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The notion that domestic responses to financial crises are constrained in a way that limits the options available to national governments is not new. However, the last term of the European Parliament was a period when this reality was brought home to European electorates with previously unseen potency. This study explores the implications of this for the logic of voting in the 2014 European elections. Defection from government parties in EP elections is known to result from a combination of sincere/ideological and performance/protest voting logics. However, this study argues that fiscal tightening policies functioned, in the most affected countries, as a signal leading voters to discount the ideological positions of parties and to behave mostly under a pure protest logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In many jurisdictions, whether referendum results are binding depends on legally defined quorum requirements. We use a pivotal voter model to examine the consequences of such requirements. We find that, although quorum rules differ in consequences, a status quo bias that is usually attributed need not be present and that quorum rules may work against the status quo. The rules can also both favor minorities and reduce voter turnout. Because quorum rules can create situations in which the secrecy of the vote is compromised, the door is opened to undemocratic forms of social and political pressure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines what has driven voters' choices in the 2006 presidential election in Portugal. Electing a semipresidential head of state has often been treated either as a "popularity contest" or as a full-fledged "first-order" election, depending on the particular national political system in which those elections were studied. Using data from a panel survey conducted following the 2005 legislative and 2006 presidential elections, this article suggests that, in a "premier-presidentialist" system such as Portugal - where presidents are neither the heads of the executive nor mere figureheads - voters are unlikely to be oblivious to the conventional partisan and ideological cues provided by campaigns, but also unlikely to see these elections as a mechanism with which to hold government accountable. Instead, patterns of defection from the government party seem to conform to theoretical expectations derived from the notion that presidential elections in such cases can be conceived as "less important", but where parties and voters remain aware of the connections between what is at stake in different electoral arenas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the performance of the pre-election polls in Portugal since 1991 and attempts to determine some of the common causes of poll inaccuracy in both National Assembly and European Parliament elections. The analysis of poll results in this period reveals marked improvements in poll accuracy since 1991, which have brought it to levels that, today, are comparable to those found in nations where the practice of both survey research and opinion polling is longer and more established. No evidence of a systematic bias against any of the major parties is found, and sources of error are congruent with those found elsewhere. However, large errors remain the norm in polls pertaining to European Parliament elections, suggesting a shared inability of Portuguese polling organizations in dealing appropriately with the problems caused by low turnout and 'landslide' elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]