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This paper connects the formal theory surrounding Duverger's Law with an empirical specification and test to examine the empirical evidence for strategic voting in the 2001 General Election in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper expands on the experimental findings of the motivated reasoning literature to numerous election studies in the U.S., Britain, and Germany. Conclusions inform both the information processing and campaign effects literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is considerable agreement that economic conditions affect electoral outcomes, there is less agreement as to exactly how. Scholars have spent a great deal of effort exploring the links between economics and vote choice but have generally ignored the potential that economic perceptions could also affect the likelihood of voter abstention. I explore that possibility in this paper. First, I develop a theory of how economic perceptions affect the likelihood of abstention. I argue that the relevant factors in this relationship are one?s retrospective and prospective judgments of the economy and the ideology of the respondent and government. Hypotheses are generated and tested using national election survey data from the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands. The results show that economic perceptions have an effect on the likelihood of electoral abstention. This effect is mediated by the ideology of the respondent and party and appears to be weakened in situations of greater coalitional complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young adults have since long been identified as a group of the electorate least likely to vote. Recent research suggests, however, that turnout among young cohorts is declining rapidly in some countries. It does so at a much faster pace than the turnout among older age groups. In sum, today's youth turns out at lower levels than their parents or grandparents did when they were young. Consequently, the turnout gap between younger and older voters enlarges. The trend towards a widening generational divide has been particularly well documented in Canada and Great Britain. In other countries, such as Sweden and the Netherlands, the turnout difference between younger and older citizens is however stable through time. This paper contributes to the literature on youth participation by assessing the age gap in voter turnout in a longitudinal and comparative way. After observing patterns in the age gap in turnout, competing hypotheses explaining trends are put to the test. Using time-series cross-sectional analysis, the impact of both characteristics of elections and characteristics of voters on the age gap are assessed. The focus is exclusively on Western democracies for which the age gap can be estimated through election survey data. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing body of research, particularly from the United States, that considers the role candidate sex has upon political attitudes and behaviour. There is some, mixed, evidence that women will tend to favour women candidates when making their vote choice (Plutzer and Zipp 1996; Cook 1998; Dolan 1998; Dolan 2001). Moreover, the literature suggests that all voters tend to assess men and women candidates differently (Huddy and Terkildsen 1993a; McDermot 1997; McDermot 1998; Cutler 2002; Schwindt-Bayer, Crisp and Malecki 2008). This paper uses the British case, which so far has not been included in the expanding literature, to explore the relationship between candidate sex and vote choice. Using the British election study series and the British parliamentary constituency database we test whether women really do vote for women. We use staged regression techniques to control for the endogeneity that arises from the disproportionate number of Labour women candidates placed in winnable seats. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modernization signaled the de-alignment of traditional social cleavages in advanced industrial states. Implicit in this is a homogenization of electorates according to post-material, "new politics" values. Although the impact of traditional social cleavages may have weakened, electorates are not de-aligned; the traditional social cleavages remain important divisions which structure the electorate in significant and meaningful ways. This paper focuses on the impact of religious voting relative to the other traditional social bases of politics in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain, comparing the modern electorates to the electorates of the early 1960s. Using election survey data and focusing on the social bases of conservative parties' support, the results show that while most of the social bases of electoral support have weakened, religious voting remains significant and has increased in the contexts of the United States and United Kingdom. This suggests that despite the decline in religious attendance, the traditional values shared by religious voters make them a tempting social basis of conservative parties’ voter coalitions, and that this may be occurring beyond these contexts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the impact of distance to polling station upon electoral turnout. Using polling station level data from a London borough, it examines three types of election, parliamentary, European and local elections, over a twenty year period. The UK is notable among western liberal democracies for its relatively large turnout gap - the percentage point difference between turnout at elections for the Westminster parliament compared to that for other institutions, including local councils and the supra-national European parliament. This research considers the hypothesis that in high information, high salience elections for the national parliament the costs of voting associated with travel to vote are perceived as either low or insignificant but that in low information, low salience elections, those costs are perceived as higher and may act as a deterrent upon voting. A series of regression models consider the relationships between the dependent variable, percentage turnout, and a range of independent variables, including socio-economic characteristics, party competition as well as the spatial context. We show that there is indeed a relationship between distance and voter turnout which is stronger for the lower salience European and local elections than it is for the higher salience national elections. Hence we conclude that the local geography of the polling station can have a significant impact on voter turnout and that there should be a more strategic approach to the location of polling stations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores how changes in the 'costs' of voting through the liberalisation of voting by mail has affected both the level of electoral turnout and the distribution of voter support for parties. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that the economic consequences of separation, divorce, and widowhood are strikingly different for men and women. While women on average experience a substantial decrease in incomes and living standards after transitions out of marriage, men often experience only small losses or even moderate gains. Recent work in political economy suggests that this difference in the economic consequences of marital dissolution leads to gendered redistributive and political preferences. After leaving marriage women should become more left-wing and men more right-wing. So far, however, credible causal inferences about the political consequences of marital dissolution do not exist. In this paper, we use data from the British Household Panel Survey in combination with a matching estimator to estimate the effects of transitions out of marriage on policy preferences and vote choice in British General Elections. We show that marital dissolution causes a large decline in turnout, but in contrast to previous research we find that it has no systematic effect on policy preferences and vote choice. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of the number of parties in a system on incentives to cultivate a personal vote. Empirical tests are conducted on data from British General Elections since World War Two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fuzzy preference functions for individuals and parties in the British House of Commons are constructed from 2001-2003 roll calls on substantive bills. These functions are then evaluated on their ability to predict voting behavior for later years. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the relationship between roll call voting by British members of parliament and their electoral performance. We introduce Breiman's 'random forests' machine-learning algorithm to do so. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral competition has long been held as a required and essential component of a smoothly functioning democracy. This common wisdom suggests that representative responsiveness is likely to decrease as the level of general election competitiveness falls off. The closer the election the more uncertain the incumbent member of the legislature is about her ability to get reelected, which motivates her to work harder to win votes (i.e. campaign harder, spend more time in the district, secure more pork projects, modify voting behavior in the legislature, etc.). In turn these activities should increase voter satisfaction and efficacy. This final linkage is what we take up here. Namely, do voters in districts that have competitive elections demonstrate higher levels of efficacy and higher levels of satisfaction with the representative and with the legislature itself? Using survey data from the most recent elections in three western democracies with single member district systems (UK, Canada, and the U.S.) we find no such connection. Rather, the winner/loser dichotomy is primal. Electoral competitiveness has no measurable effect on voters either in terms of satisfaction with their representative or with more abstract variables like efficacy. This finding has important implications for democratic theory and for redistricting. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Parliament elections are the only national elections in Britain where you will not see strategic voting.  We will show that small Euro-Skeptic parties are strategically deserted in national legislative elections. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study compared the episodic and thematic framing of the most recent national elections in Sweden (2002) and Britain (2005), illustrating the presence of structural bias in media coverage. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine movements for voting system reform at the time of suffrage expansion in France, the UK and the US. I argue that elites used these reforms to undermine popular participation. Outcomes vary with the degree of working class mobilization. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]