170,034 research outputs found
On mismeasurement of strategic voting under mixed member electoral systems
No full textUnder mixed systems, voters cast two votes to elect the same legislative body: one vote for parties using proportional rules and one for candidates using majoritarian rules. Voters are said to cast straight-tickets if the candidate they vote for is of the same party as their proportional vote; otherwise, they are said to cast split-tickets. Split-ticket voting is commonly used as a measure of strategic voting as splitters are usually assumed to express their true preference in one vote but vote strategically in the other. This study challenges this practice showing that split-ticket voting does not necessarily indicate strategic voting, just as straight-ticket voting does not necessarily indicate a sincere vote. This result has wider consequences as it indicates that measuring strategic voting from observed behaviour can result in incorrect conclusions about vote choice
Portfolio-specific accountability and retrospective voting: The case of Italy
No full textHow do voters attribute responsibility for government outcomes when they are the result of a collective decision taken by multiple parties within a coalition government? In this article we test the argument that in a multiparty coalition system, responsibility attribution should vary according to the quantity and quality of portfolios that the coalition partner controls. The article uses data from the Italian National Election Study in Italy, a country usually characterized by governments formed by more than two parties. We find no consistent empirical evidence that coalition parties collectively suffer from perceived negative performance. While the prime minister party is held responsible on average more than the other coalition partners, responsibility attribution decreases by party size in the parliament rather than by the quantity of ministerial portfolios the incumbent party controls. Issue saliency, however, plays an important role in the retrospective voting mechanism. These results have important implications for our understanding of electoral behaviour and democratic accountability
Split-Ticket Voting in Mixed-Member Electoral Systems: A Theoretical and Methodological Investigation
No full textWhy do voters support different parties at elections when given the opportunity of casting two votes to elect the same representative body?
This book relaxes common assumptions in the voting behaviour literature to provide an in-depth study of split-ticket voting across ten established and non-established democracies. It proposes an original framework and combines a theoretical investigation with a purely methodological analysis to test the reliability of the predictive models.
The broader picture that emerges is the one of a ‘simple’ voter with ‘sophisticated’ preferences. Parties still function as the principal cue for voting, but voters appear sophisticated in that they often like more than one party or choose candidates regardless of their party affiliation.
Despite mixed-member systems being one of the most complicated electoral systems of all, there is no evidence supporting the conclusion that voters are not able to cope with the complexity of the electoral rules
The effect of pre-electoral party coordination on vote choice: evidence from the Italian regional elections
No full textAlthough it is theoretically relevant, the effect of pre-electoral coalitions on vote choice remains a largely unexplored area in the field of party strategy. The article addresses this gap by focusing on the Italian regional elections, where the electoral rules allow parties to run alone and, at the same time, to present pre-electoral coalitions on the ballot paper. This setting allows us to investigate under what conditions citizens vote for their preferred party and the coalition that this party indicated to coalesce with. The results suggest that ideological congruence and the size of the parties entering a pre-electoral agreement are decisive factors. Findings also reveal that the time elapsed since the establishment of a coalition has no effect on vote choice
On the nature of voters' coalition preferences
No full textAn expanding literature indicates that in multiparty systems with coalition governments, citizens consider the post-electoral bargaining process among parties when casting their vote. Yet, we know surprisingly little about the nature of voters’ coalition preferences. This paper uses data from the Austrian National Election Study to examine the determinants as well as the independence of preferences for coalitions as political object. We find that coalition preferences are strongly informed by spatial considerations; but additional non-ideological factors, such as party and leader preferences, also play a fundamental role. We also find that coalitions enjoy a certain degree of independence from other objects of vote choice and they do not always represent a simple average score on the feeling thermometer of the constituent parties. There are, however, substantial differences among voters, with party identifiers and those with extreme ideology being less likely to consider coalitions as separate entities from their component parties
Learning from the other side: how social networks influence turnout in a referendum campaign
No full textInterpersonal discussion is considered to be one of the most influential sources of opinion formation and behaviour. Yet, an unresolved puzzle remains within the literature: while some studies show that discussion with not like-minded citizens depresses political participation, other studies, on the contrary, indicate that the same type of interpersonal discussion can foster political engagement. In this study, we address this unresolved democratic dilemma for the first time in a context of direct democracy, by focussing on the campaign leading to the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum. Specifically, we pay particular attention to the interaction between network diversity, ambivalence, and political knowledge. The findings show that frequent interactions with not like-minded citizens increase turnout. The results based on regression models and structural equation modelling indicate that this positive effect is channelled mainly through political learning, since network diversity increases factual knowledge about the constitutional reform, which in turn is associated with an increase in turnout. We do not find a significant effect of network diversity on ambivalence, as predicted by previous studies. These findings have important implications for deliberative theories and campaign strategies
The non-ideological component of coalition preferences
No full textRecent research on political attitudes has emphasized that coalition preferences determine electoral choices, prompting scholars to investigate the sources of coalition preferences. While it is not surprising that coalition preferences are strongly informed by spatial considerations, several studies have drawn attention to additional nonideological factors. Relying on this insight, the present study aims to systematically investigate the nonideological or valence component of coalition preferences. In order to decompose attitudes into their principal ideological and nonideological components, we apply a Bayesian unfolding model to coalition sympathy ratings. We find that coalitions differ strongly with regard to their valence component. This surplus cannot be reconstructed as a linear combination of the coalitions’ constituent party valences and is predominantly structured by campaign valence
Retrospective voting and party support at elections: credit and blame for government and opposition
No full textRetrospective voting is arguably one of the most important mechanisms of representative democracy, and whether or not the public holds the government accountable for its policy performance has been extensively studied. In this paper, we test whether retrospective voting extends to parties in the opposition, that is whether and how parties’ past performance evaluations affect their vote, regardless of whether they were in government or in opposition. Taking advantage of a rich set of questions embedded in a representative German national elections panel, we update our knowledge on the retrospective voting mechanism by modeling retrospective voting at the party level. The findings indicate that the incumbent status is not the only criterion for retrospective voting, ultimately suggesting that both government and opposition parties can expect credit and blame for their conduct and this should provide some impetus for responsive performance of all parties
Split-ticket voting in an STV system: choice in a non-strategic context
No full textThis article explores the sources of weak party-voting patterns in Irish elections, conceptualising this as split-ticket voting. Ireland provides a context where election results show split-ticket voting is common, but the strategic interpretations of such behaviour that have been very prominent elsewhere are not generally applicable. We employ data from the Irish national election studies to explore the behaviour of individuals embedded in a variety of contexts. The results demonstrate the prevalence of split-ticket voting, and they support the validity of non-strategic explanations. One source of explanation for the patterns we find lies in differences between individuals: partisanship and the extent to which voters are attracted to candidates rather than parties are important. A second source is contextual: the factors connected with the complexity of the choice facing voters have a powerful influence on split-ticket voting
An Evaluation of the Performance and Suitability of RxC Methods for Ecological Inference with Known True Values
No full textEcological inference refers to the study of individuals using aggregate data and it is used in an impressive number of studies; it is well known, however, that the study of individuals using group data suffers from an ecological fallacy problem (Robinson in Am Sociol Rev 15:351–357, 1950). This paper evaluates the accuracy of two recent methods, the Rosen et al. (Stat Neerl 55:134–156, 2001) and the Greiner and Quinn (J R Stat Soc Ser A (Statistics in Society) 172:67–81, 2009) and the long-standing Goodman’s (Am Sociol Rev 18:663–664, 1953; Am J Sociol 64:610–625, 1959) method designed to estimate all cells of R × C tables simultaneously by employing exclusively aggregate data. To conduct these tests we leverage on extensive electoral data for which the true quantities of interest are known. In particular, we focus on examining the extent to which the confidence intervals provided by the three methods contain the true values. The paper also provides important guidelines regarding the appropriate contexts for employing these models
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