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The article focuses on the indicators of women's electoral participation in India, highlighting gender disparities in political engagement. Topics include the relationship between women's education levels and political participation, the role of media exposure in electoral involvement, and the rankings of states based on women's voter turnout and representation.

Term limits are theoretically expected to boost voter participation which has been confirmed by multiple empirical examinations. This study uses a robust causal assessment within the difference-in-differences framework to evaluate this hypothesis. It leverages an exogenous 2018 term limit reform in Ecuador which prohibited some, but not all, incumbent mayors from running in elections. Contrary to expectations, the results indicate null findings: the adoption of term limits has neither increased turnout, nor depressed the casting of blank and spoiled ballots (alternative indicators of voter engagement under compulsory voting). This is puzzling given that the reform impacted the electoral competition by significantly increasing the number of mayoral candidates in the newly open-seat contests. Two possible solutions to the puzzle of the null findings are presented with implications for understanding the scope conditions for the effect of term limits on voter participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article titled "Urban Affairs Review: A Retrospective on the 2010s" discusses the emergence of urban politics as a significant field of study and its relevance to understanding broader patterns in American politics. The authors highlight the importance of race in shaping the urban vote, with racial divisions being a key factor that outweighs class divisions. They also note the distinctiveness of the Black vote and the relevance of party and ideology in explaining voting patterns. The article emphasizes the value of studying urban politics for understanding national politics and addresses the unique institutional structures and limitations of local governments. The authors also mention the increased availability of data and its impact on the field of urban politics research. Overall, the article demonstrates the significance of urban politics in providing insights into American democracy. [Extracted from the article]

Women form a large part of the voting public in India. In the 2009 Indian National Election post-election survey, 82% of all adult women surveyed reported voting, but only 32% said that they were interested in politics. The paradox between high female turnout but low levels of interest has been noted in multiple developing country contexts, but the phenomenon is under-theorized. We suggest the reason is that women's ideas (interest in politics) are discouraged and suppressed by societal patriarchal norms enforced in the household, but women's bodies (their votes) are valued in competitive elections. We illustrate our argument using matched samples from two rounds (2009 and 2014) of the Indian National Election Survey and an original post-election survey in 2019. We find that women are consistently less likely to report either an interest in politics, or an opinion on political issues, if their spouse or an adult family member observes the interview. Our findings suggest that women's political agency is systematically under-estimated by researchers, and that women are more likely to assert themselves politically in survey contexts, if given the privacy to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, the EU introduced the lead candidate procedure to raise citizens' awareness and interest in the European Parliament (EP) elections and, thereby, voter turnout. We study the use of personalization, centralized personalization (focusing on lead candidates), emotional personalization, and private personalization on Facebook by political parties across 12 countries during the 2014 and 2019 EP campaigns and the effects of personalization on user engagement. A standardized quantitative content analysis of 14,293 posts by 227 political parties shows that about half of the Facebook posts were personalized, but there is no general trend of rising personalization. While emotional personalization increased, parties hardly ever posted about their lead candidates and their private lives. Variations are not due to structural (e.g., party and media systems) or geographical/cultural factors. Positive effects are found for the use of emotional personalization attracting a higher volume of user reactions (likes, reactions, shares, and comments) in both elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The increasing political inclusion of diaspora populations around the world has raised questions about their influence on electoral outcomes back home. In Kenya, emigrants have advocated for direct influence through external voting rights, while less attention has been given to the ways in which they may also indirectly influence elections through economic remittances. In this research note, we explore diaspora efforts to influence elections through the perspectives of domestic voters, which are often overlooked in the literature on diaspora voting. We surveyed a nationally representative sample of eligible voters within Kenya prior to the August 2022 presidential election and posed parallel questions to a smaller sample of diaspora Kenyans. Domestic voters strongly support direct diaspora participation in elections for president, but not for lower-level offices. Our survey results also indicate that roughly one of every seven eligible voters in Kenya was encouraged to vote in the 2022 election by friends and family abroad from whom they receive remittances. Thus, emigrants may have more influence on elections through their connections at home than through their direct votes. Drawing on the Kenyan case, we explore some directions for future research on transnational citizenship and voting rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Europe, the multiplication of elections makes the election calendar a decisive issue given the decreasing participatory trend. Turnout is expected to be higher in simultaneous elections, while it lessens if several elections are held over a short period. The saliency of the preceding ballot may also affect participation in the next one. In this article, we argue that these temporal effects are crucial for European Parliament elections due to their second-order nature. We analyse how the position, frequency and nature of domestic ballots affect European Parliament elections turnout since 1979. Our results indicate that the participation level is less affected by the timing of elections than by their overall frequency. The type of preceding election also matters, although not the second-order nature per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do democratization processes affect voter turnout in new democracies? Existing work points to an expected boost in electoral turnout after democratization as newly democratic citizens are euphoric to exert newly democratic freedoms or because they developed new political attitudes and behaviours by mobilizing for democracy. While intuitive and normatively appealing, these explanations have not been theoretically nor empirically scrutinized within the literature. This paper develops and tests novel theoretical expectations on the processes and legacies of democratization that impact voter turnout in new democracies. Using electoral turnout data from 1086 national elections between 1946 and 2015, and turnout survey data of over 1 million respondents between 1982 and 2015, we find that the boost in voter turnout (1) exists only for the first election after transition, (2) its effect depends on the life cycle during which individuals experienced the transition and (3) it is less dependent on transition type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On August 2nd, 2022, Kansas held a vote to lift state constitutional protections for abortion access. The vote gained national attention, as it was the first statewide plebiscite on the subject since the U.S. Supreme Court had issued its ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which had overturned the remaining U.S. Constitutional blocks on restricting abortion that had been in place since Roe v. Wade. The turnout for the election was unprecedented for a primary in the state, and to the surprise of many, the amendment failed by a large margin in deep red Kansas. In this paper, we use both precinct-level election results and individual-level voter registration and history data to explore who was mobilized to vote in the August 2022 primary and their behavior in the November 2022 general election. We find that the primary mobilized an electorate that had more women and young people, fewer Republicans, and more first-time voters than a normal primary, but that these demographics were also more likely to then abstain in the general election. Thus, the engagement of young people, especially young women, on the abortion issue remains, but preliminary findings suggest the future of this groups' electoral participation separate from abortion activism is unclear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populist voting behavior is a relatively new research area with most studies concentrated on European and American voters, despite electoral successes of populist parties in illiberal and hybrid democracies of Asia. The research fills this gap by outlining the determinants of populist voting in Pakistan through constituency-based analysis of electoral data of the 2018 general elections when a Pakistani populist party, Pakistan Tahreek-e-Insaaf, won the elections. The research compares the ideational framework with the strategic framework of populism, examining whether voting for a populist party is determined by the political ideology or attitude of the voters or the mobilization strategy of the party built upon the sociopolitical realities of the region. The focus is on constituencies where PTI was successful for the first time. Based on the analysis of eight such constituencies, both rural and urban, the study concludes that neither the PTI voters' profile matches the sociodemographic profile of the populist voter mentioned in literature nor their voting decisions seem to be guided by anti-elitist attitude common among European or Latin American populist voters. The research outlines two major factors that can explain the victory of PTI: the politics of electables and the mobilization of non-voters, indicating that the strategic lens of populism better explains voting for PTI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many, direct democracy is said to increase political interest. To date, however, empirical findings regarding this relationship remain inconclusive. In this article, we claim that this inconclusiveness can be partly ascribed to the diverse effects that direct democracy has on individuals. In other words, direct democracy influences political interest, but how and to what degree depends on an individual's personality traits. Running hierarchical regression models with survey data from random samples of eligible American and Swiss voters, we arrive at the following three conclusions: First, in both countries, the use of direct democracy is not directly connected to political interest. Second, the Big Five personality traits affect the interest in politics. Third, neuroticism, in particular, alters the relationship between direct democracy and political interest, suggesting that a certain personality type is likely to be more sensitive to popular votes, and a vibrant democratic environment can help to inspire interest in politics for people who, because of their personality, tend to be detached from it. Quite intriguingly, these relationships hold irrespective of the country and research period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does party system polarization mobilize voters? Polarization is increasingly shaping democratic competition across Europe. While often perceived to be negative, polarization can be an effective remedy against voter disengagement. This paper investigates two distinct, but often conflated mechanisms, which could explain why polarization leads to mobilization. Spatial polarization of parties diversifies electoral options at the ballot, while affective polarization mobilizes based on emotional considerations. This article then shows the link between polarization and turnout across 22 European countries. The results are complemented by a difference-in-differences analysis of German local elections. However, voting results alone do not inform about the mechanism at play. Survey data is used to show that negative affect appears to be the main driver of voter participation. Party polarization thus has ambivalent consequences for democracies: It mobilizes the electorate, but its effect is driven by negative emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geography has long played a significant role in American electoral politics. Candidates engage in "retail politics" by visiting fairs, festivals, schools, churches, and businesses, to meet and greet potential voters. However, systematically understanding where candidates are actually going has plagued prior work due to small sample sizes and lack of data availability. Presidential elections have been used with success in previous scholarship, but there are few viable candidates to compare within a single cycle. Utilizing competitive gubernatorial elections, this work attempts to address these deficiencies by utilizing social media posts to track multiple candidates in real-time across the 2018 campaign cycle at the state level. The paper tests competing theories of candidate engagement regarding travel decisions: do candidates (1) focus their attention on their partisan base or (2) try to attract independent or "swing" voters? Following an original and intensive data collection effort, we identified location-specific information for over 4700 campaign stops made by major-party candidates across seventeen states. Our results lend support to candidates spending time with their respective bases of partisan support, with Republicans going to rural areas with non-college educated individuals while Democrats travel to urban counties with a more diverse electorate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early voting laws intended to increase voter turnout seem to have had little to no effect on turnout. Why? We argue that the effects of early voting on turnout are contingent on campaigns providing citizens with information about the election, their choices, and how to vote early. When campaigns do so, turnout increases because citizens are more likely to vote – and more likely to vote early. Using individual-level panel data, we show that direct campaign contact increases turnout exclusively via the use of early voting. Using county-level data, we show that campaign ad volume also increases turnout via an increase in early voting turnout. Our results affirm our expectation that campaigns facilitate the expected mobilizing effects of early voting. At the same time, the effects of campaigns on early voting are small in magnitude, and emerge only under campaign mobilization conditions that are more the exception than the norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The academic debate on how voters decide which candidates to support often centers on whether they prioritize their personal preferences or consider who can beat the opposing candidate. American research on voting behavior has largely focused on first-past-the-post (FPTP) elections. However, considering jurisdictions are adopting new electoral systems such as ranked-choice voting (RCV) this leads to several questions about the impact of system adoption on voter decision-making. Particularly, does the voter decision-making process differ depending on the system used? To investigate the impact of RCV on voter decision-making across electoral systems we conducted a survey experiment in a federal senate election. Our findings indicate that in comparison to FPTP elections, RCV elections may lead to decreases in both sincere and strategic voting. Instead, RCV appears to increase voter uncertainty around how to decide which candidates to support and leads to voters who appear to be neither sincere nor strategic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imposing term limits on elected officials is expected to increase turnout due to enhanced competition by one theoretical perspective, while another predicts depressed turnout as a result of clientelist turnout buying. These puzzling contradictory predictions are examined by a quasi-experiment (using a difference-in-differences approach) based on a 2022 reform which introduced term limits for Costa Rican mayors that were applied for the first time in the 2024 municipal election. Over one half of mayors suddenly faced retroactive term limits, while the remaining ones were eligible for reelection. This analysis was pre-registered following the 2022 reform but before the 2024 election, that is, at a time when treatment assignment already occurred but the post-treatment outcomes were not known and the analysis could still not be performed. The analysis could only be completed after the February 2024 election. The results suggest that the adoption of term limits reinvigorated electoral competition but that its participatory gains were only modest, fostering turnout only in the largest cities. The analysis contributes by advancing the—still uncommon—practice of pre-registering observational research after the treatment assignment but prior to the release of the data (and even prior to the processes that produce that data). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has had tremendous impacts on political, economic and social developments across the globe. Although some studies show that voters tend to hold incumbent parties accountable for managing the pandemic, the results of others suggest that the rally-round-the-flag strategy might be at plan. We contend that voters tend to hold the incumbent party accountable, even during an exogenous shock, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. We hypothesize that more stringent government responses to tackle the pandemic and more COVID-19 casualties tend to decrease the electoral support for incumbent parties. Using original data from 67 national elections in 56 electoral democracies from mid-March 2020 to May 2022, the empirical results support our hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing literature over the past 10 years on health and political behavior has established health status as an important source of political inequality. Poor health reduces psychological engagement with politics and discourages political activity. This lowers incentives for governments to respond to the needs of those experiencing ill health and thereby perpetuates health disparities. In this review article, we provide a critical synthesis of the state of knowledge on the links between different aspects of health and political behavior. We also discuss the challenges confronting this research agenda, particularly with respect to measurement, theory, and establishing causality, along with suggestions for advancing the field. With the COVID-19 pandemic casting health disparities into sharp focus, understanding the sources of health biases in the political process, as well as their implications, is an important task that can bring us closer to the ideals of inclusive democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How Gandhi viewed elections? Scholars studying Gandhi have focussed on his strategies of ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagrah (insistence on truth), which produced conditions for mass mobilisation leading to successful decolonisation efforts in India. Though Gandhi recorded his views on franchise beginning with his petition to Natal Assembly in 1894, the researchers have not made much attempt to explore its nuances; those shaped Gandhi's evolution as a democratic crusader in the context of India as a nation. His engagements with the issues of the franchise question in Natal connected him to traditions of elections in India, and his observation of suffragette in England made him conscious of the challenges of struggle in the manner of engagement with a powerful state. This article focuses on Gandhi's engagement with various facets of elections in his early political days and argues that the 'franchise question' allowed him to understand India as a political possibility and the 'suffragette' informed his methods of mass engagement with the imperial powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study attempts to reveal the impact of distribution inequality of electoral districts on the election outcomes in Jordan. Since 1993 elections, electoral laws and regulations have been adopted that underestimate population density in Jordan, meaning that some regions with lower population densities have obtained more parliamentary seats than regions with high population density, including the governorates of Amman, Irbid and Zarqa. Successive Jordanian governments' strategies have intentionally ignored electoral geography, which reduces the chances of mainly the Palestinian component obtaining significant numbers of seats in the Parliament. Governments have also sought to mitigate the chances of Islamic, Leftist and Nationalist parties obtaining a majority of seats in the Parliament, and thus being able to exert effective pressure to hold the executive authority accountable and responsible for its actions. In addition, low levels of confidence of most Jordanian citizens in Parliament have resulted in a lack of true desire to vote, which has led to an increase in the percentage of wasted votes compared with the cast votes. The study concludes that the executive authority's domination in drawing and dividing electoral districts as part of its hegemony and control over the general policy of elections has purposefully neglected population density and geographical criteria. In light of the study results, an urgent need arises to endorse an election law that accomplishes the standards of distributive justice, maximizes the role of supportive and opposition parties, raises citizen confidence in Parliaments, reduces the percentage of wasted votes and finally activates a truly representative Parliament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the subversion of democratic norms in the United States, particularly under the leadership of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. It highlights the party's shift to the extreme right and its exploitation of cultural, economic, and demographic changes to push conservative proposals that are not supported by most voters. The article also examines the partisan biases in the US Constitution, such as the winner-takes-all rule in the Electoral College and malapportionment in the Senate, which have favored Republican candidates and policies. Additionally, it discusses gerrymandering and intentional efforts to suppress Democratic turnout. The article concludes by expressing concerns about the future of US democracy, regardless of the outcome of the 2024 elections. [Extracted from the article]

This article discusses the shifting electoral geography of England and Wales over the past 40 years, from Margaret Thatcher's premiership in 1979 to Boris Johnson's victory in 2019. The authors analyze constituency-level election results and examine the impact of socioeconomic and demographic changes on the spatial distribution of voters. They also explore the contextual factors that have led to distinct electoral trajectories in certain areas. The article highlights the different types of "left behind" areas and how they have influenced voting trends. It concludes that the electoral map of England and Wales is still undergoing transformation and that future elections may bring further changes. [Extracted from the article]

One strategy in defence of compulsory voting is based on what I call the non-instrumental value of high turnout: the idea that almost-universal participation in elections is valuable per se. This article argues that we do not have democratic reasons to value compelled turnout. First, thanks to an original analysis of the practice of voting, I identify three constitutive rules that make the physical acts of marking and casting a ballot count as proper voting. This preliminary analysis serves to illuminate the fact that the act of voting has democratic value if it is performed in a free and reason-responsive way. Second, I identify political equality and popular control as democratic values that high turnout expresses. Finally, the article rejects the non-instrumental case for compulsory voting because it cannot ensure that people vote in a reason-responsive way and, if they do not, high turnout lacks democratic value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral disinformation is feared to variously undermine democratic trust by inflaming incorrect negative beliefs about the fairness of elections, or to shore up dictators by creating falsely positive ones. Recent studies of political misperceptions, however, suggest that disinformation has at best minimal effects on beliefs. In this article, we investigate the drivers of public perceptions and misperceptions of election fairness. We build on theories of rational belief updating and motivated reasoning, and link public opinion data from 82 national elections with expert survey data on disinformation and de facto electoral integrity. We show that, overall, people arrive at largely accurate perceptions, but that disinformation campaigns are indeed associated with less accurate and more polarized beliefs about election fairness. This contributes a cross-nationally comparative perspective to studies of (dis)information processing and belief updating, as well as attitude formation and trust surrounding highly salient political institutions such as elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did the pandemic impact turnout of young voters living in university communities? Leveraging the mandatory vacating of Florida college students living on campuses and drawing on administrative data from Florida's voter file, we argue that on-campus registered young voters who had to leave their university housing in the days prior to Florida's 2020 Presidential Preference Primary (PPP) were less likely to turn out compared to adjacent off-campus young voters because they lost the opportunity to cast early in-person and Election Day ballots. Using a difference-in-differences (DiD) design, we find that on-campus students, in part because they had early and Election Day voting available to them on campus in the 2020 general election, were more likely than comparable off-campus student-aged registered voters to cast ballots in the November election. Our study has important implications for academic debates concerning the turnout effects of convenience voting reforms and the ability of voters to cast ballots prior to Election Day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In November 2023, Argentina elected Javier Milei, a right-wing former television personality, as its president. Milei promised to implement radical, libertarian policies such as abolishing the central bank and eliminating public institutions. His victory, with 56 percent of the vote, was supported by sections of the working class, particularly young males in the informal sector. This election marks a potential transition to a new political and social regime in Argentina. The country has previously been governed by populist left and neoliberal right governments, but neither type of government has been able to fully address the country's economic challenges. [Extracted from the article]

Media scholars have long recognized the potential for falsely balanced reporting to distort public opinion, but existing empirical evidence is inconclusive. In this study, we examine the effect of falsely balanced reporting and explicit journalistic intervention on perceptions of voter fraud in U.S. elections through original internet survey experiments conducted in the United States shortly before and after the 2020 U.S. presidential election held on November 3, 2020. The results show that exposure to falsely balanced reporting largely has a null effect on perceptions of voter fraud, though we also find evidence of partisan-based heterogeneity in its effect. The results of the study also show that explicit journalistic intervention equally decreases belief in voter fraud among both Democrats and Republicans before the election, but among Republicans the corrective effect of intervention disappears in the post-election period, suggesting that there are sharp contextual limits on the effect of explicit journalistic intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An i-voting system may promote electoral participation by reducing travel cost and time to polling places, especially among youth who are more accustomed to technological changes. We study the linkage between travel costs on election day and voter turnout by comparing past electoral participation with stated voting behavior in a hypothetical i-voting system. We believe that the link between transportation costs, i-voting, and voter-turnout emerges as an interesting opportunity to disentangle the mechanism behind the expected increase in political participation after diversifying voting channels. Data were collected using an online questionnaire that was disseminated among Chilean university students. Binary and bivariate probit estimates show that conventional turnout probability among university students is negatively affected by travel costs on election day. Interestingly, whereas political interest and democracy valuation still augment the probability of voter turnout with i-voting, travel-to-polling-station costs are not statistically relevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we ensure quality elections when the key institutions responsible for the organisation of polls are openly partisan and anti-democratic? In their 2017 paper, Birch and van Ham suggest that partisan electoral management bodies (EMBs) do not matter for the quality of polls so long as effective alternative oversight institutions exist, are active and independent. These institutions can make up for the EMBs’shortcomings and ensure that a relatively highquality election is still achieved. I argue that the notion of active and independent alternative oversight institutions leaves us guessing under which conditions it works. Adopting James’s network-based approach to electoral management, I show on the example of the 2019 Thai election that electoral governance networks that are characterised by high levels of political polarisation, the presence of entrenched authoritarian elites and formally independent EMBs that are too powerful make substitution untenable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do violent elections affect the willingness of citizens to defend democratic institutions? We argue that in the wake of violent elections, support for democratic constraints on the executive will diverge amongst ruling and opposition party supporters. To protect their position, ruling party supporters become more likely to endorse weakening constraints on executive power, even if it violates democratic principles. Opposition supporters, on the other hand, become more likely to reject democratic transgressions that de facto render them more vulnerable to political abuse. We examine these expectations using a vignette experiment embedded in a nationally representative 2019 post-election survey of 2400 Nigerians. Our findings suggest that incumbent supporters are overall more likely to endorse weaker constraints on the executive, but these attitudes are not reinforced by information about election violence. Opposition supporters, in contrast, become less likely to accept transgressions when informed about election violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent elections around the world have seen young voters come out in large numbers to support young leaders running for office, such as New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern in October 2020. At the same time, however, young voters have shown strong support for relatively older candidates such as Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom and Bernie Sanders in the United States. While the former is consistent with the descriptive representation literature, the latter is not. This article deploys an experimental design involving 1000 young participants to analyse young voter support for older candidates. We find that young voters are significantly more likely to support older candidates if they are aware that these candidates champion general left-wing policies, but the same is not true for young candidates. We also find that ceteris paribus younger voters do not prefer younger candidates to older candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A prominent literature argues that moderate candidates perform better in general elections, but a competing literature that emphasizes partisan loyalties contests this. The 2020 Democratic presidential primary represented an opportunity to speak to these debates due to high voter information about multiple moderate and extreme candidates running in the same election. We present results from two national surveys (total n = 102, 425) that asked how respondents would choose in an election between one of the Democratic candidates and Republican Donald Trump. Our evidence is consistent with moderates having an electoral advantage: more moderate Democratic candidates receive more support against Trump than do more extreme candidates. Providing information through plausible attacks did not change these results. Notably, Sanders had the highest support after the moderates, but this was due to an implausibly large increase in intended turnout among young voters. Inconsistent with theories emphasizing the strength of partisan loyalties, Republican voters explain much of this effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy requires voters to hold politicians accountable for violating democratic norms. Events surrounding Donald Trump have shown how partisanship can interfere with this process. While Trump has been accused of violating democratic norms, Republicans have opposed efforts to hold him accountable. Using a survey experiment, we explore the conditions under which Republican voters might become more willing to hold Trump accountable for violating democratic norms. We focus on whether Republicans can be convinced by members of their own party that Trump should be held accountable. Our research thus speaks to whether Republican voters might be receptive to appeals from Republican elites like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney who have criticized Trump. We find more evidence than prior work that Republicans are receptive to appeals from co-partisans who are critical of Trump's behavior. However, our overall finding is that co-partisan appeals are not highly effective at changing Republicans' views of Trump. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the global trend of lowering the voting age to 16 and its impact on young people's political engagement and relationship with democracy. It discusses the countries that have already implemented this reform, such as Austria, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Malta, and Nicaragua, and the political parties that have played a role in advocating for it. The article also examines the potential benefits and challenges of lowering the voting age, including increased youth participation and potential inequalities within younger voter cohorts. It emphasizes the importance of implementing comprehensive measures, such as civic education, alongside voting age reforms to enhance young people's political engagement. [Extracted from the article]

The issue of unequal electoral turnout poses serious concerns for both the overall health of democratic politics, and the extent to which certain groups exert an unequal influence on the political process. This article explores the relationship between electoral rules such as: compulsory voting, electoral system proportionality, and voter registration with voter inequality in terms of age, income and education. This is examined using cross-national survey data and cross-level interactions between electoral institutions and socio-demographic variables. The final dataset is based on waves 2–4 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, and contains information on 133,000 individuals, within 45 countries, between 2001 and 2016. The results indicate that compulsory voting is associated with a significant reduction in turnout inequalities, while the effects of proportionality and voter registration are somewhat more mixed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When studying corruption's consequences for voter turnout, reverse causality hinders identification; corruption may affect turnout, but an engaged citizenry may also improve governance. However, because good instruments are hard to find, most studies do not adjust for the issue. Here, I surmount the endogeneity problem by predicting turnout among second generation Americans with the level of corruption in their ancestral country. The core intuition is that the best predictors of turnout—education, income, and civic duty—are endogenous to corruption, internationally mobile, and reproduced inter-generationally. Thus, corruption in one country can affect turnout among the American-born children of the country's émigrés. However, because turnout in US elections does not affect corruption in the ancestral country, there is no threat of reverse causality. Estimating the model with data from the Current Population Survey and the Varieties of Democracy Project reveals a statistically robust, substantively sizable negative effect of corruption on turnout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Party realignment is occurring along the lines of education in the United States. As college-educated voters increasingly align with the Democratic Party, it is necessary to revisit the partisan effect of turnout. We predict that, since 2016, the Democratic Party no longer benefits from higher turnout. Using validated voter turnout from the Cooperative Election Study (CES), we simulate election results across turnout rates for the 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020 elections. Our findings show that increases in turnout greatly benefit the Democratic Party in the pre-Trump era. However, this pattern has drastically changed. In 2016, 2018, and 2020, the Democratic Party sees a much smaller gain in vote share as simulated turnout increases, but also a large vote share advantage when voter turnout is extremely low. These results indicate that continued party realignment along the lines of education could lead to a persistent reversal in the expected partisan effect of turnout—where Democrats perform better in low-turnout local or primary elections and Republicans perform better in high-turnout general elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decision-theoretic Downsian model and other related accounts predict that increasing perceptions of election closeness will increase turnout. Does this prediction hold? Past observational and experimental tests raise generalizability and credible inference issues. Prior field experiments either (1) compare messages emphasizing election closeness to non-closeness messages, potentially conflating changes in closeness perceptions with framing effects of the voter encouragement message, or (2) deliver information about a particular race's closeness, potentially altering beliefs about the features of that election apart from its closeness. We address the limitations of prior work in a large-scale field experiment conducted in seven states and find that a telephone message describing a class of contests as decided by fewer, as opposed to more, votes increases voter turnout. Furthermore, this effect exceeds that of a standard election reminder. The results imply expected electoral closeness affects turnout and that perceptions of closeness can be altered to increase participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports the results of an empirical research design testing the relationship between a state's use of conscription and the public's level of political participation. Although few previous studies have investigated conscription's influence on political levels in times of war, none have yet to analyze conscription's impact on political participation during peacetime. We, therefore, study the relationship between voter turnout and military conscription using a global sample with the expectation that citizens in states that practice conscription will be more politically engaged during times of no conflict. We perform logistic regression models on a global sample (1982–2008) and find that those states that do practice conscription see their citizens participate in the electoral process at a higher level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do violence during a civil war and its aftermath leave a mark on political behaviour? In this article I study how violence perpetrated by the left and repression by the right during and after the Spanish Civil War shaped vote choice and turnout in 1977, in the first legislative election after a 40 year dictatorship. I argue that the effect of repression travels over time when actions are perpetrated by clearly identifiable antagonistic actors. By using a dataset that captures the intensity and the type of violence, results indicate that repression perpetrated by the Francoist dictatorship during and after the conflict had a positive and significant effect on left-wing support in 1977. Results are consistent across different indicators, such as religious violence, distance to mass graves or sanctions to teachers, confirming that violence triggered greater support for the political left. In contrast, results show no relationship between repression and turnout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their ubiquity, few have used traffic camera networks for social science research. Using 1,312,977 images collected from 768 London-based cameras leading up to the 2015 UK general election, this study not only demonstrates how traffic camera data can be used to effectively measure same-day turnout, but we also provide ways such data can be used to assess political behavior more broadly. Such automated enumeration is especially important in countries where official results are only returned for the current election, making it difficult for those interested in assessing turnout at lower levels of aggregation, even when those elections are next on the calendar. Although we are not the first to suggest the value of images-as-data, this study hopes to underline the importance of video-as-data, while simultaneously offering an important foundation for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, liberal democracies have considerably expanded the scope for citizen participation, calling their citizens to vote in a growing number of popular votes. This research investigates the effects of the rising election frequency on electoral participation. It expands on the voting calculus and theorizes which, when, and how past votes affect current voter turnout. We argue that all election types contribute to a common factor of election frequency, whose high values depress turnout and reduce the effectiveness of party mobilization even in the most important elections. We find support for the new theory using an original database of all significant elections and referendums held in 22 European democracies between 1939 and 2019, two natural experiments, and survey data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. Our findings shed light on contemporary participation trends and have major implications for democratic citizenship and democratic institutional engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is voting a duty of democratic citizenship? This article advances a new argument for the existence of a duty to vote. It argues that every normative account of electoral representation requires universal turnout to function in line with its own internal normative logic. This generates a special obligation for citizens to vote in electoral representative contexts as a function of the role morality of democratic citizenship. Because voting uniquely authorizes office holding in representative democracies, and because universal turnout contributes powerfully to representation being fair, to be a good citizen of such democracies requires one to vote. Whereas previous arguments for a duty to vote have invoked basic moral principles like fairness or a Samaritan duty of rescue, this account is based on citizens occupying a vital functional role within electoral representative institutions. This institutional duty solves the "specificity problem" of justifying a duty to vote better than competing accounts and also immunizes the duty to objections that there is no duty to vote when there are only bad choices and that there is a no duty to vote but rather duty to vote well. By emphasizing the tight connection between institutions and individual conduct, the role morality approach used here supplies a less abstract and more realistic framework than much previous research on the ethics of democratic citizenship and brings the debate closer to constitutive features of democratic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political representation of citizens of immigrant origin in Western Europe has received much attention in recent years' political science research. While existing research has advanced our understanding of the drivers of citizens of immigrant origins' descriptive representation, a lot less is known about its consequences for citizens of immigrant origins' electoral participation. This article intends to address this gap in the literature by conducting the first cross-country comparative study of whether migrant-specific descriptive representation can attenuate turnout gaps between citizens of immigrant origin and native-origin citizens in 11 Western European democracies. Linking data on migrant-specific descriptive representation in national parliaments with survey data provided by the European Social Survey, results suggest that turnout gaps tend to be lower in countries where descriptive representation is high. However, this relationship is contingent upon citizens of immigrant origin who consider themselves to be in an ethnic minority position, in which they frequently experience discrimination. By contrast, there is no evidence that descriptive representation matters for turnout levels of non-marginalised citizens of immigrant origin. The study sheds light on the widely overlooked link between descriptive representation and the immigrant gap in turnout levels and opens up several avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Habit is among the most influential explanations for why people vote. Scholars have addressed the impact of individual disruptions to habitual voting, but analyses including several life events are rare. We combine two panel surveys, conducted in the UK during 1991-2017, to examine the impact of unemployment, retirement, changes in partnership status, moving and disability on voting. We distinguish between habitual voters, occasional voters and habitual non-voters. For all voter groups, turnout declines with divorce. For other life events, the impacts diverge across the voter groups. Overall, the findings suggest that social connections are the strongest underlying mechanisms explaining the changes. Although the results support the voting habit thesis, they also suggest that previous research has overstated the persistence of voting habits. The results revise some of the canonical findings by demonstrating that the impact of life events differs across people with different voting habits and across different life events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socioeconomic resources are important predictors of electoral participation, yet to understand their impact, we argue it is essential to examine the interaction of income dissatisfaction (egocentric dimension) with someone's view of societal conditions (sociotropic dimension). Drawing on pooled national election surveys, we find that deprivation indeed depresses voting, but more importantly also that there is significant variation among those who experience economic difficulties: those who disconnect their personal misfortune from broader grievances are significantly more likely to abstain (Relative Power Hypothesis), while embedding one's situation in a context of societal disparities leads to a desire for change and participation levels nearly as high as among the better off (Conflict Hypothesis). Our findings speak to inequality and turnout research but also have direct political implications, as it seems that responsiveness to campaigns focused on distributional injustices hinges on voters' perception of themselves in relation to society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research on voting legislation argues that Republican lawmakers enact strict voting laws as part of a racialized, partisan electoral strategy—they believe that the laws will reduce minority turnout and benefit Republicans electorally. Yet, the empirical effects of strict voting laws on turnout are mixed, with some studies finding that restrictive legislation can actually increase minority turnout due to counter-mobilization effects. I leverage this empirical finding to study the foundations of public attitudes toward voting laws, specifically testing whether exposure to information that restrictive voting laws can boost minority turnout impacts Republicans' or Democrats' attitudes. My results show that Republican support for restrictive voting laws generally does not change in response to information about the consequences of the laws, but Democrats are significantly less opposed when they become aware of the laws' potential impact on minority turnout. These results pose challenges for building majorities that will defend the franchise in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most vote validation studies assume that socially desirable responding is the cause of turnout overreports. Still, very little has been done to test this assertion. Using response latency measures from the 2020 Cooperative Election Study and its vote validation data, I examine the relationship between overreporting turnout and response latencies. Emulating research on the effect of deception on response latencies I test whether turnout overreports have a similar effect to that of deception on the response latencies for self-reported turnout. I find that the respondents who overreport turnout have higher mean response times than validated voters on average, and address the role memory in predicting the length of response latencies for the turnout self-reports. This study sheds light on the cognitive mechanism that underlies the occurrence of overreports in survey research, and provides new evidence to support the view that overreports of voter turnout occur due to socially desirable responding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political scientists have long recognized educational attainment as a strong predictor of voter turnout, but the mechanisms through which educational experiences lead voters to the polls remain underexplored. This research begins to open this proverbial black box to understand the specific types of scholastic experiences that encourage voting. Grounded in previous findings by scholars of policy feedback and political socialization, a mix of qualitative and quantitative data analyses reveal that nonacademic high school experiences can have powerful and lasting interpretive effects. Participants in performance and service-based extracurricular activities are consistently recognized for their efforts and connected to their communities, leading to interpretations of dignity, efficacy, and civic duty. As a result, these young Americans are more likely than their peers to vote in early adulthood. Further analyses uncover critical effects based on socioeconomic status: many interpretive educational experiences have more profound impacts on the voting behaviors of young citizens who may lack opportunities for positive political socialization in their home and social environments. Unfortunately, those young Americans whose participatory behaviors could be most impacted by uplifting extracurricular experiences are also least likely to have access to and participate in these programs, a gap that may have been exacerbated during the recent pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]