ISSUES, IDEOLOGY AND THE NATURE OF ELECTORAL CHOICE

Electoral persuasion rests at the center of the democratic process. Politicians, parties, interest groups, members of the media, and citizens themselves are constantly communicating with one another about electorally relevant topics. These communications will ultimately influence—although not always in predictable ways—voters’ choices and, therefore, election outcomes and the direction of government. Scholarship on this important topic has exploded in recent decades. Yet, there have been relatively few efforts to synthesize the accumulated knowledge. In this volume, we bring together accomplished scholars who study one or more aspects of electoral persuasion—who communicates with whom about democratic politics, what they communicate about and why, how and where they communicate, and with what effect. The result is a vibrant collection of US-based and international perspectives on the relevant actors, their motivations and methods of persuasion, and their varied influences on electoral choice.

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Estimating the Electoral Effects of Voter Turnout

American Political Science Review ◽

10.1017/s0003055410000109 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 104 (2) ◽

pp. 268-288 ◽

Cited By ~ 109

Author(s):

THOMAS G. HANSFORD ◽

BRAD T. GOMEZ

Keyword(s):

Voter Turnout ◽

Instrumental Variable ◽

Presidential Elections ◽

Empirical Test ◽

The United States ◽

Electoral Outcomes ◽

Level Data ◽

Electoral Choice ◽

High Turnout ◽

Specific Factors

This article examines the electoral consequences of variation in voter turnout in the United States. Existing scholarship focuses on the claim that high turnout benefits Democrats, but evidence supporting this conjecture is variable and controversial. Previous work, however, does not account for endogeneity between turnout and electoral choice, and thus, causal claims are questionable. Using election day rainfall as an instrumental variable for voter turnout, we are able to estimate the effect of variation in turnout due to across-the-board changes in the utility of voting. We re-examine the Partisan Effects and Two-Effects Hypotheses, provide an empirical test of an Anti-Incumbent Hypothesis, and propose a Volatility Hypothesis, which posits that high turnout produces less predictable electoral outcomes. Using county-level data from the 1948–2000 presidential elections, we find support for each hypothesis. Failing to address the endogeneity problem would lead researchers to incorrectly reject all but the Anti-Incumbent Hypothesis. The effect of variation in turnout on electoral outcomes appears quite meaningful. Although election-specific factors other than turnout have the greatest influence on who wins an election, variation in turnout significantly affects vote shares at the county, national, and Electoral College levels.

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Heterogeneity in Models of Electoral Choice

American Journal of Political Science ◽

10.2307/2111244 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 32 (3) ◽

pp. 737 ◽

Cited By ~ 74

Author(s):

Douglas Rivers

Keyword(s):

Electoral Choice

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The logic of electoral choice

Democracy and Decision ◽

10.1017/cbo9781139173544.003 ◽

1993 ◽

pp. 19-31

Keyword(s):

Electoral Choice

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The intergenerational foundations of class voting: social mobility and electoral choice in Western Europe

10.31235/osf.io/u7zf4 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Giuseppe Ciccolini ◽

Juho Härkönen

Keyword(s):

Social Mobility ◽

Western Europe ◽

Empirical Studies ◽

European Social Survey ◽

Political Behaviour ◽

Individual Level ◽

Specific Effects ◽

Electoral Choice ◽

Class Voting ◽

Voting Choice

Scholarly explanations of the survival of left parties and the upsurge in mainstream politics discontent often refer to voters' intergenerational mobility resulting from the post-industrial transition. As the occupational structure evolves, voters across generations are exposed to heterogenous life chances, and the social elevator progressively alters class voting patterns. Yet empirical evidence for the electoral implications of social ascent and decline as well as their reasons is mixed at best – likely because most empirical studies seek for homogenous average mobility effects. To address this limitation, we analyse the diverse consequences of mobility across social groups in a quasi-descriptive fashion by applying a cutting-edge ANOVA-based OLS model. Contrarily to prior studies, this approach allows us to identify class-specific mobility effects on voting (ceteris paribus), consistently with theory. Our analyses draw on individual-level detailed information on both intergenerational social mobility and political behaviour from the European Social Survey (rounds 1-9) across 19 Western European countries. Although scholarly accounts on the consequences of social mobility averagely find little to no support in our analyses, we do observe some significant and substantial class-specific effects of both social ascent and descent on voting choice.

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Electoral Shocks

10.1093/oso/9780198800583.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Edward Fieldhouse ◽

Jane Green ◽

Geoffrey Evans ◽

Jonathan Mellon ◽

Christopher Prosser ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Global Financial Crisis ◽

The European Union ◽

Electoral Volatility ◽

Liberal Democrats ◽

Scottish National Party ◽

Electoral Choice ◽

General Elections ◽

Scottish Independence ◽

The Global Financial Crisis ◽

The Uk

This book offers a novel perspective on British elections, focusing on the importance of increasing electoral volatility in British elections, and the role of electoral shocks in the context of increasing volatility. It demonstrates how shocks have contributed to the level of electoral volatility, and also which parties have benefited from the ensuing volatility. It follows in the tradition of British Election Study books, providing a comprehensive account of specific election outcomes—the General Elections of 2015 and 2017—and a more general approach to understanding electoral change.We examine five electoral shocks that affected the elections of 2015 and 2017: the rise in EU immigration after 2004, particularly from Eastern Europe; the Global Financial Crisis prior to 2010; the coalition government of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats between 2010 and 2015; the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014; and the European Union Referendum in 2016.Our focus on electoral shocks offers an overarching explanation for the volatility in British elections, alongside the long-term trends that have led us to this point. It offers a way to understand the rise and fall of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), Labour’s disappointing 2015 performance and its later unexpected gains, the collapse in support for the Liberal Democrats, the dramatic gains of the Scottish National Party (SNP) in 2015, and the continuing period of tumultuous politics that has followed the EU Referendum and the General Election of 2017. It provides a new way of understanding electoral choice in Britain, and beyond, and a better understanding of the outcomes of recent elections.

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Spatial Modeling of Voter Choice: The Survey of Theoretical and Empirical Approach

Spatial Economics ◽

10.14530/se.2021.2.127-164 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 17 (2) ◽

pp. 127-164

Author(s):

Lada Kuletskaya ◽

Keyword(s):

Research Methodology ◽

Spatial Modeling ◽

Mutual Influence ◽

Empirical Work ◽

Spatial Models ◽

Point Of View ◽

Factors Affecting ◽

Directional Model ◽

Electoral Choice ◽

Voter Choice

As for today, political elections are the key form of people’s participation in the formation of the state in all democratic countries, which is why theoretical works in the field of spatial modeling of voter choice appeared relatively long ago and played a major role in the development of both further theoretical and empirical research in this area. In this survey we firstly give a brief overview of the history of the formation of spatial modeling in relation to election results and political preferences of individuals from the point of view of research methodology, based on the classical theoretical ‘proximity model’ and ‘directional model’, where rational individuals determine their political positions and compare them with the positions of candidates. Secondly, we explain the appearance of the studies of the mutual influence of voters living in neighboring territories on each other as one of the factors that determine the voters’ political positions and, accordingly, the final choice of a candidate. We also point out the authors’ different explanations of the reasons for the appearance of such mutual influence of voters and other factors affecting voters living in neighboring territories (also called as ‘contextual effects’) and emphasize the importance of taking them into account in the studies of electoral preferences. A separate chapter in this paper presents the systematization and description of the main empirical approaches to spatial modeling of electoral choice: at the beginning, we present the basic econometric spatial models (used by the authors regardless of the subject of the study), and then we describe the empirical work in the field of voter choice, depending on the hypotheses, focusing on the research methodology and the data used. In conclusion, we define the main directions for the research development and the vector of further practical work in this area. This paper will help researchers understand existing fundamental works, evaluate current approaches to the modeling of electoral choice, and improve theoretical or empirical spatial analysis

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