Countering Fake News

The objective of this study is to examine people's attitudes towards fake news and tactics to counter disinformation in India. A national survey through an online questionnaire was conducted through which 200 respondents recruited in the study through snowball sampling technique. The results of the study disclose that more than 90% of the participants perceive that fake news poses a threat, and 78.5% see fake news as harming democracy. Religious harmony and voting decisions are the topmost areas of public life which are mostly targeted by fake news in India. Conspicuously, the top three agents creating and disseminating fake news are politicians, political parties, and journalists. The study's findings provide an insight into countering fake news in India. This study is useful to government agencies in formulating policies related to fake news.

Legislative Decision-Making

Chapter 4 examines the logic used by moderates in determining how to vote on legislation. Using interview data from six retired senators, Chapter 4 examines the pressures they face, both within the chamber with party leadership and outside the chamber with constituents and interest groups. While conventional wisdom would dictate that moderates vote only for legislation that they find palatable, and vote against all else, using data collected by Project Vote Smart capturing the issue positions of many senators, we see that all too often this is not the case—centrists get “railroaded” by leaders and vote with the majority, even when the legislation goes against their stated position. Using voting decisions on key votes and publicly stated positions by senators, the chapter then creates a logic model that illustrates how moderates decide how to vote on legislation.

Still Not Important Enough? COVID-19 Policy Views and Vote Choice

Scholars have long been skeptical of citizens’ ability to vote on the basis of their policy views. Voters lack incentives to pay attention to politics and so are often unaware of the policy stances adopted by presidential candidates and parties. However, some scholars have suggested that voter attention may increase when policy issues become important to them, such as when a crisis disrupts their lives. The coronavirus pandemic provides an opportunity to test this proposition. It is one of the most severe crises the United States has faced. It has disrupted almost everyone’s lives, and many people know someone who has tested positive or died from the virus. It is thus salient and important to many—if not most—voters. Despite this context, we find that many voters remain unaware of the 2020 US Presidential candidates’ stances on coronavirus policies. Their levels of knowledge are about typical for other policies, which is middling. In the absence of knowledge, voters cannot connect their policy views on the virus with their presidential voting decisions.

Violence and Voting in the United States: How School Shootings Affect Elections

How do citizens change their voting decisions after their communities experience catastrophic violent events? The literature on the behavioral effects of violence, on the one hand, and on political behavior, on the other, suggest different answers to this question. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we investigate the influence of indiscriminate, rampage-style school shootings on both voter turnout levels and the relative electoral support for the Democratic and Republican Parties at the county level in US presidential elections (1980–2016). We find that although voter turnout does not change, the vote share of the Democratic Party increases by an average of nearly 5 percentage points in counties that experienced shootings—a remarkable shift in an age of partisan polarization and close presidential elections. These results show that school shootings do have important electoral consequences and bring to the fore the need to further examine the effects of different forms of violence on political behavior.

Inmigración y derecho al voto Una investigación exploratoria en Santiago de Chile

The objective of our research is to analyze the causes and/or factors that influence the voting intentions of immigrants in the municipality of Santiago, Chile. To achieve this, we interviewed twenty immigrants who had the right to vote in two different periods. Before and after the October 2016 municipal elections. By doing this we were able to compare their answers having the elections as a pivotal point. We followed a content analysis of their answers to evaluate their discourses with regards to voting intentions. We conclude that the factors that influence immigrants’ voting decisions are multiple. We center our conclusions in the lack of information migrants have on their electoral rights, the lack of interest of candidates on migrants as a voting force, and the lack of recognition from the State of migrants as legal subjects. These reasons produce high political indifference on immigrants.

Eye Movements Predict Large-Scale Voting Decisions

More than 100 countries allow people to vote directly on policies in direct democracy elections (e.g., 2016 Brexit referendum). Politicians are often responsible for writing ballot language, and voters frequently encounter ballot measures that are difficult to understand. We examined whether eye movements from a small group of individuals can predict the consequences of ballot language on large-scale voting decisions. Across two preregistered studies (Study 1: N = 120 registered voters, Study 2: N = 120 registered voters), we monitored laboratory participants’ eye movements as they read real ballot measures. We found that eye-movement responses associated with difficulties in language comprehension predicted aggregate voting decisions to abstain from voting and vote against ballot measures in U.S. elections (total number of votes cast = 137,661,232). Eye movements predicted voting decisions beyond what was accounted for by widely used measures of language difficulty. This finding demonstrates a new way of linking eye movements to out-of-sample aggregate-level behaviors.

The Effects of Dehumanizing Attitudes about Black People on Whites’ Voting Decisions

Political scientists have long noted the key role racial attitudes can play in electoral politics. However, the 2016 election of Donald Trump raises questions about prevailing theories of racial attitudes and their political effects. While existing research focuses on ‘cultural’ or ‘modern’ forms of racial prejudice, this article argues that a sizeable portion of White Americans, disturbingly, dehumanize Black people: that is, they view Black people as less than fully human. Unsurprisingly, given the blatant racism of Donald Trump's campaign, this study also demonstrates that dehumanizing attitudes toward Black people are more strongly associated with support for Trump than with support for other candidates in the 2016 Republican primary. The authors also find evidence that dehumanizing attitudes toward Black people bolstered Donald Trump's vote share among Whites in the 2016 presidential election. Finally, dehumanizing attitudes are negatively associated with Whites' evaluations of Barack Obama, even after holding standard measures of racial prejudice constant. These findings suggest that a fundamental form of racism – dehumanizing attitudes toward Black people – can powerfully shape candidate evaluations and voting decisions in the twenty-first century.

Voting in multi-stage elimination contests: Evidence from a Karaoke show

We employ the data from a karaoke contest to analyze strategic voting. Participants face a trade-off when voting for the contestant they want to eliminate. Excluding worst-performers increases the size of the prize allocated to the winner, whereas excluding top-performers increases the chances to become the winner. We analyze the performance and voting decisions and justifications of 138 participants in this contest across 23 episodes. We find that votes for worst-performers are much more common than votes for top-performers, and the justifications for voting due to the competitors' mistakes are the most prominent. Although contestants are not informed of the performance of themselves or any other participant, the likelihood to vote for the worst-performer is higher than the probability of randomly voting for someone else.

5. Voting Decisions

This chapter analyses how citizens in Europe vote across elections. Elections are an integral part of democracy as they allow citizens to shape collective decision-making. The chapter addresses the issue of trying to explain why people vote in the first place. It also looks at the inequality of turnout between citizens: why do some people just not bother to vote at all? The chapter also looks at different explanations of vote choice. This is achieved by introducing the proximity model of voting which assumes that voters and parties can be aligned on one ideological dimension. It presupposes that voters will vote for the party that most closely resembles their own ideological position. Complications can be added to this model, however, that consider the role of retrospective performance evaluations and affective attachments to social groups and political parties. The institutional context also needs to be considered, though, as this can influence voters’s decision-making.

Foundations of European Politics

Foundations of European Politics introduces important tools of social science and comparative analysis. The first part of the book acts as an introduction to the topic, looking at democratic politics and multilevel politics in Europe. The second part moves on to citizens and voters, considering issues related to ideology and voting decisions. Part III looks at elections and introduces electoral systems and direct democracy, representation, political parties, and party competition. The next part is about government and policy. The last part looks at the rule of law, democracy, and backsliding.