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After decennia of research on economic voting, it is now established that the state of the economy affects voting behaviour. Nevertheless, this conclusion is the result of a focus on predominantly national-level economies and national-level elections. In this paper, we show that at a local level as well, mechanisms of accountability linked to the economy are at work. The local economic context affected voting behaviour in the 2012 Belgian municipal elections, with a stronger increase of unemployment rates in their municipality significantly decreasing the probability that voters choose an incumbent party. Additionally, we observe that voters are not opportunistically voting for incumbents who lower tax rates. Instead, voters seem to be holding local incumbents accountable for local economic conditions. We hence conclude that voters care about economic outcomes, not about what specific policies are implemented to reach these outcomes.

This article derives a theory of party–voter linkages. It uses the decision theoretic calculus of voting model to theorize about political party strategies to mobilize voters under democratic competition. I show that parties will devise categorically distinct linkage strategies to operate upon different terms in the calculus of voting model. In particular, the theory implies four strategies: programmatic, clientelist, symbolic, and vote-buying. I illustrate their empirical relevance with case narratives of four parties in Ecuador.

Various electronic voting channels have been introduced across a range of countries. In some countries these new channels have proved uncontroversial, while in others, they remain contentious and have even been abandoned. Relatively little is known about whether and why voters have confidence in new and old voting channels. Australia provides a useful case for researching these issues, since it is a mature democracy in which election processes and outcomes are widely accepted. The 2013 Australian Election Study results show that in this context, voters have most confidence in paper-based voting and least in voting via smartphones. Positive political attachments, ease of voting and familiarity with technology are all associated with higher levels of confidence in voting channels.

This paper presents a novel application in the emerging field of computational politics. Here, we anticipate American congressional voting outcome using support vector machines (SVM) and back propagation learning algorithm neural network models. Our proposed method successfully associates opinions of American congress members on defined national issues with their political party affiliation as republican or democrat, thus providing a artificially intelligent anticipation system of the congressional voting outcome based on previous knowledge of how the congress members perceive national issues. Knowledge is obtained from existing congressional records which are unclassified and available online for research purposes. The obtained experimental results suggest that our novel method and application can be further applied to similar voting polls in order to anticipate the party members voting inclination.

This paper estimates the effects of the compulsory voting laws on individuals´ political orientations though a regression discontinuity framework. The identification comes from Brazil´s dual voting system – voluntary and compulsory – whose exposure is determined based on citizens’ dates of birth. Using self-collected data, we find that compulsory voting has sizable effects on individuals´ political preferences, making them more likely to identify with a political party and to become oriented towards ideological extremes.

Made available in DSpace on 2018-11-26T15:29:34Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2016-03-01 One of the most robust findings on political institutions is that compulsory voting (CV) reduces the participation gap between poorer and wealthier voters. We present evidence that in Brazil, the largest country to use such a rule, CV increases inequality in turnout. We use individual-level data on 140 million Brazilian citizens and two age-based discontinuities to estimate the heterogeneous effects of CV by educational achievement, a strong proxy for socioeconomic status. Evidence from both thresholds shows that the causal effect of CV on turnout among the more educated is at least twice the size of the effect among those with less education. To explain this result, which is the opposite of what is predicted by the existing literature, we argue that nonmonetary penalties for abstention primarily affect middle-and upper-class voters and thus increase their turnout disproportionately. Survey evidence from a national sample provides evidence for the mechanism. Our results show that studies of CV should consider nonmonetary sanctions, as their effects can reverse standard predictions. Sao Paulo State Univ, Dept Polit Sci, BR-01225010 Sao Paulo, SP, Brazil MIT, Dept Polit Sci, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA Sao Paulo State Univ, Dept Polit Sci, BR-01225010 Sao Paulo, SP, Brazil

Hitherto, tactical voting has not been a topic in Norwegian electoral research, despite the fact that tactical considerations have been publically discussed both by politicians and citizens for years. The complexity of the electoral system is partly to blame. Norwegian voters experience a number of tactical situations that give rise to rather different dilemmas, and hence several tactical motives. These need to be mapped and analysed separately. A set of survey questions has been especially designed for the present study to record these motives. Special attention has also been paid to the political sophistication of voters, campaign messages encouraging tactical voting, and the restraining effects of habitual voting and negative attitudes towards tactical voting. These factors may modify the inclination to tactical electoral behaviour. The web survey designed for the present project was conducted immediately following the Norwegian parliamentary election of 2013 (N = 2,278). Of the voters in the survey, 18.3 percent reported casting a tactically motivated vote. The 4 percent threshold on the distribution of compensatory seats, the competition for the last district seats and the composition of government coalitions triggered tactical voting. Tactical voters do not stand out as more politically sophisticated than other voters. Rather than calculating the expected utility for each party, they seem to rely on campaign information from the political parties and the media when voting tactically. For the habitual voters and voters with a strong dislike of tactical voting, the propensity for tactical voting is well below average.

Compulsory voting is assumed to have both primary and secondary effects on citizens' political behaviour. While compulsion increases voter turnout, its effects on political engagement, democratic satisfaction, and electoral advantage are still debated. This study hypothesises that compulsory voting increases citizens’ political knowledge, either because voters choose to become informed given the requirement to vote, or because the process of voting itself imparts incidental knowledge. It also hypothesises that knowledge is distributed more evenly in compulsory systems. Multivariate analysis of data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (Modules 1 to 4) finds some support for the first hypothesis, and stronger evidence in support of the second hypothesis. These findings inform normative debates on the merits of compulsory voting rules.

This paper proposes a new method to analyze strategic voting in ‘wasted vote’ situations. Two-round elections, in which the second round features three candidates, provide an ideal testing ground since the first round offers precise baseline measurement of the support for the third-place candidate. Estimations are conducted on 403 single-member district races from six general elections in Hungary. It is estimated that if the first-round vote share difference between the two leading candidates becomes smaller by one percentage point, the number of votes the third-place candidate receives in the second round diminishes by 1.4 percent. The effect is estimated to be strongest in 2010, while no strategic voting is found in the first democratic election in 1990.

A recent literature has found a positive relationship between the disproportionality of the electoral system and the convergence of parties’ positions. Such a relationship depends crucially on the assumption that voting is sincere. We show that, when voters are players in the game and not simply automata that vote for their favorite party, two policy-motivated parties always take extreme positions in equilibrium.

Previous voting studies classified voters into three groups – pre-campaign deciders, campaign deciders, and last-minute deciders – according their vote decision timing and suggested a linear relationship between time-of-voting decision and political/nonpolitical characteristics, predicting that the earlier voters make their decisions, the more inclined they are to be politically involved, interested and attentive. This study re-examines the linear relationship suggested by past studies, treating time-of-voting decision as a dependent variable. Furthermore, it explores the roles of interpersonal communications, specifically heterogeneity within interpersonal communication networks, in individuals’ voting behaviors with the expectation that heterogeneity is a primary determinant of the time-of-voting decision. Data for the study came from the 2000 American National Election Studies, and the same variables as previous studies were used in analysis. Results showed there were no significant differences between campaign deciders and last-minute deciders, while precampaign deciders significantly differed from the other two groups. Further analysis with non-voters included found that both campaign deciders and last-minute deciders showed significantly higher levels of political participation and interests than non-voters. These results do not support the findings of previous studies. Heterogeneity was found to be an important predictor for time-of-voting decision. Supporting the “cross-pressure” hypothesis, it was found that as heterogeneity increased, opinion formation was delayed. Also, it was revealed that heterogeneity was negatively correlated with political participation and media use and attention. The results suggest that

In South Africa, a team of analysts has for some years been using statistical techniques to predict election outcomes during election nights in South Africa. The prediction method involves using statistical clusters based on past voting patterns to predict final election outcomes, using a small number of released vote counts. With the US presidential elections in November 2016 hitting the global media headlines during the time period directly after successful predictions were done for the South African elections, the team decided to investigate adapting their meth-od to forecast the final outcome in the US elections. In particular, it was felt that the time zone differences between states would affect the time at which results are released and thereby provide a window of opportunity for doing election night prediction using only the early results from the eastern side of the US. Testing the method on the US presidential elections would have two advantages: it would determine whether the core methodology could be generalised, and whether it would work to include a stronger spatial element in the modelling, since the early results released would be spatially biased due to time zone differences. This paper presents a high-level view of the overall methodology and how it was adapted to predict the results of the US presidential elections. A discussion on the clustering of spatial units within the US is also provided and the spatial distribution of results together with the Electoral College prediction results from both a ‘test-run’ and the final 2016 presidential elections are given and analysed.

First Published March 28, 2017 Political scientists have identified protest voting – voting for an anti-establishment party as a protest against mainstream politics – as a consequence of dissatisfaction with traditional political options. Yet we know little about what motivates people to cast a protest vote or why voters select one such protest option over another. Taking as its empirical referent the 2015 General Election in Great Britain, this article assesses the ‘protest choice’ in parliamentary democracies. We test three possible theoretical explanations for protest voting: ideology, mistrust of political elites and campaign effects. We find that the most important factors affecting protest choice are issue positions and campaign effects. The findings suggest that protest voting is a complex phenomenon that cannot be reduced to knee-jerk anti-politics reactions.

In the paper the results of voting by different voting methods are presented and analyzed. Approval voting, disapproval voting, categorization method and classical majority voting are compared using results of a presidential poll conducted over a representative sample. Results differ depending on the voting methods used. However, from the statistical point of view, within the same valuation scope (positive, if voting is constructed so that the vote is “for” the candidate and negative, if the vote is “against”) the order of the candidates remains similar across the methods.

International audience; This work provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the dominance solvability of approval voting games. Our conditions are very simple since they depend just on the number of possible winners when voters play weakly undominated strategies. If there are at most two possible winners, then the game is dominance-solvable and the outcome coincides with the Condorcet winner. If every candidate is a possible winner, the game is not dominance-solvable. If none of the previous conditions holds, then the game need not be dominance-solvable, and the outcome need not coincide with the Condorcet winner.

This article explores legislative voting behaviour in the regional party system where electoral competition is based primarily on geographic divisions instead of national public policies. An analysis of roll-call votes in the National Assembly of the Republic of Korea from 2000 to 2008 reveals that in the regionalized context, legislative voting unity is high because legislators are disciplined to receive endorsement from their regional champion party. Those legislators are far more disciplined when voting on pork legislation. Nonetheless, as the socioeconomic status of constituents rises and the constituents thus care more about policy than pork, then opposition legislators tend to vote against their parties more often. Conversely, governing-party members are more disciplined to pass bills where voters often desire policy over pork. This study suggests a powerful interaction between party affiliations and voter demands as a dominant electoral strategic tool in the regional party system.

This study suggests that certain election administration arrangements can have a modest but significant impact on the probability of voting. Using data from Module 3 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, supplemented by contextual data from the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network, I explore the effects of election timing and voter registration procedures on turnout in 30 democracies. I show that when voter registration is in the hands of an independent electoral management body, there is a greater likelihood of an individual voting. Contrary to conventional wisdom, election timing has little impact on the probability of voting. Weekend voting, polling hours, and the timing of the election during the year have no significant impact, even among young people, supposedly the beneficiaries of such arrangements. The results show the potential for certain election arrangements to stimulate turnout. They also reveal that facilitating voters by lessening voting costs is not a cure to the problem of gr...

This study investigated the factors leading to e-voting adoption successes and failures. Secondary data on e-voting adoption across the world was used in this study.Results indicate that concerns about accuracy, lack of trust, lack of secrecy of votes, lack of verifiability, secrecy of source codes and lack of support from political parties are among the factors leading to failure in e-voting adoption and it vary from country to country.The findings of this study can help in the determination of the necessary factors for the successful and sustainable adoption of e-voting system.

This article aims to explain a new and recent phenomenon from the scope of political science: How does the implementation of remote internet voting (RIV) affect voter turnout in one chosen European state (Estonia) after employing e-voting on the supranational, national and local level of elections. From some point of view, Remote internet voting can have a positive effect on lowering the barriers for voting, because traditional elections using paper ballots do not meet today’s standards for many citizens. The question seems simple: Does the application of RIV create new possibilities for Estonian citizens to vote outside the polling stations thus bringing new voters to the polls in a number, that we can recognize as a significant change in the total turnout in the first and the second level elections?

Unlike in the standard jury voting experiment, the voting environment in practice has no explicit signal structure. Voters then need to conceptualize the information structure in order to update their beliefs based on “pivotal reasoning”. This paper investigates whether voters can play a strategic voting under a “detail-free” environment. We obtain non-parametric predictions in terms of the differences in voting behaviors under majority and unanimity rule. Our experimental results suggest that voters can still play the strategic voting as in the existing experiments.

Field experiments and regression discontinuity designs test whether voting is habit forming by examining whether a random shock to turnout in one election affects participation in subsequent elections. We contribute to this literature by offering a vast amount of new statistical evidence on the long-term consequences of random and quasi-random inducements to vote. The behavior of millions of voters confirms the persistence of voter turnout and calls attention to theoretically meaningful nuances in the development and expression of voting habits. We suggest that individuals become habituated to voting in particular types of elections. The degree of persistence appears to vary by electoral context and by the attributes of those who comply with an initial inducement to vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research note examines patterns of MPs’ voting behaviour during ‘conscience’ or ‘free’ votes on three ‘morality politics’ issues in the lower house of the New South Wales state parliament in Australia: adoption rights for gay couples; scientists’ use of therapeutic cloning; and the status of the Sydney Medically Supervised Injection Centre. First, the research note reviews the literature on conscience voting and hypothesises that party will be the main predictor of voting patterns, but also establishes that previous studies have almost exclusively focused on national legislatures. Next the research note discusses methodological issues. Third, it presents the analysis of free vote patterns in the New South Wales parliament on the three ‘morality politics’ issues, along four key variables: party; sex; social ideology; and religion. The analysis of voting in the New South Wales parliament challenges existing explanations of free voting, where party is the key predictor of voting patterns. Intra-party un...

This study investigates the voting behavior of the Taiwanese electorate in two different levels of election by taking into account two aggregate-level effects, namely the political and economic contextual effects. Using both individual-level and aggregate-level data to study the 2008 legislative election and the 2012 presidential election in Taiwan, this paper not only confirms that the valence politics explanation outperforms other individual-level voting models in the legislative election and in other elections in Taiwan, but also demonstrates how the two contextual effects influence individual voting behavior. Specifically, the political contextual effect had influence on the individual electoral choice in both the 2008 legislative election and the 2012 presidential election, whereas economic contexts only affect voters’ decision when choosing a president. The multilevel analysis reveals that different individual-level voting models could provide partial explanation for voting behavior; however, the fi...

Voting presents a challenge to military personnel and overseas citizens. Mail absentee ballots are often unreliable, and many citizens are unaware of their full range of voting options. Following implementation of a new internet-based ballot delivery system, we assessed the impact of the different email messages used to introduce it. Our findings show that communications with a concise subject line, source credibility, and that feature a citizen's reference groups encourage system usage. These communications also promote greater usage and turnout among citizens located in nations experiencing conflict, in allied nations, and abroad. Our findings have implications for scholars and political practitioners.

The most prominent explanation for the paradox of voter turnout is that citizens are willing to bear the cost of voting because they perceive a benefit (e.g., fulfilling a civic duty or expressing themselves) that is independent of the election outcome. However, a separate literature highlights the empirical importance of information for voter participation, and existing explanations for this are that uninformed citizens either expect smaller benefits from voting, or defer strategically to peers who know more. This paper simply points out that, while either of these theories offers a plausible explanation for the importance of information, neither is robust if the motivation for voting is unrelated to the election outcome. This is because citizens with positive net voting costs should abstain, no matter how well informed, while those with negative net voting costs should vote, no matter how poorly informed. Thus, the purported resolution to the turnout paradox raises a new paradox of information and voter turnout. Intuitively, the quality of a vote should matter only if the vote is somehow instrumental, suggesting that future work should continue to explore instrumental rationales for voting.

Voting is seen as the sine qua non of moral citizenship for most Christians: not voting is unthinkable. But some believers, drawing from countercultural traditions within Christianity such as Christian pacifism, argue that abstaining from voting is necessary to provide a faithful witness to God’s kingdom. The result is a reductionist approach to voting that resolves in either a simple yes or no. Seeking to broaden this discussion, this article will analyze voting as a moral action. Attention will be given to how voting or not voting shapes the moral actor through analysis of the work of John Rawls, arguments for proportional representation and compulsory voting, and arguments for voting abstinence. Despite their differences, these arguments revolve around the question of moral imagination and community formation. Taylor will argue that voting or not voting are misunderstood morally if portrayed in terms of a relationship to political authorities. Voting and not voting are better understood as acts of neighbor love. Any ethic of voting must focus on how voting or not voting advances the good of the neighbor. Consequently, absolutist claims regarding voting or voting abstinence risk losing sight of the complex and changing needs of neighbors. A more flexible ethic of voting that allows us to vote or not vote depending on what our neighbors need should be the focus of ethical reflection on voting.

We investigate the influence of electoral rules on voting behavior and the quality of judges, using newly collected data on judicial elections and ratings from 39 U.S. states. We find that in partisan elections, where candidates' party affiliations are listed on the ballot, party drives voting behavior and candidate quality has little effect on outcomes. In nonpartisan elections, where party affiliation is not on the ballot, party has a much smaller influence on voting behavior and candidate quality has a substantial effect on outcomes. If the primary task of public officials is not to represent voters' ideology and their decisions have little variability across parties, then we need to seriously consider the potential cost of partisan competition. To the extent that partisan voting behavior crowds out the influence of candidate quality on voting outcomes, the desirability of the partisan election system should be carefully assessed.

As of 2015, 36 states and the District of Columbia allow any registered citizen to cast a vote before Election Day through the mail or at designated locations (National Conference of State Legislatures 2015). Early voting programs have become a significant feature of American elections. In both 2008 and 2012, more than 30% of the electorate cast ballots before Election Day, including a majority of voters in at least nine states in 2012 (Demos 2014; McDonald 2012). Numerous surveys indicate that voters appreciate the convenience offered by early voting (Kasler 2014; Martens 2014; Warner 2013). Some voters also recognize that voting before Election Day means an early end to the barrage of mailings, phone calls, and canvassing visits directed by parties and candidates (Benac 2010). States offering early voting do so not only in general elections, but in primary contests as well. While national figures are difficult to obtain, a substantial number of voters cast early ballots during both the 2008 and 2012 presidential nomination cycles. In fact, a majority of primary voters participated early in California and Texas in both 2008 and 2012 (Austin Community College 2010, 6; California Secretary of State 2012; Reynolds 2014). (1) Early voting has become significant enough in presidential primaries that exit pollsters now routinely conduct telephone surveys of early voters to supplement their primary day surveys (Roper Center 2008). (2) Most scholarly attention devoted to early voting has focused on the degree to which programs increase voter turnout. While many have argued that early voting fails to bring new voters to the polls (Burden et al. 2014; Fitzgerald 2005; Gronke, Galanes-Rosenbaum, and Miller 2007; Larocca and Klemanski 2011; Primo, Jacobsmeier, and Milyo 2007; Wolfinger, Highton, and Mullin 2005), others have reported that programs with abundant sites (Fullmer forthcoming; Losco, Scheele, and Hall 2010; Neeley and Richardson 1996) or sites in convenient areas (Stein and Garcia-Monet 1997) can improve turnout by several percentage points or more. Research has largely ignored the question of whether early voting alters the information environment in campaigns. Those who vote early may do so before important information becomes available in the final days and weeks of a campaign. Many have speculated that early voting may particularly affect presidential nomination contests, as support for candidates tends to be more unstable and the process often commences before candidates fully launch campaigns in respective states. I speculate that early voting should benefit early front-runners in these contests, as voters may cast early votes for these candidates before fully considering their less-known opponents. Examining exit-poll data from the 2008 Democratic primaries between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, I find that Clinton indeed benefitted from early voting in several early primary states. Information Asymmetries When voters submit ballots early, they complete their civic duties ahead of schedule. With votes already cast, political campaigns essentially conclude weeks early for these citizens. There is no mechanism by which one can change a submitted vote; early voters can only wait and observe whether election outcomes (reported on Election Night or primary day) match their preferences. Of course, campaigns themselves do not end early. Candidates continue to fund television ads, participate in debates, and grant interviews and news conferences. The news media investigate voting records and past associations. Parties and outside groups remain active as well. Lacking any knowledge of late campaign developments, those who choose to vote early ultimately do so without the same information as Election Day voters. Late information comes in many forms during political campaigns. The term October Surprise has become synonymous with a news event holding the potential to influence an election's outcome. …

We use the citizen-candidate model to study the differential incentives that different voting rules provide for candidate entry, and their effect on policy polarization. In particular, we show that allowing voters to cast multiple votes leads to equilibria which support multiple candidate clusters. These equilibria are more polarized than those obtained under the Plurality Rule. We also show that equilibria under the Alternative Vote Rule do not exhibit multiple candidate clusters and they are less polarizing than those under the Plurality Rule. These results differ from those obtained in the existing literature, where the set of candidates is exogenous. Thus, our paper contributes to the scholarly literature as well as public debate on the merits of using alternative voting rules by highlighting the importance of endogenous candidacy.

This paper contributes to a growing body of research on voting technology and voter confidence, which generally concludes that voters are less confident in technology—particularly in developed democracies. Using a unique survey experiment, this paper demonstrates that far fewer individuals are concerned about election fraud involving electronic voting, compared with other potential forms of election fraud such as registering ineligible voters or voter suppression. Other interesting findings emerge from the data: Older individuals are more concerned about fraud with electronic voting but the effects of age appear to be conditioned on political polarization. This paper advances our understanding of the impact of voting technology on electoral confidence, and raises important substantive and methodological questions about priming.

This paper reviews the problem of declining turnout and proposes as a solution a system whereby each elector would be legally obliged to vote in the first election for which they were eligible. Popular attitudes toward first-time compulsory voting are measured and probed by means of UK data. The main findings of the paper are that first-time compulsory voting is a politically and administratively feasible proposal that appears tentatively to command popular support and has the potential to help address a number of the problems associated with declining turnout, and in particularly low rates of electoral participation among younger citizens.

I demonstrate that a set of well-known objections defeat John Stuart Mill’s plural voting proposal, but do not defeat plural voting as such. I adopt the following as a working definition of political equality: a voting system is egalitarian if and only if departures from a baseline of equally weighted votes are normatively permissible. I develop an alternative proposal, called procedural plural voting, which allocates plural votes procedurally, via the free choices of the electorate, rather than according to a substantive standard of competence. The alternative avoids standards objections to Mill’s proposal. Moreover, reflection on the alternative plural voting scheme disrupts our intuitions about what counts as an egalitarian voting system. Undue emphasis on Mill’s version of plural voting obscures three important reasons to reject plural voting in favor of strictly egalitarian voting systems: (1) that certain choices that generate inequalities of political power are morally impermissible; (2) that even chosen inequalities may undermine the potential epistemic benefits of democratic decision-making; and (3) that such choices may undermine citizens’ commitments to democracy understood as a joint project.

Control in elections models situations in which an external actor tries to change the outcome of an election by restructuring the election itself. The corresponding decision problems have been shown NP-hard for a variety of voting systems. In particular, in our companion paper [16], we have shown that fallback and Bucklin voting are resistant (in terms of NP-hardness) to almost all of the common types of control. While NP-hardness results for manipulation (another way of tampering with the outcomes of elections) have been challenged experimentally (see, e.g., the work of Walsh [38] and [37]), such an experimental approach is sorely missing for control. We for the first time tackle NP-hard control problems in an experimental setting. Our experiments allow a more fine-grained analysis and comparison—across various control scenarios, vote distribution models, and voting systems—than merely stating NP-hardness for all these control problems.

Research on absentee and early voting laws has led many scholars to conclude that these convenience voting methods do little to boost turnout. But most of this work has evaluated these methods well after their implementation and without consideration for how information campaigns about them might alter voter behavior. Voter mobilization research shows that impersonal communications produce little-to-no effect on turnout. But we know much less about how mobilization might influence changes in the method of voting. Using a field experiment during the 2010 midterm primary and general elections in Maryland, we demonstrate that e-mail messages with concise subject lines that appeal to relevant reference groups combined with an easy-to-use electronic absentee ballot delivery system, increase the likelihood that overseas voters will use a new technology when they participate in elections. Our findings have scholarly and practical implications for election reform, campaign communications, and voter mobil...

In both 2008 and 2012, about one-third of U.S. voters cast their ballots before Election Day. Reformers have argued that early voting lowers participation costs and should therefore increase turnout. Recent research, however, has reported that no positive relationship exists. The literature widely omits consideration of important differences in early voting implementation within states. I break from past research and measure early voting availability at the county level, where it often varies considerably. I rely on Election Assistance Commission data on the number of early voting sites available in 2008 and 2012. Specifically, I measure the effect of a county's early voting site density on turnout. My model controls for other known participation predictors, including lagged turnout, demographics, political variables, and voter identification requirements. Ultimately, I find that early voting site density has a significant and positive effect on voter turnout.

This article is about comparative voting behaviour in referendums on the EU and explores variation within one country rather than variations across countries. This enables us to control for broad national context while allowing variations in the immediate referendum context, in terms of campaign intensity and incumbency. It analyses voting behaviour in the many referendums that have taken place in Ireland. The major part of the analysis deals with the five referendums since 2001, as this allows the use of the same measurement of EU support and the use of post referendum surveys. Most attention is paid to attitude to the EU, party support and satisfaction with the incumbent government, reflecting the main debates in the literature on the issues and party cues. The relative importance of each is said to depend on contextual factors such as campaign intensity and economic strength. We find both party cues and issues matter consistently, and suggestive evidence that incumbency matters to the effectiveness of cues given by the two main pro-EU parties but the major finding is that variations in the factors driving voting behaviour in different Irish polls on Europe are slight and barely significant.

Recent elections have witnessed substantial debate regarding the degree to which state governments facilitate access to the polls. Despite this newfound interest, however, many of the major reforms aimed at increasing voting convenience (i.e., early voting and no-excuse absentee voting) were implemented over the past four decades. Although numerous studies examine their consequences (on turnout, the composition of the electorate, and/or electoral outcomes), we know significantly less about the factors leading to the initial adoption of these policies. We attempt to provide insights into such motivations using event history analysis to identify the impact of political and demographic considerations, as well as diffusion mechanisms, on which states opted for easier ballot access. We find that adoption responded to some factors signaling the necessity of greater voting convenience in the state, and that partisanship influenced the enactment of early voting but not no-excuse absentee voting procedures.

We examine the extent to which Americans with disabilities vote at the polls or take advantage of convenience voting reforms relative to voters without disabilities. The Help America Vote Act (2002) sought, in part, to increase polling place accessibility for the voters with disabilities, with a particular focus on those with vision disabilities. We construct two operationalizations of disability from the November Voting and Registration Supplement of the Current Population Survey over eight elections. A multinomial logistic model shows voters with a disability are significantly less likely to vote but are more likely to vote by mail ballot. Early in-person voting reforms have a marginal effect on the voting behavior of voters with disabilities. A matching model reveals adopting no-excuse absentee voting, permanent absentee voting, or both reforms increases the likelihood of voters with a disability casting a mail ballot.

The economic vote provides a widely available tool for gauging electoral accountability. Yet in many cases, this search for electoral accountability appears elusive. A large literature has yielded conflicting and unstable empirical results. While there appears to be an association between the economy and citizens' voting behavior, we are unsure of its foundation. Do citizens reflect on the performance of the economy when choosing between candidates in democratic elections? What determines the existence and size of the economic vote: individual attributes, the wider politico-economic context, or messages received from trusted elites? Scholars have unearthed some answers by turning outward to consider context, theorizing the cross-national, individual-level, and temporal conditions under which economic voting is likely to be strongest. In addition, more recently, researchers have turned inward to reassess the mechanism that drives the link between economic performance and voting behavior. Future scholarship must continue to interrogate core theoretical questions in an effort to better understand how citizens' subjective economic evaluations are reflected in their decisions as voters. Keywords: economy; voting behavior; economic evaluations; sociotropic economy; motivated reasoning; endogeneity; clarity of responsibility

This article analyzes the effect of political participation in the electoral process on parties' announced platforms in a model of electoral competition. The model highlights the existence of a class bias that favors groups of voters with higher turnout. There exists empirical evidence that wealthier economic classes present higher levels of political participation. In that situation, the model suggests that compulsory voting may be a useful mechanism to reduce the bias in favor of the higher-turnout class.

The majority runoff system is widely used around the world, yet our understanding of its properties and of voters’ behavior is limited. In this paper, we fully characterize the set of strictly perfect voting equilibria in large three-candidate majority runoff elections. Considering all possible distributions of preference orderings and intensities, we prove that only two types of equilibria can exist. First, there are always equilibria in which only two candidates receive votes. Second, there may exist an equilibrium in which three candidates receive votes. Its characteristics challenge common beliefs: (i) neither sincere voting by all voters nor pushover tactics (i.e., supporters of the front-runner voting for a less preferred candidate so as to influence who will face the front-runner in the second round) are supported in equilibrium, and (ii) the winner does not necessarily have democratic legitimacy since the Condorcet winner may not even participate in the second

Objectives This article assesses the conditions under which voters are more likely to vote “correctly” in direct democratic ballots. We look for determinants of correct voting simultaneously at the individual and contextual levels through a multilevel approach. At the individual level we provide special attention to the level of sophistication and the use of cognitive heuristics. At the contextual level we will investigate how the nature and content of political campaigns—more specifically, their intensity and negativity—enhance correct voting. We test our empirical models in the “hard-case” scenario of Swiss direct democracy. We propose an alternative approach for the measure of correct voting, one that makes a full use of survey data but that tries to replicate the original idea of comparison between uninformed and informed voters to establish the “correctness” of a decision. Methods We use two different data sets that cover all direct democratic votes held in Switzerland, at the federal level, between 1999 and 2005; this period covers 23 ballots, during which 75 different projects were voted. To measure correct voting and all individual variables we rely on the VOX survey data, collected on a representative sample of about 1,000 individuals after each direct democratic vote in Switzerland. To measure campaign intensity and negativity we rely on an original data set that codes the content of every campaign ad published in the six major Swiss newspapers during the month prior to each ballot. Results We show that political sophistication and the use of referential heuristics strongly enhance correct voting. Furthermore, at the contextual level, we show that campaigns with high intensity decrease correct voting, especially when combined with high negativity, even though the direct effect of negativity on correct voting is positive. Conclusion We contribute to the existing literature in a threefold way. First, our results provide an additional confirmation that correct voting exists under both individual and contextual influences. Second, we assess the presence and determinants of correct voting in direct democracy, a “hard-case” scenario, and find that the share of citizens who vote correctly is in line with the levels found for American citizens during elections, and that the main determinants seem to hold for both elections and direct democracy. Third, our alternative approach to measure correct voting highlights that the original idea of comparison between uninformed and informed voters, usually dealt with through experimental protocols, can be replicated with survey data.

This article examines the determinants of voting in competitive authoritarian regimes in the Arab world. In contrast to scholars who view elections in the Arab World purely as patronage contests, we argue that citizens also care about policy outputs and use turnout as a way to signal their approval or disapproval with the regime. We draw on the literature on economic voting in democratic regimes to develop an argument about economic voting under authoritarian conditions, and we propose a mediation model to get at the mechanisms of economic voting. We test our argument with original data based on surveys conducted in seven Arab countries between 2006 and 2009. Our results show that although patronage helps to explain turnout, especially among high-income citizens, policy outcomes are also important in the calculus of voting. Most voters turn out to vote to show approval of the regime and its economic performance.

Parliamentary representation is a fluid concept. Yet, while the behaviour of elected representatives during roll call votes has been widely analysed, we know little about how parliamentarians act when their individual voting choices are not made public. This paper explores the relationship between voting procedures and the likelihood that Members of the European Parliament prioritise the interests of their EP party group versus the interests of their national party. Using an original survey, I find that MEPs are more likely to prioritise the interests of their national party over those of their EP party group when voting by show of hands or electronically, as opposed to by roll call. Moreover, this voting procedure effect is particularly salient among MEPs elected from 2004/07 accession countries.

Although tactical voting attracts a great deal of attention, it is very hard to measure as it requires knowledge of both individuals’ voting choices as well as their unobserved preferences. In this article, we present a simple empirical strategy to nonparametrically identify tactical voting patterns directly from balloting results. This approach allows us to study the magnitude and direction of strategic voting as well as to verify which information voters and parties take into account to determine marginal constituencies. We show that tactical voting played a significant role in the 2010 election, mainly for Liberal–Democratic voters supporting Labour. Moreover, our results suggest that voters seem to form their expectations based on a national swing in vote shares rather than newspaper guides published in the main media outlets or previous election outcomes. We also present some evidence that suggests that campaign spending is not driving tactical voting.

How does a change from a compulsory voting system to a voluntary one affect election turnout? It is often argued that an electoral regime under which voting is voluntary reproduces class bias or, in other words, that the rich vote more than the poor. This bias is corrected either by the introduction of compulsory voting or the existence of strong left-wing parties and trade unions able to mobilize poorer segments of the population. In this article, we put forward an alternative argument. We assert that when voting is voluntary, class bias can disappear if an election is very competitive since this affects both turnout and its socio-economic composition. To evaluate this argument, we examine the case of Chile's 2012 municipal election when voting was voluntary for the first time, instead of compulsory.

Citizens with disabilities are less likely to vote than their non-disabled peers, and are more likely to experience difficulties when they do vote. This article reviews the evidence on voter turnout and voting difficulties among people with disabilities, finding that nearly one-third of voters with disabilities who voted in a polling place in 2012 experienced difficulties in doing so. We summarize best practices for removing voting obstacles, including measures to increase polling place accessibility, train election officials in disability issues, educate people with disabilities about the voting process, and increase the availability of no-excuse mail ballots. Given the size and expected growth of the disability population, such measures are needed to make the voting process more fully accessible and ensure that all American citizens can exercise the right to vote.