurality to be large. The appropriate null hypothesis, however, is unclear. We show that statistical models of voting in which each voter's decision of whether to vote does not vary with the expected plurality can nonetheless generate data which lead to both positive and negative correlations between turnout and plurality.     

Can the majority lose the election?

One may believe that plurality voting guarantees that the preferences of a majority of the population are implemented. It is shown that by selecting platforms consisting of stances on binary issues the implemented stances may be misaligned with the population. In a model where parties are free to enter, a party preferred by only a minority can win. In these equilibria a third party pulls votes from the one representing the majority of the population. The result is shown to hold regardless of the number of issues, whether individuals vote sincerely or strategically, and allowing for coalitions.     

Affect versus cognition: Wishful thinking on election day: An analysis using exit poll data from Belgium

Citizens tend to overestimate the electoral success of their preferred party. We investigate the extent to which Belgian voters overestimate the result of the party that they vote for and the factors that explain which voters do so more than others. Our focus is on the impact of educational attainment and partisan attachment on the overestimation of one’s party’s result. Previous research in this field has relied on data gathered in the months before the elections, which introduces a substantial amount of uncertainty and variation over time into the measurements of citizens’ vote share estimations. As an alternative, we investigate voters’ estimations of their party’s electoral success by means of data gathered in an exit poll survey. Our results show partisan attachments to have a strong impact on overestimations, which suggests that a wishful thinking mechanism is in play. Furthermore, we find that the extent to which partisan attachments increase citizens’ overestimations depends on a voter’s level of education.     

Targeted campaign competition,loyal voters,and supermajorities

We consider campaign competition in which candidates compete for votes among a continuum of voters by engaging in persuasive efforts that are targetable. Each individual voter is persuaded by campaign effort and votes for the candidate who targets more persuasive effort to this voter. Each candidate chooses a level of total campaign effort and allocates his effort among the set of voters. We completely characterize equilibrium for the majoritarian objective game and compare that to the vote-share maximizing game. If the candidates are symmetric ex ante, both types of electoral competition dissipate the rents from office in expectation. However, the equilibria arising under the two electoral objectives qualitatively differ. In majoritarian elections, candidates randomize over their level of total campaign effort, which provides support for the puzzling phenomenon of the emergence of supermajorities in majoritarian systems. Vote-share maximization leads to an equilibrium in which both candidates make deterministic budget choices and reach a precise fifty–fifty split of vote shares. We also study how asymmetry between the candidates affects the equilibrium. If some share of the voters is loyal to one of the candidates, then both candidates expend the same expected efforts in equilibrium, but the advantaged candidate wins with higher probability for majoritarian voting or a higher share of voters for vote-share maximization.     

Campaign dynamics of cognitive accessibility of political judgments: measuring the impact of campaigns and campaign events using response latencies in two German rolling cross section studies

Do campaigns matter? Based on two rolling cross-section computer-assisted telephone surveys conducted in the run-up to the 2009 and 2013 German Federal Election, we test whether we can detect campaign effects on the accessibility of voters’ judgments: how do response latencies of political judgments evolve over the course of campaigns? The study uses response latencies, i.e. the standardized time it takes respondents to answer a survey question, as a proxy measurement of cognitive accessibility of political judgments. If campaigns do help voters to make up their minds, we should be able to observe changes at the implicit level of response latencies. Do people answer questions about their voting behavior and political attitudes faster as Election Day comes closer? Our results suggest that attitudes towards candidates and voting intentions become more cognitively accessible during campaigns whereas the accessibility of party identification is conditional on the contextual features of campaigns. In addition we find specific short-term effects of TV debates.     

Abstention and political competition

The classical literature on spatial majority voting postulates that all citizens vote. The Median Voter Theorem (MVT) then obtains when parties have perfect information on voter behavior and are either office-seekers (“Downsian”) or ideological. This paper introduces abstention, a simple yet realistic modification. We show that the main features of the MVT survive to a large extent but subject to some qualifications. First, the winning policy does not bear any necessary relation to the median voter. Second, there exist examples in which the candidates choose different positions at equilibrium. Third, equilibrium may fail to exist or be unique. Finally, the equilibria of the model with office-motivated parties may differ from the ones where parties are ideological. Received: 18 September 1999 / Accepted: 31 January 2000     

Voting with a Hand on the Bible and Not on the Wallet: The 1996 Video Poker Referendum in Louisiana

Abstract . The 1996 gambling referendum in Louisiana provided a unique opportunity to study voters' preferences. At the time of the referendum, video poker machines legally operated in all of Louisiana's 64 parishes (counties). Video poker was voted down in 31 parishes and retained in 33 parishes. Voters also allowed the New Orleans land‐based casino and 15 riverboat casinos to continue their operations. The extant horse racing and pari‐mutuel betting were not voted on. We examine the economic, demographic, and religious factors that influenced how people voted on the issue of legalized video poker. This study is of interest because in recent years, legalized gambling has been expanding around the world. We know of no other referendum on gambling that covered an area as large as an entire U.S. state—all of Louisiana—and offered voters control over gambling in their locality. Months before the 1996 referendum, the news media suggested several factors that might determine the outcome of the vote. The media concluded that concern over jobs would be the major influence on the outcome. Other important factors included a campaign against gambling by Southern Baptist churches and the simultaneous national presidential election. We investigate whether these factors, along with demographic factors such as age and education, influenced the results of the gambling referendum. Surprisingly, we found no clear evidence that the economic health of a parish or the preexisting size of its gambling industry determined the vote. The presence of Southern Baptists in a parish increased the likelihood that gambling would be voted down. Democratic voters tended to vote for gambling, as did black voters. Age and education levels of voters did not appear to influence their votes on gambling. Voters in parishes that bordered other states were more likely to retain gambling. Overall, it appeared that personal values were more important in determining voter behavior than financial considerations. People were voting with their hearts, not their pocketbooks.     

What is the role of perceived leadership capacity in presidential politics?

The relevance of leadership models in presidential leadership, and principally the role of perceived leadership in presidential election years, is an area of study with limited development but increasing importance. This study explores the relationship between young voters' leadership assessment of presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, and their reports of voting behavior during the 2008 presidential election. Leadership perceptions were collected from 812 respondents prior to the election. Results indicate that candidate leadership assessments have a significant effect on candidate preference after controlling for the impact of party identification and self‐perceived political efficacy. Further, political efficacy significantly impacted respondents' intent to vote in the election after controlling for these same variables. Party affiliation produced significant differences across the political ideology, leadership ratings, political efficacy, and likelihood of voting variables. The study concludes with a discussion of the implications as they pertain to political leadership.     

Equilibria in the spatial stochastic model of voting with party activists

Stochastic models of elections typically indicate that all parties, in equilibrium, will adopt positions at the electoral center. Empirical analyses discussed in this paper suggest that convergence of this kind is rarely observed. Here we examine a stochastic electoral model where parties differ in their valences – the electorally perceived, non-policy “quality” of the party leader. It is assumed that valence may either be exogenous, in the sense of being an intrinsic characteristic of the leader, or may be due to the contributions of party activists, who donate time and money and thus enhance electoral support for the party. Theorem 1 shows that vote maximization depends on balancing these two opposed effects. Theorem 2 provides the necessary and sufficient conditions for convergence to the electoral mean when activist valence is zero. The paper then examines empirical electoral models for the Netherlands circa 1980 and Britain in 1979, 1992 and 1997 and shows that party divergence from the electoral mean cannot be accounted for by exogenous valence alone. The balance condition suggests that the success of the Labour party in the election of 1997 can be attributed to a combination of high exogenous valence and pro-Europe activist support.     

Weighted representative democracy

We propose a new system of democratic representation. Any voter can choose any legislator as her representative; thus, different legislators can represent different numbers of voters. Decisions in the legislature are made by weighted majority voting, where the weight of each legislator is determined by the number of voters she represents. We show that, if the size of the electorate is very large, then with very high probability, the decisions obtained in the legislature agree with those which would have been reached by a popular referendum decided by simple majority vote.     

Maximizing political vote in multiple districts

This paper models a resource allocation problem in the political context. Voters and political candidates of two parties are positioned in each of n given electoral districts. We assume that each voter will vote for the candidate he is more attracted to. This attraction is modeled by an attraction function. Each of the parties now attempts to allocate a finite budget to maximize their objective, which is either the popular vote or the number of districts, in which the party has a majority. Individual scenarios are examined with respect to leader-follower solutions and Nash equilibria. The paper then describes a dynamic model that successively allocates existing funds plus additional donations to candidates in different electoral districts.