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

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.

Early EEG responses to pre-electoral survey items reflect political attitudes and predict voting behavior

Self-reports are conventionally used to measure political preferences, yet individuals may be unable or unwilling to report their political attitudes. Here, in 69 participants we compared implicit and explicit methods of political attitude assessment and focused our investigation on populist attitudes. Ahead of the 2019 European Parliament election, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) from future voters while they completed a survey that measured levels of agreement on different political issues. An Implicit Association Test (IAT) was administered at the end of the recording session. Neural signals differed as a function of future vote for a populist or mainstream party and of whether survey items expressed populist or non-populist views. The combination of EEG responses and self-reported preferences predicted electoral choice better than traditional socio-demographic and ideological variables, while IAT scores were not a significant predictor. These findings suggest that measurements of brain activity can refine the assessment of socio-political attitudes, even when those attitudes are not based on traditional ideological divides.

A spatial analysis of parliamentary elections in Sweden 1985–2018

Understanding where and why political change is happening in a country is a fundamental issue in political geography. While electoral choice is individual, it is influenced by various sociological, cultural, and geographical factors postulated to create ‘cultural fields’ influencing individual decision-making. Here, we test the cultural field hypothesis on Sweden, an important democracy of Europe long regarded as an example by other European countries, by studying the middle-long-term evolution of the spatial structure of political choice over the last three decades. In testing the cultural field hypothesis, an analysis of spatial correlations is combined with groupings of Swedish municipalities into larger communities reflecting the similarity of their voting profiles. We show that spatial correlations decay logarithmically, which is a sign of long-ranged interactions, and also demonstrate that Sweden can be divided into three or four large and stable politico-cultural communities. More precisely, a transition from three to four main politico-cultural communities is observed. The fourth community, which emerged in the early 2000s is of particular interest as it is characterized by a large vote-share for the Sweden Democrats, while almost all other parties underperform. Moreover, the Swedish electoral landscape seems to be increasingly fragmenting even when the voting profiles of the municipalities over the country are slowly converging.

Gender Attitudes and Candidate Preferences in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Primary and General Elections

Scholars increasingly recognize that voters’ attitudes about gender shape their electoral preferences. Yet previous research has not captured important nuances of the relationship between gender attitudes and electoral choice. We argue that the effects of gender attitudes are not unidirectional and interact in complex ways with voters’ perceptions of candidates, depending not only on candidates’ sex but also on their gender-relevant characteristics and values. We draw on an original survey of Americans during the 2016 elections that measured three gender attitudes—hostile sexism, modern sexism, and traditional gender roles—and evaluations of primary and general election candidates. Our study design increases analytical leverage by examining actual and hypothetical candidate matchups. We find that among Democrats, hostile sexists were drawn to Bernie Sanders, but gender traditionalists preferred Hillary Clinton. Our results also suggest that if Sanders had been the Democratic nominee, gender egalitarians would have strongly supported him over Donald Trump, as they did Clinton.

The Voters’ Choice

Designated candidates seeking office play a central role in elections today, so it is a surprise to discover that in the past voters were free to name whom they wished on their ballot papers. In France, their choice was only restricted when declared candidatures were required for election to the Chamber of Deputies after 1889, though this liberty lasted much longer when it came to local elections. This raises the question of how individuals aspiring to office put themselves forward, in the absence of manifestos or publicity, when their talents were supposed to speak for themselves. Indeed, before the French Revolution, and even afterwards, to openly seek election was regarded as a disqualification, though this created confusion as votes were widely dispersed and those elected often declined to serve. Yet the reluctance to abandon this approach was not simply attachment to tradition, rather it constituted an assertion of the voters’ sovereign right to exercise an unfettered electoral choice, and to reject those offered to them as official candidates by the government or as the nominees of political parties.

How “Us” and “Them” Relates to Voting Behavior—Social Structure, Social Identities, and Electoral Choice

The last decades have seen the emergence of a divide pitting the new left against the far right in advanced democracies. We study how this universalism-particularism divide is crystallizing into a full-blown cleavage, complete with structural, political and identity elements. So far, little research exists on the identities that voters themselves perceive as relevant for drawing in- and out-group boundaries along this divide. Based on an original survey from Switzerland, a paradigmatic case of electoral realignment, we show that voters’ “objective” socio-demographic characteristics relate to distinctive, primarily culturally connoted identities. We then inquire into the degree to which these group identities have been politicized, that is, whether they divide new left and far right voters. Our results strongly suggest that the universalism-particularism “cleavage” not only bundles issues, but shapes how people think about who they are and where they stand in a group conflict that meshes economics and culture.

Polarized Partisanship and Voting Behavior in Zimbabwe: A Public Opinion Perspective

The chapter argues that voting behaviour and public opinion are deeply influenced by official controls applied by the entrenched ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party. Popular voting behaviour in Zimbabwe is associated with an assortment of political, cultural, and economic views. In regard to the ruling ZANU-PF’s series of electoral triumphs, leading considerations are whether persons trust traditional leaders as a guide to vote choice, the extent to which they think the economy has been administered properly, and whether they fear retribution for not voting for incumbent political elites. However, the chapter further argues, to best appreciate Zimbabwean voting behaviour, scholars must pay significant attention to Zimbabwe’s acute hyper-partisan polarization. Zimbabweans are more divided politically than in any other African country in which party affiliation has been systematically measured. Ruling and opposition parties are divided by mutual distrust, conflicting standpoints on policy debates, and over electoral choice. Polarization is partly a construction by Zimbabwean political elites, but it also has substantial traction amongst ordinary citizens who have accepted partisan loyalty as an important facet in their range of identities.

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

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

Electoral Ergonomics

This chapter focuses on electoral ergonomics, defined as the interface between every aspect of electoral organization and the psychology of the voters. It argues that every small detail in the organization of the vote (electoral ergonomics) matters not only mechanically, but also because of the way it may trigger different psychological mechanisms and emotional reactions, and that as a result, the ergonomic interface will have different effects on different types of voter, such as ‘referees’ or ‘supporters’. Indeed, electoral ergonomics affects the way citizens experience the vote, their attitudes, their likeliness to vote in elections, and their actual electoral choice. The chapter then unpacks the theoretical and empirical logic behind the influence of electoral ergonomics, both in general and through specific case studies. These case studies include the impact of the use of remote voting on electoral experience in the general population, its influence on the electoral choice of young voters, and the effect of ballot-paper design (including paper vs electronic ballots) on the electoral experience.