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A conference paper about the partisanship of independent voters in Japan is presented which was prepared for presentation at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, in New Orleans, Louisiana. The paper discusses topics including the decision-making of independents, a comparison of the determinants of vote swings before and after electoral reform, and the electoral dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party during 1955-1993.

Since the 1960’s, the majority of researchers studying political behavior in the United States seem content to either ignore the sociological basis of citizen choice or treat social location as a secondary, less important determinant of political choice. The bulk of the work that has been done concerning the sociological basis of citizen choice focuses on the role that membership in demographic group categories plays in shaping political choices. The findings from these sorts of studies has not only reinforced the perception that social location is a secondary, less important determinant of political choice, but also led some to conclude that modern citizens have become largely independent of groups and social influence (Dalton and Wattenberg, 1993:212-3). Although few would agree that this asocial model of political choice accurately represents reality for most Americans, it is nevertheless striking how little in the way of empirical evidence has been compiled to challenge it. The purpose of this paper is to make use of three unique surveys conducted during the 1984, 1992, and 1996 presidential campaigns to take a closer look at the sociological basis of modern citizen choice, specifically the role of social networks on political choice. By shifting the focus away from the sorts of social groups typically studied in political science (i.e., demographic groups) toward social networks, I seek to determine whether modern choice is still strongly linked to social interaction. It is important to note, however, that simply discovering a link between social networks and political choice would not, in and of itself, present a strong challenge to the asocial model of citizen choice. To do so, it is necessary to demonstrate that social influence occurs beyond the boundaries of close relationships (e.g., family, close friends) and takes place in a significant way among less intimate contacts like nonrelatives and casual acquaintances. The paper is divided into two main sections. In the first, I seek to determine what sort of role social networks play in shaping modern candidate choice. Do networks exert a significant and direct impact on candidate choice, even after controlling for key variables like partisanship and issue position? In the second, I look to see whether social influence regarding partisanship and issue preferences is restricted to intimate friends and acquaintances. Does the most important social influence occur within intimate friendships, or do more casual acquaintances exert a significant impact on choice as well? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 includes temporal provisions scheduled to expire in 2007, if not further extended by Congress. The first part of this paper outlines the main provisions and issues of the Voting Rights Act, as amended. A summary of the key findings on unintended and undesirable effects in an urban setting (Dallas, Texas) of the single-member district remedial requirement for ensuring representation to specific minority groups follows. The remainder of the paper describes the path to the radical change in Census 2000 and its implications for Voting Rights Act enforcement. I conclude that the original intent of the Act to protect individuals’ right to cast a vote and have it counted requires new and increased enforcement efforts, but that Section 5 preclearance and the English-only ballot prohibition, both intended as temporary remedial measures, should be allowed to expire in 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The challenges in isolating the substantive conflict in American politics as it actually moves the mass public are truly daunting. Two such challenges dominate all others, however. First, it is necessary to have consistent measures of the main domains of policy conflict across the postwar years, itself a demanding challenge. But second, it is necessary to combine these into a consistent issue structure across that same period, else good individual measures will mislead as much as they help, by masking and distorting the mix of available policy concerns. This paper builds on previous APSA papers aimed at eliciting this issue structure, and moves on to its impact on voting behavior from 1952 through 2000. A set of measures for the policy domains of social welfare, foreign affairs, civil rights, and cultural values are developed, with much confirmation of an existing literature specialized to these domains, plus some twists that arrive with the ability to address them in an extended time-frame. These individual measures are then combined into a more comprehensive picture, an ?issue structure?, so that their influence within a richer issue context can be examined. What results is a picture of postwar American politics at the mass level, confirmed in many familiar ways but, we hope, nuanced in many others and actually disconfirmed in a few. Said differently, what results is a picture of social welfare as the dominating issue concern in this politics among the general public, with foreign affairs as an important?and frequently cross-cutting?secondary concern. Civil rights changes its partisan direction as the postwar years pass. And cultural values does the same, while exploding to prominence in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars study the properties of voting rules, but few extend their studies to legislative institutions such as quorum requirements. This paper investigates the optimal quorum requirement between 1 and N, assuming that decisions are made by simple majority rule. Quorum requirements are evaluated by the probability that they fulfill one of four criteria: 1) the Pareto criterion, 2) a modified version of Rae?s criterion, 3) Expected Social Gain (a utilitarian criterion), and 4) a Non-Negative Representation criterion (a measure of how well the quorum represents the assembly). This paper shows that the optimal quorum according to all four criteria is typically no quorum requirement. However, the optimal quorum according to the third and fourth criterion is N, if non-voters are more likely to oppose the proposal than favor it. Such results have important implications for institutional design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

``Going negative’’ has practical and normative implications for electoral outcomes in all democracies. But most research on campaign strategy is limited to the two-candidate, plurality context provided by many elected offices in the United States. How do campaign strategies change as a function of electoral rules? In this paper, I use recent campaign strategies observed under three different sets of electoral rules in Brazil to illustrate several lessons overlooked in models derived for single member districts, and I discuss implications for building a general model of campaign strategies. The main conclusions of the paper are that (a) negative campaigning should occur under many other electoral systems, though the patterns and calculus of attacks should be considerably more complex; and (b) uncertainty about public opinion and voting behavior can quickly eliminate negative campaigning, especially as district magnitude increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fast growing statistical literatures on matching methods in several disciplines offer the promise of causal inference without resort to the difficult-to-justify functional form assumptions inherent in commonly used parametric methods. However, these literatures also suffer from many diverse and conflicting approaches to estimation, uncertainty, theoretical analysis, and practical advice. In this paper, we propose a unified perspective on matching as a method of nonparametric preprocessing for improving parametric methods. This approach makes it possible for researchers to preprocess their data (such as with the easy-to-use software we offer with this paper) and then to apply whatever familiar statistical techniques they would have used anyway. Under our approach, instead of using matching to replace existing methods, we use it to make existing methods work better, such as by giving more accurate and considerably less model-dependent causal inferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the radical right is open to multiple interpretations. The question addressed in this paper is whether many of these parties have fostered an enduring social base among core voters and, if so, which social sectors are most likely to support them. Part I discusses the alternative theoretical frameworks provided by the classic accounts of the 1950s and 1960s, the ?new social cleavage? thesis common during the last decade, and the theory of partisan dealignment. The chapter then compares evidence to analyze rival hypotheses about the social basis of the radical right vote across fifteen nations, using data drawn from the European Social Survey, 2002 and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, 1996-2001. Part II focuses upon the role of socioeconomic indicators, while Part III considers the enduring gender gap and patterns of generational support. The conclusion considers the implications of these results for understanding the basis of radical right popularity, and for the stability and longevity of these parties. This paper is drawn from Chapter 6 of Radical Right: Parties and Electoral Competition, a new book by the author forthcoming with Cambridge University Press (2005). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the argument that theories of party competition can move beyond the unitary actor assumption and model the impact of intra-party politics on the behavior of parties in the wider system. Concentrating on legislative parties, the paper maps the intra-party factional structure of the Italian DS and uses this to explain the legislative behavior of its parliamentary representatives. The factional structure is mapped by analyzing the motions endorsed, and the speeches made, by delegates at DS party congresses, using a computational text analysis technique developed by Laver, Benoit and Garry (APSR 2003). The results are then used to explain the behavior of DS deputies in key roll call votes in the area of foreign policy, in which different sections of the same party vote in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the role of party system in the outcome of pension reform in Central and Eastern Europe. Mapping party positions in a bi-dimensional space, in which one dimension is left-right and the second is a nationalist-authoritarian vs. cosmopolitan-libertarian dimension, allows predicting the likely pro-reform and anti-reform coalitions. The success of reform in the long-run depends on the types of coalitions that can form and the existence of a minimal consensus between the major left and right parties on the basic blueprint of reform. A roll call analysis of voting in the Polish Sejm brings evidence for the dimensionality of the political space, legislators? ideal points, and the formation of pro-reform and anti-reform coalitions. Results are compared with party positions given by expert evaluations. The study compares Poland?s chances of reform success with those of Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. Unlike the existing literature, which emphasizes the role of crises and international pressures in the outcome of pension reform, this paper argues that the demand-side factors are of limited relevance. It also finds that the concentration of power is a poor predictor of the outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how presidentialism influences legislative party system formation by focusing on the Philippines. The country?s post-transition party system serves as a ?crucial case? in the sense that its institutional configuration, according to an acknowledged theory, is a most likely case of national legislative bipartism, yet the actual party system did not follow the prediction. In this concern the paper examines why the theory does not properly explain the multipartism in post-Marcos Philippines. My analyses of the Philippines illustrate that the theory failed to give due attention to three issues: (1) number of presidential candidates need to be taken as a variable, (2) presidential elections influence the organization of legislative parties by providing preferred party affiliation options for legislative aspirants, and (3) presidential elections affect the cross-district variation rather than the number of parties competing at district-level. A comparative implication of this single-country study is that the influence of presidential election on legislative party system formation may be found at the level of cross-district variation rather than at the level of the number of parties in each district. This conjecture can be tested by cross-national studies in future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As terrorist attacks have become more immediate threats for large nations, what role do fear and concern over terrorism play in campaign strategy, media coverage and vote choice during elections? Election campaigns offer a particularly useful way to examine these issues, principally in countries that recently have experienced deadly terrorist attacks. While the public has relatively little input into security concerns in the short term, elections can offer a time for the public to express their opinion by choosing among various policy options. This paper is the first stage of a project funded by the New Security Challenges Programme of the British Economic and Social Research Council. It will examine the role of terrorist threat and security concerns in elections in Russia and the United States. Under consideration is whether politicians, parties and the media use nationalist or xenophobic rhetoric in their discussions of these issues or whether any of those involved frame the discussion under the broader terms of international affairs and cooperation. The paper uses material from the main Russian nightly news in the 2003 parliamentary elections as well as focus-group discussions on the parliamentary and 2004 presidential campaigns to discuss the framing of terrorist threat in Russian elections. What emerges from the Russian study is that while the prime-time news shows on state-run and commercial television cover terrorism differently, neither provide in-depth or meaningful analysis of the events. State-run television news focused more on international terrorism, while commercial television news featured more on terrorism related to Chechnya and news on Chechnya in general. There was little discussion of any issues, including terrorism, in the 2003 parliament campaign. In turn, focus-group participants found little link between terrorism and vote choice, although the notion of strong, stable Russia was a part of their calculus in their support for the only viable presidential choice, Vladimir Putin, in 2004. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to examine the ?freezing hypothesis? in the case of Belgium by analysing different ?volatility? measures. It applies various volatility measures available to this date and provides a comparative view on their utilities and constraints. By using the longitudinal data of the Euro-Barometer surveys, the paper applies the indicator of ?Consecutive Voting? to voters of new parties (i.e. green and right-wing populist parties) as well as traditional ?cleavage-based? parties in Belgium. The analyses reveal that voters for new parties score a higher Consecutive Voting rate than voters for established parties. These results suggest that even though the Belgian party system is de-pillarised at systemic level as the aggregate ?volatility? indicators depict, cleavage politics is still alive at individual level among traditional voters. The paper thus argues that party systems today still reflect cleavage structures partly if not wholly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a widely held argument that civic engagement and political participation reinforce each other, which remains to be empirically vindicated, especially in the context of developing societies. Using survey data from Kathmandu, this paper examines the structural relationships between civic engagement, electoral participation, and other forms of political participation and finds that civic engagement contributes to other forms of political participation, which in turn affects electoral participation. In process, this paper identifies the extent of civic engagement, electoral participation, and other forms of political participation and their characteristics, with important policy implications on maximizing electoral participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the allocation of ?pork? projects to constituents affect legislative position-taking? Are legislators who deliver substantial amounts of federal largesse more likely to diverge from their campaign opponents and from their constituency medians? Three competing, though overlapping, literatures are examined in this paper: valence theories of position-taking, trust theories of position-taking, and marginality theories of position-taking. These three literatures lead to competing predictions in terms of the extent that legislators deviate from their constituencies and diverge from their campaign opponents given the extent of valence advantages available to incumbents. Examples of valence advantages are numerous (e.g., charisma, constituency service), though we measure an incumbent?s valence advantage as the extent of federal project outlays distributed to a legislator?s constituency. The marginality hypothesis suggests a linear and negative relationship between project allocations and legislator deviation from the district. The trust hypothesis also suggests a linear relationship, though in a positive direction. The valence hypothesis suggests a nonlinear relationship, where increased levels of project allocations at first lead to more legislator convergence toward the median, but eventually lead to more legislator divergence from the median. These competing expectations are tested by examining candidate convergence data from the 1996 U.S. House elections and data on senator divergence from their states? median voters during the 104th-107th Congresses. One key contribution of this paper is the creation of ideal point estimates of legislators and constituency medians on a common scale using MCMC ideal point estimation techniques. The findings are that valence theories are demonstrated when examining incumbent divergence from the constituency median, though these theories are not demonstrated when examining candidate divergence from one another. In addition, we also find that the extent of project outlays (though not deviation from the constituency median) is related to the margin of victory for legislators. The deviation from the constituency median, and not the extent of project outlays, is directly related to the likelihood of winning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last fifty years, mass partisanship has become more responsible. Using newly collected data, this paper shows that partisanship is now based substantially more on a rational assessment of differences between the parties, than on non-cognitive bases. In previously published research (2002, with Pomper), I showed that after 1972 there was an increasing trend toward a greater cognitive basis of partisanship (based on perception of party differences) and a diminishing trend away from the affective basis (based on parental partisanship). That analysis ended in 1992 because the National Election Study then stopped asking the parental partisanship questions. This paper provides original data from a 2002 nationwide survey that replicated the NES parental partisanship questions, together with the relevant questions about respondent partisanship and the perception of differences between the parties. That data set, supplemented with the earlier NES data, permits a five-decade comparison of the bases of party identification, which confirms and strengthens the evidence of increasing mass partisan responsibility. These findings validate party-based voting, providing contemporary evidence that such behavior is rational because it is based on perceived differences between the parties (and, as such, policy considerations) rather than merely on inherited, affective considerations. This evidence has important implications for responsible party analysis by suggesting a different kind of mass partisanship, one that is both ‘rational" and "responsible." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To compare how differently people vote in Single Non-transferable Vote (SNTV) and in the single-member plurality, this paper utilizes the index of SF Ratio (ratio of the second to the first loser’s vote total), a district level data proposed by Gary Cox (1997), to measure the extent to which the strategic voting is exhibited. Based on the Taiwan magistrates and legislative elections in 2001, the empirical result shows that SNTV does have different impact on people’s voting response. The paper concludes with the findings that, first, people do not converge their votes to the potential candidates in SNTV as obviously as in the single plurality. Second, the competition in the SNTV system does not help improving this phenomenon either. Third, the larger the SNTV district magnitude is, the vote dispersion becomes more apparent. Four, even if there is some degree of vote convergence in SNTV, it has no substantial assistance to the seat bonus for either party. Finally, the most important factor for the party to improve the winnable seats in SNTV is basically from the nomination. So long as the party nominates appropriate numbers of candidates in SNTV, strategic voting does not influence the electoral result that much. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper revisits some old propositions of pluralist theories and the Columbia school about the impact of ‘cross-pressure’ on political attitudes and behavior that, following some discouraging test results, largely vanished from scholarly works since the early seventies. Cross-pressure means that some individuals, like socially conservative trade union members in the United States, are pulled in opposite partisan directions because of their different characteristics. In their most generalized form the relevant hypothesis suggests that the more conflicting are the ways the various attributes of citizens pull them towards one party or another, the more disengaged they become, reducing cognitive and affective involvement with politics as well as participation. The paper scrutinizes the micro-logic of the proposition, points out that cross-pressure on citizens may be one of the mechanisms underlying the freezing effect of cleavages postulated by Lipset and Rokkan (1967), develops a greatly improved measure of cross-pressure, and subjects the hypothesis to a far more comprehensive test than those attempted before. The empirical analysis finds some support for the hypothesis using worldwide cross-sectional data on various forms of political participation from the World Values Study. However, not all forms of participation are affected to the same extent, and there are also signs of some significant cross-national variations. The cross-national differences can, however, be linked to survey sample and political system characteristics in ways that are consistent with the original hypothesis. Interestingly, it is the conflicting electoral influence of different value orientations that seems to be the truly consequential source of cross-pressure, and not the conflicting influence of two or more socio-demographic characteristics on party preference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The singular act of a Member of Congress placing a roll call vote in the US House, either yea or nay, occurred over five and a half million times from the 80th to 100th Congress. Using a dataset that links a large variety of exogenous factors to each of those acts of voting, this paper seeks to identify the development of ‘inter-party partisanship’ (how opposed are the Democrats and Republicans to one another?) and ‘intra-party’ partisanship, (how cohesively do members of the same party vote together?). The first section of this paper examines the scope of roll call voting in the post war US House, detailing the number, distribution, and variety of roll call votes held in that period. Following that, the second section examines methods that can be used to identify inter-party partisanship, including updated uses of Lowell and Rice measures. In addition, party and vote are correlated for each roll call vote to create another measure of inter-party partisanship - one that is explored by Clausen roll call topics. The paper goes on to examine intra-party partisanship by looking at predictors of partisan defection. Using a variety of methods culminating in a comprehensive Logit model, we are able to parse out many of the causal predictors of defection - roll call characteristics, member characteristics, constituency characteristics, and electoral marginality. We find that while no magic bullet exists that can overwhelmingly account for variance in the probability of a member defecting, several patterns emerge that indicate the large role roll call characteristics and member characteristics have in predicting defection. Please email me (after 15 October) at danielsinger@comcast.net for full paper [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the real structure of substantive conflict in American politics during the postwar years? Is it even possible to talk about an ‘issue structure’, about ongoing policy conflict within continuing policy alignments, at the mass and not just the elite level? If so, what is the structure of substantive conflict characterizing the mass politics of our time? How do policy issues cluster, and nest, in the practical environment for mass politics? And how does such an issue structure relate to (and shape) electoral conflict? Has this relationship remained essentially constant over the last half-century, the period when public opinion data are most widely available, or are there major break-points, and when did these occur? The search for a continuing structure characterizing public preferences on policy conflicts across the postwar period is the principal challenge of this paper. To that end, consistent measures of public preference in four major issue domains–welfare policy, foreign policy, race policy, and social policy–are sought, developed, and analyzed. A theoretical grounding is derived from the literature on postwar political history. An exploratory analysis applies this theoretical grounding to the American National Elections Studies, 1948-2000. A confirmatory analysis is applied to these exploratory findings, as informed by the literature on public opinion in specific issue domains, which provides a further set of independently testable propositions. And the result is an ongoing issue structure. The application of this structure to voting behavior in presidential elections is then the main secondary task of the paper, yielding what is in effect a pure politics of public policy. In this, social welfare proves to have been the leading policy concern of American voters across the postwar period. But international relations was normally present and often important, while civil rights and cultural values made occasional but still noteworthy contributions. From one side, social welfare also had the most consistent impact. From the other, it was nevertheless international relations that divided the postwar years into coherent periods. By contrast, the domain of civil rights and the domain of cultural values, along with one of the two key aspects of foreign policy–foreign engagement, the continuum from isolationism to internationalism–all changed the actual direction of their partisan impact from the immediate postwar period to the modern era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses several kinds of evidence concerning the role of voters’ policy-related views in shaping their choices in 2002 for the House of Representatives. Most of the evidence presented is based on a new national survey conducted by Indiana University devoted to voters’ information and opinions about Congress, but selected results are also compared with similar kinds of evidence based on the National Election Studies (NES) 2002 survey. Initial findings include: (a) a large combined influence for voters’ views about current policy-related conflicts; (b) an even larger role for policy-related views in shaping voters’ evaluations of the President and other national leaders; (c) identification of specific policy-related conflicts which appeared to have an independent influence on vote choice; and (d) a dramatic increase in the apparent influence of policy-related views in districts that had more competitive races or challengers that spent enough money to provide a visible alternative. The paper concludes by reviewing leading challenges to the validity of these kinds of conclusions, and suggests the kinds of changes that must be made in future surveys to provide more decisive answers to address those kinds of challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral constituencies define a group of voters who vote (or are eligible to vote) for a candidate(s) for a seat in a legislature. They may usefully be described as being more or less homogeneous, more or less stable, and more or less voluntarily defined. In this paper, I argue that any plausible theory of legitimate political representation will generate a default assumption in favor of heterogeneous, permanent and involuntary electoral constituencies (i.e., constituencies that are defined by the state rather than by individual voters). These defaults follow from rather uncontroversial (almost trivial) assumptions of what a theory of legitimate political representation will entail, assumptions like, ‘majority rule’ or ‘representatives should act properly in office.’ In the process I argue that the ‘one-person-one-vote’ standard of equality is unimportant as the value it is purported to be; that the plea to ‘make votes count’ ignores the fact that they won’t count for much no matter what electoral arrangements one uses; and that the very meaning of ‘democratic self-rule’ entails that citizens be assigned to electoral constituencies for the duration of their lives. The paper concludes with a consideration of some important problems for deliberative democrats by making constituencies homogeneous, problems that may best be solved by an appeal to qualifications for political office, rather than through other electoral reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Voting Rights Act is best known for the political impact it has had for African Americans in the South, but it has also been used by other minorities, including American Indians. This paper reports on the 35 cases identified, following a summary of the Voting Rights Act and of patterns of discrimination against American Indians. Drawing on Charles Epp’s concept of a legal support structure, the paper examines the support structure for voting rights cases on behalf of American Indians. It finds that Native American organizations are not the predominant litigators in the field; the Voting Rights Project of the ACLU and the Voting Rights Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice are. The groups are compared and the emergence noted of the Mountain States Legal Foundation in support of the defendant jurisdictions. The paper concludes with the striking success of American Indian plaintiffs to date, but notes that political empowerment requires candidate and voter mobilization to turn legal victories into political victories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Nash, the subject of Nasar’s (1999) A Beautiful Mind, affected political science in important ways. His equilibrium concept and variants of it are the inferential foundation for many of game theory’s contributions to the study of politics. But do political actors have beautiful minds? We ask this question to focus attention on whether people, such as voters, think about politics in ways that popular equilibrium concepts imply. We argue that many people do not reason in these ways. Our paper examines the cognitive underpinnings of commonly used equilibrium concepts. In the process, we offer Fudenberg and Levine’s (1993) self-confirming equilibrium concept as more appropriate for an important class of political actors. We close the paper with a model of electoral competition that leverages this equilibrium concept’s substantive possibilities. We conclude that political science can increase the range and depth of its contributions by expanding its repertoire of solution concept [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increased prominence of electoral democracies in the world calls out for detailed descriptions of this recent political change, systematic explanations of its causes, and fuller assessments of its probable consequences and historical meaning. This critical work must continue in order to understand this global, historical change not only within and across each electoral democracy but also upon the remaining non-democratic or quasi-democratic forms of government that exist in the world today. This paper cannot fully engage these identified tasks. Instead, this paper focuses upon the prior analytical problem of concept formation as it applies to trans-historical and cross-national comparative analysis and theorization about democracy. More specifically, this paper calls attention to a narrow but critical set of difficulties that emerge when we think about measuring and comparing elections and voting across space and time. In particular, this paper illuminates numerous difficulties associated with presently accepted concepts of electoral participation (and, by convention, voter turnout)–difficulties that obstruct our capacities to measure and to evaluate the characteristics, causes and purposes of democracy. The narrow analytical focus of this paper does not diminish its ultimate goal, which is to expose and to qualify–and, if necessary, to delegitimize--a significant portion of a long cherished academic literature concerning the nature, conceptualization, and history of democracy, democratization and (especially) electoral participation. Given the breadth of previous investments and present commitments to this literature, immediate acceptance is not expected. Yet, if successful, this paper’s ultimate project promises multiple consequences, turning dominant public images and much of the American and comparative voter turnout literature, including the Downsian rational low voter turnout conjecture, on their collective head. The impetus and boldness of this paper’s goal are drawn from several sources, including the nontrivial difficulties of challenging a deeply established and presumed triumph intellectual truth. The other sources of support for this paper’s claims are: its extended historical horizon; its deep empirical foundations; and its novel conceptual solution to the well-known puzzle of political participation (Brody, 1978). Part I of this paper surveys the conventional wisdom concerning the history of electoral participation in the United States. Part II provides a thorough critique of this conventional wisdom, revealing it to be filled with numerous and irreparable forms of conceptual and measurement bias. With these biases in full view, this paper defines and defends a new voter turnout measure, which subsequently is employed to construct a new history of voter participation in U.S. elections from 1776 to 2002. Part III extends the implications of the preceding critique and historical revision of voter participation rates by analyzing national elections in nineteen industrialized democracies from 1900 to 2002. Although the United States has lagged below many of these other democracies after 1950, these cross-national measurements reveal interesting historical changes and path dependent boundary conditions that account for electoral participation variations across these cases. Part IV completes this analysis, employing this new measure of voter turnout to analyze electoral participation rates in thirty South/Central American, Eastern European, Asian, and African nations with relatively recent commitments to democratization or regular elections. Part V forgoes a summary conclusion, but provides a brief discussion of one unexamined implication of this paper’s conceptual and empirical contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates exactly what is meant by a sympathy vote in the context of the 2002 U.S. Senate race in Minnesota and proposes a specific model to explain the concept and what happened to dissipate the advantage enjoyed by Wellstone’s successor, Walter Mondale. Immediate speculation blamed Mondale’s decline in the polls on the ‘partisan’ Wellstone memorial which took place on the Tuesday night after Wellstone’s death and the night before Mondale’s nomination by the Democratic Party. While the memorial serves as part of the explanation, this paper presents a more comprehensive explanation for the changes in public opinion seen over the course of this final week-long campaign by integrating concepts and findings from the psychology, mass communication, and public opinion literatures. This more elaborate model not only accounts for the mechanism producing support for Mondale in polls, but also explains what happened to deflate such support and place the two candidates on a level playing field. Further, this model incorporates the emotional context of voter opinion in these circumstances and suggests boundaries for strategic decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the politics of noncitizen voting in the United States. It is not widely known that noncitizens currently vote in local elections in Chicago, New York City and in five municipalities in Maryland; or that over the past decade campaigns to expand the franchise to noncitizens have been launched in at least a dozen other jurisdictions from coast to coast. These practices have their roots in another little known fact: for most of the country’s history–from the founding until the 1920s–noncitizens voted in at least twenty two states and federal territories and held public office such as alderman, coroner, and school board member. This paper presents arguments for (and against) noncitizen voting rights, and examines some of the contemporary political organizations and actors who fought for and won (or lost) campaigns to reinstate noncitizen voting. The paper explores recent campaigns that successfully reestablished noncitizen voting, that are currently underway, and other campaigns that failed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the preferences of major political factions are likely to influence policy choice on security issues, the origins of these preferences remains unclear compared to those on foreign economic policy. This paper examines efforts to explain preferences on security issues using data on congressional roll call voting. A large body of quantitative research in this area concludes that ideology drives these preferences, and that constituency economic interests have little or no effect. Unfortunately, this literature conceives of economic interests in an unrealistically narrow way, and does not consider the possibility that these interests may shape the ideology of members of congress. Using data on Senate voting on foreign policy from 1947 through 2000, this paper presents evidence that Senators’ home states’ stake in the international economic order, as well as their stake in military spending, played an important role in shaping foreign and defense policy. Although liberal-conservative "ideology" also matters, its effects are more consistent with an interest-based vote trading arrangement than with a coherent set of ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presumption in the theoretical literature on ethnic mobilization is that voting for ethnic parties is a purely expressive act, not subject to cost-benefit calculations. Models of strategic voting, meanwhile, typically make no reference to the ethnic identity of voters and parties. This paper challenges the presumption that voting for ethnic parties is primarily an expressive act. It develops an argument predicting high levels of strategic voting for ethnic parties in ‘patronage democracies,’ where such parties have historically been most visible. The argument is investigated using multiple sources and types of data on the voting patterns of Scheduled Castes in India: individual level estimates of voting behaviour generated from aggregate election results using EI, the method of ecological inference developed by Gary King; ethnographic data from the election campaigns of the BSP, the ethnic party courting Scheduled Caste voters; and survey data from the Indian National Election Studies between 1996 and 1998. In addition to the literature on ethnic mobilization, the paper identifies three new areas for theoretical and empirical investigation for the literature on strategic voting: First, it suggests that, other things equal, the levels of strategic voting in patronage-democracies may be higher than in other types of democracies. Second, it suggests that the type of strategic voting in patronage-democracies is likely to be distinct. Third, it highlights the importance of ethnic demography and the ethnic profile of political parties, in addition to opinion polls, as an important variable structuring expectations about likely electoral outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2003 Welsh Assembly Elections: Multiple Influences; Ambiguous Implications The paper gives an overview of the results of the 2003 Welsh Assembly Elections. It then discusses approaches to the interpretation of the results, exploring in turn the strengths and weaknesses of models of second order voting and multi-level voting. It introduces the relevance of shadow referendum voting as a way of reassessing the first Welsh Assembly elections in 1999 as well as the 2003 elections. Ultimately, the paper argues for the relevance of all three approaches in defining the multiple influences on the new devolved context for electoral politics in Wales. It also argues for the importance of recognising the continued uncertainty over electoral trends in Wales following the creation of devolved government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harry Beran has argued that any democratic population should have a right to secede, regardless of history or grievances. This paper explores the ethical legitimacy of Beran’s claim, beginning from a natural-rights default position. It explores defenses of democracy provided by Jurgen Habermas and Thomas Christiano, and suggests that democratic secession may be acceptable within relatively strict limits. It then explores the difficulties of interpreting votes in territorial referenda, and suggests that referenda must be carefully designed if they are to be consistent with the basic goals of democracy. The paper concludes that legitimate democratic secessions should utilize sophisticated techniques such as Borda count voting in referenda design, that multiple referenda may be necessary to confirm democratic choices, and that referenda sequences should include sufficient time for meaningful democratic deliberation between votes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many mixed electoral systems voters cast two ballots, one for a party list and a second for a candidate in a single member district. In the Mexican mixed electoral system, since 1988 when the ballot structure was changed, voters cast a single vote to select both types of representatives. The single votes for district candidates are then aggregated for distribution of the party list seats in large M (40 seats) districts. In this paper, we examine the extent to which the Mexican one-vote ballot type affects strategic voting. We complement the Mexican data with district level data from Italy and Senegal. Through the SF Ratio and effective number of electoral parties comparisons, our findings indicate that strategic voting decreased from one comparable election to the next, although in modified form in concurrent (presidential and legislative together) elections. This, we argue, is at least partially an effect of the ballot structure. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federalism has long been seen as a threat to accountability. A model of federal voting behaviour must accommodate voters? attributions of responsibility to each level of government for policy outcomes. This paper uses a panel survey of Canadians in both federal and provincial elections to ask whether voters are unable to hold governments accountable in a federal context. Voters may ignore issues where responsibility is unclear, they may reward or punish both governments to the same degree, or the confusion of jurisdiction may sour them on the government or even the political system. Canadians who blame both governments for problems in health care do not take their judgment to their voting decision, while those who can identify primary responsibility do. Federalism and intergovernmental policy-making may reduce voters? ability to hold their governments accountable. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is a draft of the first chapter of a manuscript on race and voting rights in the antebellum North. It sketches out the theoretical framework for the larger work by focusing on three interacting factors and explains why racial voting restrictions were (or were not) enacted in four northern states before the Civil War: first, how racial conflict is structured through economic competition; second, how partisan competition is structured by racial cleavages; and third, how racial coalition formation is structured through racial narratives and a racialized discourse - what I call race culture. I argue that racial voting restrictions in the four Northern states occurred: 1) when racial conflict took place as an outgrowth of rapid economic and demographic change; 2) when political actors seeking electoral advantage were in a position to successfully prey upon this racial conflict by arousing newly enfranchised white (ethnic) voters; and 3) when an ascriptive race culture became the dominant racial paradigm for understanding citizenship rights for blacks. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What could be motivating voters in emerging democracies to vote for leaders who have proven themselves to be skilled at violating human rights, repressing civil rights and liberties, and ruling without democratic institutions? If voters elect former authoritarians because they prefer authoritarianism to democracy, and if the former authoritarians use their public mandate to subvert democracy once they take office, then the future of democratic consolidation could be in serious danger. As we note in this paper, there are numerous instances around the world in which voters are supporting former authoritarians. This paper looks at two such cases, Bolivia and Russia, by tapping into voters’ motivations for choosing former authoritarians in two presidential elections. We carry out a least-similar-systems design in which we search for common predictors of vote choice in countries that differ in their past and current political and economic situations. After testing the implications of a number of different theoretical approaches, our major finding is that, in both cases, support for authoritarian attitudes and values appears to be a very important predictor of the likelihood of voting for former authoritarian rulers, more so than social capital, trust in institutions, demographic characteristics of the respondent (particularly in Bolivia), and concern over specific issues (particularly in Russia). Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to characterize a dimension structuring certain party systems, intra-party differences, and candidate political strategies, this paper introduces the concepts of high and low in politics. Together, they form the poles of an axis, or scale, in politics. In contrast to the otherwise useful dimensions developed by Kitschelt or Inglehart, the high-low dimension is in fact orthogonal, or fully neutral, with regard to the left-right spectrum, while also associated with societal inequality. Moreover, high and low appeals are an important part of political campaigning and spatial strategies on the part of political actors. Just like left and right (or liberal and conservative in the U.S.), high and low can easily be integrated into the type of methodology prevalent in the field of political behavior, electoral studies, and campaign analysis. Finally, high and low are political terms that travel particularly well cross-regionally. Conceptually, the paper provides a thorough definition of the left-right axis, which is made up of two sub-dimensions. Similarly, the high-low axis is also comprised of two sub-dimensions. The definition of the low in politics is at the same time particularly useful for making sense, in a clear and intuitive fashion, of the contested concept of populism, while doing justice to various standpoints in that polemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the "moral economy" of electoral clientelism - the exchange of votes for goods - on the basis of qualitative interviews conducted in late 2000 in rural Mexico. Contrary to common assumptions about physical needs forcing the "poor and powerless" to trade their political rights for material favors, it finds that respondents reject clientelist practices, defend their individual autonomy, and demand universalistic policies. In democratic Mexico, the paper concludes tentatively, attempted vote trading may be a widespread practice; yet an illegitimate one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper develops existing methods of analyzing social cleavages by looking at the subcomponents of cleavage level at the ascriptive (demography), attitudinal (opinion) and behavioral (voting) levels and at the inter-relation of each of the these three levels. Using this method, the paper details the types of cleavages faced in Slovakia and the Czech Republic and goes further to resolve conflicts among existing understandings of the process of cleavage formation. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses data gathered in the 2001 British Election Study to investigate the determinants of turnout in general elections. The analyses focus on the explanatory power of a variant of a modified rational choice model which has stimulated protracted debate among students of voting behaviour. The paper also considers two versions of the much discussed ?heartlands hypothesis? which has been offered to explain the unprecedented drop in turnout in the 2001 general election. Analyses indicate that all three variables in the modified rational choice model have strong and statistically significant effects. Although sense of civic duty is predictably powerful, turnout also is affected by expected benefits and perceived costs of voting. Analyses do not support a ?Downsian? version of the heartlands hypothesis that blames low turnout on New Labour’s abandonment of traditional Labour policy and ideological positions. A ‘stokesian? version of the hypothesis that attributes effects to government performance dissatisfaction among Labour’s heartlands supports fares better. The paper concludes by considering the implications of major findings for future trends in electoral participation in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Built on previous literature of deracialization and white voting behavior, this paper empirically tests how the effectiveness of deracialization, measured by white crossover vote, may be conditional, dependent on urban racial contexts. Using the newly developed ecological inference (EI) method, the paper examined 81 back candidates’ white votes in New Orleans biracial elections between 1977 and 1998. The results of OLS multiple regression show that the differences in white crossover voting in New Orleans during the last two decades were related to black candidates’ strength, measured by incumbency status and newspaper endorsement. The relatively larger effect of newspaper endorsement on white crossover voting, compared to that of black incumbency, confirms previous findings regarding the powerful influence of news media on biracial elections in general and the deracilization strategy in particular. The most important finding of this research, however, is that the deracialization strategy was most effective when white voters were no longer the majority in the urban elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By most accounts, moderates have practically disappeared from the U.S. Congress. The decline of moderation occurred while congressional roll-call voting became increasingly aligned along a single ideological dimension, a dimension well characterized as liberal at one end and conservative at the other. This paper presents an argument for the importance of understanding the behavior of moderates in a Congress polarized between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. Then, the bulk of the paper explores the dimensionality of the issue preferences attributed to ideological moderates. As indicated by an analysis of several interest group ratings of House members serving in the 106th Congress, the behavior of moderates is best explained with reference to three dimensions. This is true even though a second or third dimension adds nothing of statistical importance to explaining the behavior of all House members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to present a generalization of spectral analysis as a new tool for political scientists. Spectral analysis (or Fourier analysis) is the foundation of most time-series analysis and many other types of analysis in engineering and the natural sciences. This paper draws on recent work in mathematics to show how the powerful machinery of spectral analysis can be applied to a non-time series subject in the social sciences: analysis of voting on the Supreme Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the concept of citizenship has received considerable scholarly attention in recent years, few studies focus on the increasingly prevalent reality of dual citizenship, or full membership--with its respective rights, privileges, and obligations--in two different countries. In today’s mobile, interconnected, and international world, more and more people are holding two passports and have the right to vote in two countries. Dual citizenship raises a host of important questions for democratic theory and comparative politics. The main objective of this paper is to conceptualize, measure, and classify variation in dual citizenship in the 15 countries of the European Union. In addition to recounting the historical opposition to dual citizenship and describing its emergence in recent decades, the paper develops a coding scheme that accounts for some of the intricacies involved in dual citizenship, and applies it to the EU countries. The findings point to surprisingly resilient, and historically rooted, national differences that stand out in contrast to the EU’s institutional "harmonization" in so many other areas. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to provide a comparative framework for analyzing the recent rise of unorthodox political parties in the context of third-generation post-communist elections in Eastern Europe. The first part of the paper develops a taxonomy of unorthodox political parties based on the extent and the direction of their deviation from the mainstream political consensus about the desirability of democracy, capitalism, Western integration and minority rights. The second part is devoted to a discussion of region-wide temporal trends in the electoral success of unorthodox parties with a particular emphasis on the political constellations facilitating the rise of different types of unorthodox parties in third-generation elections. The final section uses survey data from two prominent instances of electoral successes by unorthodox parties (the radical-right PRM in Romania in 2000 and the radical-left PCM in Moldova in 2001) to provide a more in-depth analysis of the different motivations of voters for supporting radical parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two newly democratized post-Soviet giants, Russia and Ukraine, share a host of post-communist parallels. The long dominance of the CPSU in both countries denied them a legacy of open, democratic politics. Based on these parallels, one would expect their patterns of legislative behavior to mirror each other. Commonalities exist in the legislative behavior of both chambers; however, in at least one area, they are not analogous: the level of parliamentary party discipline among SMD deputies.the Ukrainian SMD deputies of the first mixed-member Rada (1998-2002) voted with the majority position of their parliamentary party at higher rates than their Russian brethren did in the first mixed-member Duma (1994-1995). In this paper, I attempt to find an answer for this conundrum by analyzing the roll-call voting behavior of SMD deputies in both legislatures. I argue that the higher level of discipline among SMD deputies in the Rada is a function of a more pronounced social cleavage found in the Ukrainian electorate. While both Russia and Ukraine feature a pro-reform/anti-reform cleavage, only Ukraine features a reinforcing regional cleavage built on ethnic and linguistic differences between eastern and western Ukraine. The presence of this reinforcing cleavage helps solidify behavior in the Rada, while Russia, lacking such cleavages, features a more fluid legislature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of the IEA Civic Education Study has been to examine in a comparative framework the political socialization of adolescents as they prepare to undertake their roles as citizens in democracies. Approximately 90,000 students from the modal grade for 14-year-olds from nationally representative samples in twenty-eight countries were tested during 1999. This paper focuses on the predictors of four different types of political engagement: electoral, partisan, volunteer, and protest. The potentially influential factors to be examined are knowledge of democracy and skills in interpreting information, sense of trust in government related institutions, several aspects of the schools (perceptions of curriculum, sense of efficacy developed in the school culture, perceived encouragement of discussion in the classroom, and current participation in organizations). The countries included in this presentation include Australia, England, Greece, Norway, and the United States. The theoretical base for the paper is Wenger’s work on communities of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars disagree on what effect, if any, presidential versus parliamentary government has on political parties. In this paper, I measure unity in parties on legislative votes for parties in 20 legislative chambers in 18 countries. I then estimate the effects of both regime type and membership in government on parties on legislative voting unity. I find that presidentialism undermines party unity. Furthermore, within presidential systems, parties that control the presidency, and parties allied with the government, do not win any more than do opposition parties, and their losses are more apt to result from breakdowns in legislative voting unity. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the politics of noncitizen voting rights, an interesting and neglected aspect of American political development. It is not widely known that "aliens" voted in local, state, and even national elections in twenty-two states and federal territories from the founding until the 1920s, and that noncitizen immigrants held public offices, such as alderman, coroner and school board member. Nor that noncitizen voting rights have been re-instituted in several locales in the U.S. over the past several decades. The paper reviews the historical, social, racial and political dimensions of noncitizen voting during the Progressive Era. I argue that the disenfranchisement of noncitizen immigrants was enacted by powerful economic and political elites just when the electoral potential for working-class constituencies and powerful third party movements was growing. Immigrants posed a threat to elites (and others) on multiple levels--as did the social protest movements that many immigrants participated in--and the ensuing disenfranchisement and marginalization of immigrants was accomplished, in part, by depriving noncitizens of their voting rights. Most importantly, these developments limited democratic and progressive possibilities in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. Congress has failed to limit its spending through self-enforced rules like Gramm-Rudman-Hollings and the 1990 Budget Enforcement Act. In this paper, I consider a distributive politics bargaining model in which the legislature can set its spending level in advance of bargaining over allocations. Because the agenda setter who divides the budget may have an incentive to ignore the --budget cap," some type of enforcement is necessary. In previous work, I have solved this model with the assumption that budget caps are enforced exogenously. However, suppose external enforcement is not possible. This paper studies a simple procedure tied to an amendment rule: if an allocation proposed by a randomly-selected agenda setter violates the budget cap, then voting proceeds with an open rule allowing amendments. If an allocation satisfies the budget cap, then a closed rule operates. In equilibrium, the legislature tends to prefer an open rule to imposing a budget cap under most conditions. Only when the size of the coalition required for budget passage is close to a minimum majority are budget caps exogenously enforced. These results differ from Baron and Ferejohn’s (1989) divide the dollar game in which closed rules are always preferred to open rules by the legislature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard intuition from formal models of candidate competition suggests that candidates with more flexibility will dominate those with less, and consequently almost always win elections. An implication of this tenet is that office motivated candidates will outperform policy motivated candidates. In this paper we explore this logic formally and show that it is partly true but mostly false. Surprisingly, we find that greater flexibility can in fact work against a candidate and induce endogenously a preference by voters for less flexible candidates. Applied to candidate motivation, this implies that office motivated candidates will attempt to imitate policy motivated candidates, and therefore policy motivated candidates will be victorious in a significant proportion of elections. Most significantly, we find that the presence of both types of candidates significantly affect the policy choices of each group, implying that spurious conclusions will be drawn if the standard assumption of homogeneous candidate motivation is employed. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]