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We analyze the partisanship of Commissioners at the SEC and Governors at the Federal Reserve Board. Using recent advances in machine learning, we identify partisan phrases in Congress, such as "red tape" and "climate change," and observe their usage among regulators. Although the Fed has remained relatively nonpartisan throughout our sample period (1930–2019), we find that partisanship among SEC Commissioners rose to an all-time high during the 2010-2019 period, driven by more-partisan Commissioners replacing less-partisan ones. Partisanship at the SEC appears in both the language of new SEC rules and the voting behavior of SEC Commissioners. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix , which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has found that as the effective number of political parties increases, people are more likely to delay their voting decisions. Yet, since voters have different political predispositions, theory suggests that the effects of fragmentation are not equal for all, but stronger for non-partisans and low interest voters. The analysis of survey data from 24 countries shows that party fragmentation does increase the probability of a late voting decision of all partisan and non-partisan voters at all levels of political interest. A more detailed measure of time of voting decision, however, evidences that partisans and voters with high political interest are less influenced by the number of parties. All in all, these findings highlight an understudied consequence of party fragmentation: it impacts the time of voting decision for most voters in democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020, Alaskans voted to adopt a nonpartisan top-4 primary followed by a ranked-choice general election. Proposals for "final four" and "final five" election systems are being considered in other states, as well as ranked-choice voting. The initial use of Alaska's procedure in 2022 serves as a test case for examining whether such reforms may help moderate candidates avoid being "primaried." In 2022, incumbent Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski held her seat against a Trump-endorsed Republican, Kelly Tshibaka. We use data from the 2022 election in Alaska, along with a mixed-mode survey of Alaskan voters before the general election, to test hypotheses about how voters behave in these kinds of elections, finding: (1) the moderate Republican candidate, Murkowski, likely would have lost a closed partisan primary; (2) some Democrats and independents favored the moderate Republican over the candidate of their own party, and the new rules allowed them to support her at all stages of the election, along with others who voted for her to stop the more conservative Republican candidate; and (3) that Alaskan voters are largely favorable toward the new rules, but that certain kinds of populist voters are likely to both support Trump and oppose the rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ostracism—being ignored and excluded—has been shown to fuel threats to democracies, including increased willingness to engage in violent actions, endorsement of partisan falsehoods, and belief in political conspiracy theories. Recently, low social belonging has been linked with lower voter turnout and increased populist party support, thus illustrating how an individual's social experiences may prove consequential for political processes. Importantly, low levels of belonging may originate from social ostracism, as ostracized individuals are denied social partaking by others. In a registered report, we analyzed large survey data including reported voting behavior in the past national election from 11 European countries, and we found that ostracism is associated with lower voter turnout. Ostracism was not connected to populist party vote, irrespective of their ideological orientation (far‐left vs. far‐right). The findings highlight the need to better understand and consider how individuals' social experiences are relevant in safeguarding modern democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the effect of the allocation of centralised funding on electoral support for the incumbent by utilising the introduction of the "Towns Fund" in England in 2019 as a natural experiment. For causal identification, I leverage a difference-in-difference design to examine the electoral effect of this fund. My findings suggest that providing funding to constituencies significantly increased the vote share of the Conservative Party in the General Election in 2019. However, in a subset of constituencies in which the Labour Party constitutes the incumbent, the findings can not be replicated for all specifications and robustness checks. Furthermore, I do not find consistent support that the effect is stronger in economically deprived constituencies. Similarly, the results suggest that the voting outcome depends on the total amount of funding being received, however, this finding does not reach statistical significance. These results complement the literature by providing empirical evidence for pork barrel as a functioning means for vote buying for the Conservative government in 2019 in England. Furthermore, this paper emphasises that partisanship should be considered as a mediating variable when analysing the political effect of providing place-based funding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom holds and previous research confirms that for a political candidate, atheism is anathema. But the United States is becoming a more secular nation. Does secularization mean that atheists are acceptable to some Americans, specifically Democrats and voters with low religiosity? Can concerns about atheists be assuaged by appealing to the superordinate identity of “patriotic American”? Drawing on four survey experiments, we find that Democrats are more supportive of an atheist, Republicans less—producing a null effect overall. Furthermore, voters’ reactions to an atheist are not driven by the office, but are shaped by both their partisanship and religiosity. Voters’ negative attitudes are partially assuaged by framing an atheist as a patriotic war hero. As the secular population grows in the United States, it seems likely that atheists will emerge as candidates for elected office. Our data suggest that, contrary to conventional wisdom, atheist candidates are potentially electable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scholarly literature suggests that, as elections approach, political tensions intensify, and, as they pass, tensions return to pre-election levels. Using a massive new dataset of 66,000 interviews (cross-sectional and panel), we find that animosities are durable and consistent over the course of the 2022 US election. Individuals with more exposure to the campaign tend to be more polarized, and this sentiment endures post-election. Contrary to expectations, partisans who voted for the winning candidate are no less polarized post-election than those on the losing side. In closing, we note that the durability of polarization has important implications not only for our understanding of the scope of partisan divides but also for efforts designed to ameliorate polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a laboratory setting, we study the effect of induced partisanship on costly information acquisition, information sharing, and voting decisions in an endogenous social network. We find social media significantly increases the quality of group decision making when information sharing on the platform is constrained to be truthful. However, when it is possible to share misinformation, social media has a deleterious effect and group decisions are worse than when there is no information sharing at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies focusing on Belize reveal that clientelism is the glue that makes the party system stick. We explore whether ideology and ethnicity account for partisanship within that deeply clientelist setting. We use four AmericasBarometer survey waves by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) to study the individual-level correlates of partisan attachments with the People’s United Party (PUP) and United Democratic Party (UDP). Using binary and multinomial probit maximum likelihood estimators, we find that ethnicity correlates to partisanship with the PUP, and ideology correlates to partisanship with the UDP. The robustness checks, which focus on declared vote choices in previous national elections, corroborate our findings. The Belizean case shows how clientelist parties can develop alternative support sources and that these can vary substantially. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent do voters support election observation missions (EOMs) monitoring their elections? Building on but departing from prior work, we argue that citizens' support for election observation missions likely depends on their partisanship. To test our argument, we conduct a survey experiment with a national sample of about 3, 500 Americans in the run-up to the 2020 United States presidential election. Respondents read an adapted news article about the deployment of common interventions in the upcoming election. To test our theoretical expectations, we randomize the partisan source endorsing the interventions. We find that respondents who self-identify as Democrats and Independents/Others are much less likely to support election observers when endorsed by Trump. In addition, Democrats are more likely to support election observers if they read that Biden approves of them. In contrast, Republicans are less likely to support an intervention if they read the same. Our results contribute to ongoing debates about how to promote and defend free elections in backsliding or democratizing countries and, more generally, to the literatures on election observation and public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The choice of voting methods has increasingly become a politicized, partisan issue. We ask: Can a nationalized partisan rhetoric cast doubt on vote‐by‐mail (VBM) despite years of experience and a raging pandemic? Method: Using 2020 general election records in Colorado, an established all‐mail voting state, we analyze first the general choice of voting methods using supervised machine learning and then the choice to switch to in‐person voting despite having used VBM in previous cycles. Results: The choice of voting modes is mainly habitual; local variations of COVID‐19 hardly mattered. Republican partisanship played an important role in predicting "switchers" to in‐person voting; the probability was 5.2 percent conditional on being a Republican as opposed to 1.9 percent for a Democrat. Conclusions: The results suggest that voting in person can be heavily polarized by partisan communication, despite being a health behavior in a pandemic and voters having experience with mail voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Districted proportional systems give an edge to right-wing parties that are more popular in rural areas where district magnitude is small and large parties are mechanically advantaged. In this paper, we explore the role played by voters in this bias by looking at how ideology correlates with strategic voting. We analyze survey data from 44 elections in Western Europe and find that left-wing voters are more likely to support a party that is not viable (p < 0.01), but once in this position they seem less likely to desert this party for one that is viable (p < 0.1). Further, we find that this pattern is likely driven by the intensity of partisan preferences as left-wing voters are on average more attached to their favorite party and thus more reluctant to desert it (p < 0.01). Our study thus demonstrates that the psychological effect of districted proportional systems amplifies the mechanical one in advanced industrial democracies. [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]

While affective polarization has been shown to have serious social consequences, there is little evidence regarding its effects on political attitudes and behavior such as policy preferences, voting, or political information accrual. This paper provides evidence that affective polarization impacts misinformation belief, arguing that citizens with higher levels of affective polarization are more likely to believe in-party-congruent misinformation and less likely to believe out-party-congruent misinformation. The argument is supported by data from the ANES 2020 Social Media Study and the ANES 2020 Time Series Study, which speaks to the generalizability of the relationship. Additionally, a survey experiment provides evidence that the relationship is causal. The results hold among Democrats and Republicans and are independent of the effects of partisan strength and ideological extremity. Furthermore, the relationship between affective polarization and misinformation belief is exacerbated by political sophistication rather than tempered by it, implying that education will not solve the issue. The results speak to the need for work on reducing affective polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the 100th anniversary of the Republic, Turkey experienced another multi-party election. This paper aims to analyse the role partisanship played in determining the outcomes of the 2023 General Elections. The literature provides valuable insights about the effects of partisanship on the vote choice in Turkey, and underscores the influence of political socialization, newly emerging political parties, clientelist ties and voters' threat perceptions on party identification. To contribute to this literature, this study provides individual level analysis of the data gathered via Turkish Election Studies (TES) and compares the results of 2018 and 2023 elections. This comparison includes comparative examination of partisanship vis-à-vis the effects of such individual variables as social class, political ideology, voters' perceptions of the recent performance of the macro economy, and cultural identities. The findings show that partisanship and cultural divisions seem to be crucial determinants of vote choices in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Candidate debates are increasingly organized during elections in democracies and electoral autocracies. How do debates impact partisan divisions and preferences in these contexts? One theoretical perspective suggests that debates should amplify these preferences and divisions, while another implies debates should attenuate them. This paper evaluates these expectations by studying presidential debates organized during Malawi's May 2019 elections. With an experiment and national panel survey, the paper provides evidence consistent with attenuation: debate watchers were substantially more likely to vote across partisan lines (cross-party voting), became more favorable toward out-partisan candidates, and became less favorable toward co-partisans. Suggestive evidence on causal mechanisms shows that these effects were driven by policy persuasion and debates' impact on perceptions of the candidates' policies and qualities. Results advance debates about information processing, campaign effects, and voting behavior in new democracies and electoral autocracies, and have implications for electoral institutions' impact on partisan divisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does political partisanship extend to childhood? To what degree are children, a largely non‐political population, impacted by parents' and communities' political orientations? We examined children's behaviours and attitudes during a politically divisive event – the COVID‐19 pandemic. Children (4‐ to 12‐year‐olds; N = 313) of liberal (vs. conservative) parents reported greater preventive COVID‐19 behaviours, such as mask wearing and physical distancing, and responded more positively to these health behaviours. At the community level, children living in Democratic‐voting (vs. Republican‐voting) U.S. counties more strongly endorsed preventive COVID‐19 behaviours. Political orientation was a better predictor than education, income, religiosity, population‐density, and infection rates. Mediation and moderation analyses revealed that the parent–child political link was driven by children's perceptions of their parents' guidance, behaviours, and concern about COVID‐19, and that this link was attenuated in Democratic‐ versus Republican‐voting counties. Political orientation appears to play an unexpectedly prominent role, both at the intimate family and broader community level, in determining children's behaviours and attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral rules can affect who wins and who loses elections. Most cities select office holders through plurality rule, but an alternative, ranked-choice voting (RCV), has become increasingly popular. RCV requires voters to rank candidates, instead of simply selecting their most preferred candidate. Observers debate whether RCV will cure a variety of electoral ills or undermine representation. We test the effect of RCV on voter's choices and perceptions of representation using survey experiments with large, representative samples of respondents. We find that candidates of color are significantly penalized in both plurality and RCV elections, with no significant difference between the rule types. However, providing respondents with candidates' partisan affiliation significantly increases support for candidates of color. [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]

How do ordinary citizens perceive and respond to different kinds of political polarization in the U.S.? Recent work shows that people believe that the parties are intensely polarized but, in reality, the extent of polarization depends on whether we focus on political elites or the mass public. This paper reports results from two survey experiments with samples from Dynata and CloudResearch (total N = 2,940) exploring how people perceive ideological and affective polarization among (a) party elites, (b) partisan voters, and (c) ordinary Americans in the mass public. I show that participants believe that the public is both ideologically and affectively polarized, only marginally less than partisans and elites. I also find some evidence that news media creates perceptual spillover between elites, partisans, and the mass public: participants given information about (non)polarization for only one group nonetheless update their perceptions of all three groups in parallel. Given the dominance of information about elites and elite polarization in the U.S. media environment, I argue that top-down spillover from news stories about elites may help to explain why people think the public is more polarized than it really is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral engineering strategies in majoritarian electoral systems, in particular the possibility to contain insurgent parties by manipulating electoral districts for partisan gain, are key determinants of parties' positions on the adoption of proportional representation (PR). Providing both qualitative and quantitative evidence, this paper demonstrates that partisan districting can be an effective strategy to protect incumbent parties' dominant political positions. In addition, it shows how insurgent parties push for the adoption of PR to end the practice of partisan districting. Finally, it demonstrates that incumbents – in the face of increasing electoral threats – cling to the existing majoritarian system if partisan districting allows them to influence vote-seat distortions in their favor. Together, these findings suggest that the possibility to contain insurgent parties by means of partisan districting is an important but overlooked alternative to the adoption of PR. Moreover, by demonstrating that vote-seat distortions moderate the relationship between district-level electoral threats and legislators' support for PR adoption, this paper offers an important corrective to Stein Rokkan's influential electoral threat thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We establish the prevalence of partisan schadenfreude—that is, taking "joy in the suffering" of partisan others. Analyzing attitudes on health care, taxation, climate change, and the coronavirus pandemic, we find that a sizable portion of the American mass public engages in partisan schadenfreude and that these attitudes are most expressed by those who are ideologically extreme. Additionally, we find that a sizable portion of the American public is more likely than not to vote for candidates who promise to pass policies that "disproportionately harm" supporters of the opposing political party, and we demonstrate experimental evidence of demand/preference for candidates who promise cruelty among those who exhibit high amounts of schadenfreude. In sum, our results suggest that partisan schadenfreude is widespread and has disturbing implications for American political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to investigate the efficacy of different content moderation policies designed to combat misinformation on social media. These policies vary the way posts are monitored and the consequence imposed when misinformation is detected. We consider three monitoring protocols: (1) individuals can fact check information shared by other group members for a cost; (2) the social media platform randomly fact checks each post with a fixed probability; (3) the combination of individual and platform fact checking. We consider two consequences: (1) fact-checked posts are flagged, such that the results of the fact check are available to all who view the post; (2) fact-checked posts are flagged, and subjects found to have posted misinformation are automatically fact checked for two subsequent rounds, which we call persistent scrutiny. We compare our data to that of Pascarella et al. (Social media, (mis)information, and voting decisions. Working paper, 2022), which studies an identical environment without content moderation. We find that allowing individuals to fact check improves group decision making and welfare. Platform checking alone does not improve group decisions relative to the baseline with no moderation. It can improve welfare, but only in the case of persistent scrutiny. There are marginal improvements when the two protocols are combined. We also find that flagging is sufficient to curb the negative effects of misinformation. Adding persistent scrutiny does not improve the quality of decision-making; it leads to less engagement on the social media platform as fewer group members share posts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the political consequences of ongoing social sorting? We evaluate the degree of social sorting and mass polarization using the predictability of partisanship and voting decisions as quantities of interest. Contrary to expectations, demographic sorting has not produced a very predictable electorate. Models trained on nothing more than demographic labels from public opinion surveys (1952–2020) predict only 63.9% of two-party vote choices and 63.4% of partisan IDs correctly out-of-sample—whether they be based on logistic regressions or tree-based machine learning models. Moreover, demographics' predictive power over vote choice or partisan affiliation shows a surprising stability over time. We argue that while select demographics' marginal effects may appear to be evidence of social sorting, the joint predictability of political behavior using only demographic characteristics has been, and still is, modest at best. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals sometimes do not "vote their beliefs" but rather to affirm their partisan affiliation. We design an experiment to determine the conditions under which voters engage in partisan expressive voting. Democrats and Republicans are asked to vote on the answers to factual questions about politics and are rewarded if the majority of their group answers correctly. To evaluate both compositional and audience effects, we vary the number of affected co-partisans and public dissemination of vote totals. We find that voters are more expressive as the numbers of co-partisans in either the population or the voting pool increase, despite the potential costs of such behavior for co-partisans. Our results thus indicate that large majorities will sometimes produce outcomes that all could regret. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent will people turn out to vote under high-risk, high-cost circumstances? We examine the impact of risk tolerance on willingness to vote in person in the U.S. 2020 election during the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Our results are based on pre- and postelection surveys that indicated partisan Republicans were more willing to vote in person than Democrats or Independents, who preferred voting by mail. Using behavioral measures of risk-taking, we find that Republican in-person voting is predicted by greater generalized and pandemic-related risk tolerance compared with Democrats and nonpartisans. To explain risk tolerance, we employ prospect theory to illustrate how Republicans' fear of electoral loss, alongside conservative elite and media efforts to downplay COVID-19 severity, likely influenced Republican readiness to assume risks of in-person voting during the pandemic. We urge scholars to consider the implications of risk tolerance for models of electoral behavior under high-risk and high-cost voting conditions. [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]

In 2018, a bill attempting to establish new electoral boundaries in the Yukon following the recommendations of an electoral district boundary commission was defeated at second reading. As a result, the electoral boundaries in the territory remain the same as the ones established in 2008 despite population changes which have created significant variance within some of these districts. Legislation to establish boundaries recommended by a newly created electoral district boundaries commission will need to pass by spring 2025 if they are to be in place in time for the next general election (scheduled for November 3, 2025). In this article, the author describes the history of electoral district boundary commissions in the territory since the advent of partisan politics, explains why the recommendations in 2018 were not accepted, and outlines what he believes to be the two primary considerations the new commission must reconcile: providing fair and effective representation for rural communities and ensuring voter parity for Whitehorse area districts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although political parties are not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, the two-party electoral system is wellestablished in American elections and gerrymandering naturally occurs to benefit the party that controls both a state's legislative chambers and the governor's office. Tracing the evolution of partisan gerrymandering and examining the gerrymandering practices, this research finds that redistricting manipulation enabled by two-party electoral system, is a tale as old as time and it has continued for over two hundred years, rising or falling depending on the intensity of partisan politics. In 21st century, political polarization and gerrymandering have been feeding off each other. When the redistricting process is manipulated by entrenched partisan gerrymanders, it has become counterproductive to fair representation, competitive election, and translating public will into policies. As long as the foxes are allowed to guard the hen houses, partisan politicians will continue to abuse "one person, one vote" principle and pick voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The African National Congress (ANC) has been an electorally dominant party in South African politics since 1994, with its vote share peaking in 2004 before falling to a low in the most recent 2019 general elections. Simultaneously, there have been much sharper declines in levels of ANC partisanship and assessments of government performance among the party's own voters. This presents a puzzle: Why do a significant share of ANC voters continue to support a party that they do not 'feel close' to and do not believe is adequately managing the economy or the delivery of public goods? Based upon original qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with 111 intended ANC voters, I argue that there is a sizeable portion of ANC voters whose connection to the party is characterised by a conditional loyalty that falls short of a more thoroughgoing partisanship. The persistence of 'thin' loyalty alongside habitual and strategic voting for the ANC – especially among the 'born free' generation – has obfuscated the extent of decline in the perceived efficacy of voting and overall satisfaction with the outcomes of democratic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the growing presence and visibility of paleoconservative critique of international curricula such as the IB, little scholarly attention has been invested in discerning how the rise of paleoconservative thought in mainstream politics has shaped or even redirected the IB's growth in the United States. This study strives to address this gap by examining the association between county-level voting patterns with the growth of the IB, the availability of different programs of the IB continuum, and school demographic data. Incidence Rate Ratios (IRR) and 95% Wald Confidence Intervals (CI) were estimated using mixed-effects Poisson models with county as the clustering variable. Notable findings include a shift in growth patterns beginning in 2008, where IB schools have increasingly clustered along partisan lines. The study concludes by considering the potential challenges these changing growth patterns may present to the IB's future in the United States and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pre-election opinion polls are an increasingly prominent aspect of political campaigns, yet they often vary in terms of their results, sources, and where they are published. Citizens are therefore increasingly confronted with the proposition of which polls to give more credence to than others in shaping their voting behaviour. This study investigates the relationship between subjective determinations of poll credibility and voting behaviour in the polarised context of Turkish mayoral elections. The theoretical perspective of motivated reasoning is employed to consider how individuals determine and act upon credible opinion polls in mixed information environments. Using an original two-step experimental approach conducted in 2020, this paper establishes that while the effects of opinion poll credibility on party choice are limited to the strategic considerations of the supporters of smaller parties, opinion polls can have considerable demobilising effects when polling environments are conflicting or deemed not credible. The findings produced in this study are more suggestive of accuracy-seeking than directional motivations, and they have considerable implications for how we think about the relationship between polls, politicians, and voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although most candidates in democracies with institutionalized party systems are party militants, the cultivation of a personal vote and the declining partisanship contribute to the electoral success of candidates who are not party militants. Based on a theoretical discussion on the determinants of electoral success, we postulate hypotheses associated to party militancy and affiliation to party lists and the effect of campaign spending on electoral success. We use the case of the constitutional convention in Chile in 2021 where the registration requirements were the same for party militants and independents. This way, 790 of the 1 278 candidates were independents (61.8%). Among the 138 elected members in regular districts, 88 were independents (63.8%), although some ran on party lists. Being an independent in a list of independents had a positive effect. Campaign spending positively impacts the electoral success of independents and party militants. [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]

This article proposes a framework to analyze realignment processes in countries that transition from industrial to knowledge societies. It characterizes the electorate in terms of two traits that are main predictors for attitudes in a two-dimensional policy space of economic and noneconomic issues: income (low vs. high) and education (low vs. high). The framework divides the electorate into four groups—based on the interaction of these two dichotomized traits—and predicts how and when the voting propensities of these four groups change over time. Using a wide variety of data sources, the article tests hypotheses regarding changing voting behavior of education-income groups, as well as cross-national differences across twenty-one rich democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent do pivotal nonpartisan voters believe and act upon potentially deceptive messages from partisans who privately observe candidates' ex-ante fitness-for-office attributes? How do nonpartisan voters' responses to messages vary with changing odds of candidates' fitness-for-office attributes? This paper derives contrasting predictions regarding pivotal nonpartisans' reactions to potential lies across two-candidate voting competitions and tests them in the laboratory. We find that the partisan voters lie substantially more when candidates possess unequal than equal ex-ante odds. The inferior (superior) candidate's base transmits more unfavorable (favorable) lies about their opponent (own) candidate. Facing candidates with different odds, the nonpartisan voters largely ignore the message and vote for the ex-ante superior candidate. Yet, lying lowers efficiency compared to when the message is always factual, and the efficiency loss is marginally higher when the candidates are ex-ante unequal than equal. We develop a behavioral framework to explain key features of our data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Party leaders are increasingly relevant to voters' choices in parliamentary systems. However, most studies addressing the electoral impact of leaders have largely ignored voters' emotional responses to party leaders. Additionally, little is known about the effect of party leaders in subnational or regional elections. Using data from a specific election survey, this article examines the effect of emotions towards party leaders on regional voting. It assesses whether emotional responses to party leaders not only have direct effects, but whether they also have indirect effects through partisanship on voting. We found evidence that emotions towards party leaders have both direct and indirect effects through partisanship on vote choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties face a crucial trade-off between electoral and partisan goals: should they put electoral goals first, pursuing the policies they think will win them the most votes in the next election, or should they put partisan goals first, pursuing the policies their members, activists, and most loyal voters prefer? In this paper we argue that main political parties make different choices depending on the information environment they are in. They have strong incentives to follow the median voter when the median voter's position is well known, but when there is more uncertainty they have strong incentives to adopt policies they prefer for partisan reasons, since uncertainty makes party leaders more willing to bet that the party's preferred policies are also vote winners. We develop an empirical analysis of how the main parties on the left and the right in twenty democracies have changed their platforms from election to election since the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a theory in which heterogeneity in political preferences produces a partisan disagreement about objective facts. A political decision involving both idiosyncratic preferences and scientific knowledge is considered. Voters form motivated beliefs in order to improve their subjective anticipation of the future political outcome, which is determined by two-party competition à la Downs (1957). We provide conditions on preferences under which equilibrium beliefs are monotone along the political spectrum, as voters tend to deny the scientific arguments advocating the political orientations that run counter to their interests. Collective denial is the strongest in societies where contingent policy is the least likely to be implemented. Political competition does not imply policy convergence, as there exists an equilibrium in which each party targets a different group of voters as a function of their (endogenous) level of denial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than half of leaders who come to power through military coups hold elections to legitimate their regimes, yet there is extensive subnational variation in how citizens accept or reject this process. In this paper, we examine district-by-district voting patterns in Egyptian presidential elections a few months following the July 2013 military coup to identify the ecological correlates of three district-level measures of citizen engagement with the electoral process: voter turnout, valid (non-spoilt) ballots, and votes cast for the regime-affiliated candidate. Controlling for baseline measures of these outcomes from the free and fair presidential elections prior to the coup, we find support for the enduring effect of partisanship: districts with higher support for the deposed candidate in pre-coup elections featured systematically lower turnout and rates of valid voting in post-coup elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

California's fall 1863 elections marked the first time the state attempted any sort of untraditional voting. Republicans asserted that Civil War circumstances necessitated extending suffrage to soldiers stationed away from home, but Democrats posited that absentee voting violated the state constitution and opened the door for fraud. This paper examines how California's Republican and Democratic newspapers debated the issue from the state's first official proposal for a solider suffrage law in January 1863 until December 1864, just after the presidential election. This research aims to answer the following questions: What arguments did the California partisan press use for and against soldier voting? And what do those arguments reveal about party newspapers in the state during the Civil War? The study not only provides insights into the nature of California's Civil War press but also provides historical context for more recent elections in which absentee balloting was controversial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The COVID-19 pandemic has created yet another dimension of performance on which governments can be judged during elections. This article focuses on how the pandemic and its management factored into vote choices in provincial elections in Canada. Did pandemic considerations overwhelm other factors, or was it a tangential consideration? We address this question with data from a series of two-wave election surveys that were conducted by the Consortium on Electoral Democracy (C-Dem) using online samples of citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political accountability requires that voters understand the distribution of policy outcome responsibility among their vote choice options. Research on partisan‐motivated reasoning suggests that voters do not meet this requirement. The problem is that voters condition their attributions of responsibility to the government on their party identification. Government identifiers credit the government for desirable outcomes and blame external forces such as the global economy for undesirable outcomes. This paper draws a more optimistic conclusion. It argues that focusing on the perceived responsibility of the government and external forces is not sufficient for understanding whether voters meet the responsibility attribution requirement. It is also necessary to compare the perceived responsibility of government parties to the perceived responsibility of opposition parties because those are the options that voters get to choose from. This party distribution of perceived responsibility is analyzed with original survey data from Denmark and the United Kingdom. The results demonstrate that while party identification does indeed condition voters' responsibility attributions, both government identifiers and independents attribute systematically more responsibility to the government than to the opposition regardless of the desirability of the outcome. This suggests that voters tend to meet the responsibility attribution requirement of accountability despite the presence of partisan‐motivated reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Politics & Religion Journal is the property of University of Belgrade, Faculty of Political Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)