The Role of Communication in the Process of Forming Market-Oriented Party (Mop): Its Importance and Approaches

This paper discusses the role of communication in the process of market-oriented political modeling. Our theoretical framework benefits from the idea of Lees-Marshment’s model, there are three types of parties that can help meet voters’ needs: product-oriented party (POP), sales-oriented party (SOP) and market-oriented party (MOP). The focus here is MOP, which means developing political policies on the ground of voters’ needs to gain from the voter “market”. The MOP approach relies heavily on effective party-voter communication, before, during and after an election. Specifically, the communication aspect in the process of the MOP approach is discussed, which covers political marketing as a social or communication process in image-building and different approaches in such communication. Various communication modes in gathering voter information are compared in terms of advantages and disadvantages, especially in trust-building and two-way (both verbal and non-verbal) communications. Lastly, a section related to political canvassing is also presented.

When strategic uninformed abstention improves democratic accountability

The recent development in formal studies of elections produced two sets of findings that question the custom to treat voter information as a prerequisite for competent democratic decision-making. One argues that uninformed abstention is an effective strategy to approximate informed electoral outcome, and another suggests that uninformed voters may motivate strategic political elites to improve accountability. This article bridges and extends these two findings by analyzing strategic incentives in the comprehensive voting model with abstention and its connection with electoral accountability. The proposed model offers a contextual explanation for two contrasting logic in uninformed abstention, delegation and discouragement, and shows that uninformed voting with abstention sometimes improves accountability. Furthermore, uninformed abstention is more effective in generating democratically preferred outcome under delegatory than discouraged context. The results make a significant addition to the existing accountability literature by providing a more general mechanism by which less voter information improves policy outcomes.

Candidate Ideology and Vote Choice in the 2020 US Presidential Election

Canonical theories predict that moderate candidates perform better in general elections, but research emphasizing voters’ partisan loyalties challenges these predictions. The 2020 Democratic Presidential primary represented a unique opportunity to speak to these debates due to relatively high voter information about multiple moderate and extreme candidates running in the same election. We conducted a national survey (n = 40,153) that asked how respondents would choose in a general election between one of the Democratic candidates and Republican Donald Trump. Our evidence is consistent with canonical predictions: respondents are more likely to select Trump when he is against an extreme Democrat than against a moderate Democrat. Republican partisans contribute to moderate candidates’ advantage: ≈2% select Trump against a more extreme Democrat but would not against a more moderate Democrat. One of the extreme candidates, Bernie Sanders, ostensibly challenges canonical predictions by receiving as much support as moderate candidates – but only when assuming (1) young people vote at abnormally high rates and (2) young Democrats who claim they will only vote if Sanders is nominated are answering accurately. These patterns are robust to showing attacks against the candidates and in competitive states. Our findings lend further support to canonical predictions about moderate candidates’ electoral advantages.

Dangerously informed: Voter information and pre-electoral violence in Africa

A considerable literature examines the effect of voter information on candidate strategies and voter–politician interactions in the developing world. The voter information literature argues that information can improve accountability because more informed voters are harder to woo with traditional campaign tools, such as ethnic appeals and vote-buying. However, this literature has largely ignored the reaction of political candidates and thus may reach conclusions that are overly optimistic regarding the impact of information on electoral accountability. We argue that voter information can increase electoral violence in developing countries where politicians face fewer institutional constraints on their campaign tactics. When violence is used as a campaign strategy, more informed electorates are more at risk because they are harder to sway through alternative campaign techniques. Using data from 35 African countries, we show that respondents receiving their news predominantly from newspapers are a good proxy for informed voters because they differ in terms of their political attitudes from respondents consuming no news or receiving it via other channels. Combining the geo-coded survey data with pre-electoral violence event data, we find a robust positive association between newspaper readership and fear of and exposure to campaign violence. This finding contributes to the micro-foundations of election violence and adds a cautionary note for voter information programs.

Representation in Western Europe: Connecting party-voter congruence and party goals

One of the most common critiques of political parties is that they no longer represent the interests of their voters. On one hand, representation literature tasks all parties equally to ensure high ideological congruence with their voters. On the other hand, party behaviour literature acknowledges that parties have legitimately different primary goals, in particular vote-maximisation or policy-seeking. Thus, this article analyses whether ideological congruence depends on the general goals that parties pursue. Furthermore, this article proposes a novel, distribution-based measure of party-voter ideological congruence that reduces the loss of voter information stemming from the many-to-one data relationship. This measure is applied to 470 data points from parties in 10 Western European countries from 1970 to 2009. The article finds that vote-maximising parties create higher levels of congruence than policy-seeking parties. On this basis, the article calls for evaluations of party behaviour considering party-type specificity.

2016

The quest for data-driven campaigning in 2012—creating massive databases of voter information for more effective micro-targeting—found greater efficacy and new controversy in 2016. The Trump campaign capitalized on the power of digital advertising to reach the public to engage in unprecedented mass-targeted campaigning. His campaign spent substantially more on Facebook and other digital media paid ads than Clinton. Yet, the company that Trump worked with, Cambridge Analytica, closed up shop in 2018 under a cloud of controversy about corrupt officials and voter manipulation in several countries, as well as ill-begotten data of Facebook users that drove their micro-targeting practices. The Clinton campaign modeled itself on data-driven successes of the Obama campaign, yet the algorithms that drove their decision making were flawed, thereby leading her campaign to underperform in essential swing states. Similar to the Romney campaign’s Narwhal challenges on Election Day when the campaign effectively was flying blind on get-out-the-vote numbers, the Clinton plane was flying on bad coordinates, ultimately causing her campaign to crash in critical swing states.

Voter information campaigns and political accountability: Cumulative findings from a preregistered meta-analysis of coordinated trials

Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives’ performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevant learning.

Helping Citizens to Locate Political Parties in the Policy Space: a Dataset for the 2014 elections to the European Parliament

The authors present a dataset that contains the positions of 231 political parties across 28 countries on 30 policy issues that were considered salient for the 2014 elections to the European Parliament. The party position estimates were originally used in a voter information tool which compared the policy preferences of citizens to those of political parties. The paper discusses the estimation method in the context of the literature on estimating party positions, outlines the coding methodology, and introduces the value of the dataset for third-party users interested in studying political participation and representation.