A Note on Overseas Chinese Political Participation in Urban Malaya

1970 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-178
Author(s):  
Alvin Rabushka
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Voter Turnout ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Large Measure ◽  
Transitional Societies ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Industrial Societies

The object of this note is to demonstrate that generalizations about political participation may be invalid when applied to “developing” or “transitional” societies. Specifically, the relationship between rates of voter turnout and levels of education for urban Chinese in Malaya is not consistent with results reported for Western societies.A geographical classification of bibliographic entries in Lester Milbrath's Political Participation discloses a very interesting statistic: only 3 of the 288 listed entries concern the transitional societies of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The lack of data on developing areas may, in large measure, explain the emphasis placed on studies of political participation in North America and Western Europe. Although there is more research on transitional societies today, most studies still focus on advanced industrial societies. The validity of the generalizations presented in Political Participation, therefore, is restricted to North America and Western Europe.Using data collected in Malaya (1957), I examine four of Milbrath's hypotheses. These include:(1) higher education increases participation (p.122);(2) middle-aged persons participate more than young or old persons (p. 134);(3) men are more likely to participate than women (p. 133); and(4) religion affects participation (p. 137).

scholarly journals Do Populist Parties Increase Voter Turnout? Evidence From Over 40 Years of Electoral History in 31 European Democracies

2020 ◽  
pp. 003232172092325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arndt Leininger ◽  
Maurits J Meijers
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Voter Turnout ◽  
Party System ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Quality Of Democracy ◽  
Empirical Tests ◽  
The Relationship

While some consider populist parties to be a threat to liberal democracy, others have argued that populist parties may positively affect the quality of democracy by increasing political participation of citizens. This supposition, however, has hitherto not been subjected to rigorous empirical tests. The voter turnout literature, moreover, has primarily focused on stable institutional and party system characteristics – ignoring more dynamic determinants of voter turnout related to party competition. To fill this double gap in the literature, we examine the effect of populist parties, both left and right, on aggregate-level turnout in Western and Eastern European parliamentary elections. Based on a dataset on 315 elections in 31 European democracies since 1970s, we find that turnout is higher when populist parties are represented in parliament prior to an election in Eastern Europe, but not in Western Europe. These findings further our understanding of the relationship between populism, political participation and democracy.

scholarly journals Acute Financial Hardship and Voter Turnout: Theory and Evidence from the Sequence of Bank Working Days

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
MAX SCHAUB
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Voter Turnout ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Financial Hardship ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Financial Status ◽  
Definitive Answer ◽  
Financial Difficulties ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Using Data

How does poverty influence political participation? This question has interested political scientists since the early days of the discipline, but providing a definitive answer has proved difficult. This article focuses on one central aspect of poverty—the experience of acute financial hardship, lasting a few days at a time. Drawing on classic models of political engagement and novel theoretical insights, I argue that by inducing stress, social isolation, and feelings of alienation, acute financial hardship has immediate negative effects on political participation. Inference relies on a natural experiment afforded by the sequence of bank working days that causes short-term financial difficulties for the poor. Using data from three million individuals, personal interviews, and 1,100 elections in Germany, I demonstrate that acute financial hardship reduces both turnout intentions and actual turnout. The results imply that the financial status of the poor on election day can have important consequences for their political representation.

scholarly journals Conservation motivation, social equality and left-right ideological preferences in Western and Eastern Europe

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 336-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Márton Hadarics
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Great Part ◽  
European Social Survey ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Social Equality ◽  
Social Survey ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship

We investigated how attitudes towards social equality can influence the relationship between conservation motivation (or openness) and personal ideological preferences on the left-right dimension, and how this relationship pattern differs between Western and Central & Eastern European (CEE) respondents. Using data from the European Social Survey (2012) we found that individual-level of conservation motivation reduces cultural egalitarianism in both the Western European and the CEE regions, but its connection with economic egalitarianism is only relevant in the CEE region where it fosters economic egalitarianism. Since both forms of egalitarianism were related to leftist ideological preferences in Western Europe, but in the CEE region only economic egalitarianism was ideologically relevant, we concluded that the classic “rigidity of the right” phenomenon is strongly related to cultural (anti)egalitarianism in Western Europe. At the same time, conservation motivation serves as a basis for the “rigidity of the left” in the post-socialist CEE region, in a great part due to the conventional egalitarian economic views.

scholarly journals The Possibilities of Internet Voting in Jamaica: Moving from Convenience to Fixing the Problem of Voter Apathy among the Youth

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
Voter Turnout ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Internet Voting ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
Political Apathy ◽  
The Relationship

Recent scholarship recognises the importance of information and communication technologies (ICT), particularly the Internet, and its focus on ways to overcome challenges to political participation. The advent of Internet voting or I‑voting in encouraging youth political participation has been framed within the context of convenience voting which can help to strengthen democracy by encouraging voting, especially among apathetic youth. This paper explores the relationship between Internet voting and youth political participation in the Jamaican society through a survey of 600 youth. The findings suggest that while it may not substantially reduce apathy, which is more intricately linked to perceived overarching systemic failures, Internet voting holds the potential to improve voter turnout at the polls. While convenience was not a major factor driving political apathy, it was an important factor in encouraging participation at the polls.

scholarly journals Do inheritance rules affect voter turnout? Evidence from an Alpine region

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 395-445
Author(s):  
Andrea Bonoldi ◽  
Chiara Dalle Nogare ◽  
Martin Mosler ◽  
Niklas Potrafke
Keyword(s):  
Standard Deviation ◽  
Voter Turnout ◽  
Alpine Region ◽  
Local Elections ◽  
South Tyrol ◽  
Voting Turnout ◽  
Percentage Points ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract We examine the relationship between inheritance rules and voter turnout. Inheritance rules are measured by entailed farms in South Tyrol: land properties whose inheritance is regulated by a law similar to the right of primogeniture. Using data for municipalities between 1998 and 2010, we show that voter turnout is high in municipalities with many entailed farms relative to population. The effect is based on local elections. If the number of entailed farms per 100 inhabitants increases by one standard deviation, voting turnout in municipal and provincial elections increases by around 1.27 and 1.43 percentage points (around 25 and 35% of a standard deviation). Our results suggest that entailed farm owners themselves are more likely to vote, and that entailed farms owners encourage other citizens of their municipality to participate in local elections.

Local Improvement Districts as Political Participation Signals

2020 ◽  
pp. 147892992096578
Author(s):  
Dan Ziebarth
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Voter Turnout ◽  
Socioeconomic Development ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Local Improvement ◽  
State And Local ◽  
The Relationship

A significant amount of literature has inspected the relationship between public–private partnerships and state and local government. This literature has focused primarily on how these agreements shape financing, economic development, and public policy measures. There is little research, however, on how improvement districts may affect political participation. There are many reasons to believe that these districts may raise levels of political participation, as they deeply affect state and local politics and shape the socioeconomic development of local communities. This article fills this gap in the literature by exploring the relationship between the establishment of local improvement districts and voter participation rates. An original data set is constructed from 18 state assembly districts and 22 local improvement districts in New York City across nine elections between 2002 and 2018, resulting in 198 unique observations across time. Empirical results reflect how the development of improvement districts can serve as signals for rising political participation in surrounding areas, marked by increasing rates of voter turnout across midterm and presidential-year election cycles. These findings are compelling, providing insight into how local organizations designed and sustained through issue ownership and community collaboration have the ability to raise political participation through electoral activity.

scholarly journals Explaining Voter Registration Levels in the American States

1992 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 253-265
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Fleury
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Voter Turnout ◽  
Voter Registration ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Aggregate Level ◽  
American States ◽  
Level Data ◽  
Participation Research ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship

Previous research on political participation typically has centered upon voter turnout, modeling it as a function of socio-demographic and structural factors separately and in conjunction. Using aggregate-level data covering the 1980s, this paper updates and extends previous political participation research in the specific regard of voter registration. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between a state’s voter registration level and its degree of interparty competition. An index of interparty competition for the 1980-1989 period — based upon the Ranney index first employed for the 1948-1960 period and later extended by Bibby et al. to 1974-1980 — is presented here for the first time. However, interparty competition and several other demographic and structural factors that traditionally are cited as contributors to voter turnout are found here to be insignificant for predicting voter registration levels. A socio-demographic factor, racial composition, and a structural factor, the closing date for registration, emerge as the most important predictors of aggregate registration level.

scholarly journals Education, Self-Importance, and the Propensity for Political Participation

Perceptions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Caffrey-Maffei
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Educational Attainment ◽  
General Social Survey ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Cross Tabulation ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

Past research has largely centered on the link between education and political participation. Although an array of evidence has suggested that there is a positive—if not causal—relationship between the two, some suggest that the relationship is spurious or mediated by other factors. Using data from the General Social Survey (2004-2014), the present study intends to revisit the phenomenon while controlling for self-importance in order to resolve the previous conflicting findings. The bivariate cross-tabulation indicates that educational attainment is a significant determinant of political participation. The trivariate cross-tabulation, furthermore, uncovers that self-importance confounds the relationship between education and political participation, such that the impact of education on political participation is stronger among those who feel less important. To be sure, the higher a person’s educational attainment is, the more likely they are to participate in political processes; and, moreover, this is particularly true of those who have depressed understandings of their importance in the world. These findings suggest that those with low levels of self-importance—likely traditionally marginalized, stereotyped, or stigmatized groups—are least represented by government officials and mandates. This, in turn, creates an American governance that fails to adequately serve and represent the desires and needs of all its people. The study calls on further research to explore the impact of other related variables on the relationship between education and political participation, and to create more appropriate and comprehensive measures of political participation and self-importance.

scholarly journals Antecedents and consequences of system justification among Iranian migrants in Western Europe

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 637-653
Author(s):  
Maarten Johannes van Bezouw ◽  
Jojanneke van der Toorn ◽  
Ali Honari ◽  
Arieke J. Rijken
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Political Action ◽  
System Justification ◽  
Curvilinear Relationship ◽  
Identity Threat ◽  
Social Identity Threat ◽  
Antecedents And Consequences ◽  
Civic Duties ◽  
The Relationship

Seeing the sociopolitical system as fair and legitimate is important for people’s participation in civic duties, political action, and the functioning of society in general. However, little is known about when migrants, without life-long socialization in a certain system, justify the sociopolitical system of their host country and how system justification influences their political participation. We examined antecedents of system justification using a survey among Iranian migrants in eight European countries (N = 935). Subsequently, we examined the relationship between system justification and political participation intentions. We found that system justification beliefs are generally high in our sample, mainly stemming from an assessment of opportunity to achieve changes in intergroup relations. Stronger social identity threat, feeling disadvantaged, a longer residence in Europe, and perceived intergroup stability all relate to less system justification. Conversely, stronger efficacy beliefs bolster system justification. Furthermore, we found some support for a curvilinear relationship between system justification and political participation intentions, but the size of this effect is small. The results show that the high levels of system justification of Iranian migrants are at risk when discrimination and disadvantage are perceived to be stable facets of society. Surprisingly, political participation to better Iranian migrants’ societal position is barely affected by system justification. We discuss implications and further research that can increase understanding of system justification among migrants.

“Reading More Newspapers and Voting Less?” A Rejoinder to Pattie and Johnston

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 185-188
Author(s):  
Henry Milner
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Voter Turnout ◽  
Civic Literacy ◽  
The Relationship

In their article, C. J. Pattie and R. J. Johnston (2003) do me the honour of putting a key aspect of my approach to the relationship between civic literacy and political participation to the test. Do recent British data, they ask, confirm my expectation that newspaper reading enhances civic literacy, and thus voter turnout? Though I am gratified that they chose to address this issue, and in such a thorough manner, and though there is much in the article which is valuable, I must ultimately take issue with their methodology and, thus, the central conclusion they draw.

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