Support for campaign spending limitations in the U. S. senate: The role of party,ideology and electoral security

Recent media disclosures of American campaign funding raising practices in the 1996 election have renewed political interest in campaign finance reform. This paper examines senatorial support for the McCain/Feingold measure that would have established voluntary spending limits on senate candidates and banned unlimited campaign contributions through political party organizations. While party affiliation and senator ideology are very important in explaining support for the McCain/Feingold measure, various measures of electoral security are not significant. This is important because the public choice literature emphasizes that electoral security is the primary goal of legislators. Additionally, the electoral self-interest of legislators is probably much more accurately measured by the various electoral security measures used in this study than by the constituency measures typically employed in the public choice literature. Nevertheless, personal legislator electoral security is not a powerful explanatory factor.     

Two-stage electoral competition in two-party contests: persistent divergence of party positions

Models of party competition building on Downs (1957) have recognized that there are centrifugal and centripetal forces in party competition; but one such force, the existence of party primaries, has been remarkably neglected in recent literature. We consider party/candidate policy divergence in two-party competition in one dimension where there is a two-stage electoral process, e.g., a primary election (or caucus) among party supporters to select that party’s candidate followed by a general election. We develop a model in which (some or all) voters in the primary election are concerned with the likelihood that the primary victor will be able to win the general election and being concerned with that candidate’s policy position. This model is similar in all but technical details to that given in an almost totally neglected early paper in Public Choice Coleman (1971) 11:35–60, but we offer important new results on electoral dynamics for candidate locations. In addition to accounting for persistent party divergence by incorporating a more realistic model of the institutions that govern elections in the U.S., the model we offer gives rise to predictions that match a number of important aspects of empirical reality such as frequent victories for incumbents and greater than otherwise expected electoral success for the minority party in situations where that party has its supporters more closely clustered ideologically than the supporters of the larger party (in particular, with a concentration of voters between the party mean and the population mean).A much earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Public Choice Society, Long Beach, California, March 24–26, 1995. We are indebted to Dorothy Green and to Clover Behrend-Gethard for bibliographic assistance and to Nicholas Miller and the late Peter Aranson for helpful suggestions.     

Children's Partisan Loyalties in a New Nation: A Research Note Using Indian Data

Using a sample of Indian high school students, this articlefinds that party identification remains relatively stable overa period of two years. The largest component of change is developmentalin that many respondents change from nonpartisan to partisan.Predictors of partisan stability are examined, and knowledgeof parental partisanship is found to be the most significant.     

The Virtues of Participation without Power: Campaigns,Party Networks,and the Ends of Politics

Following Francesca Polletta's call to reconsider participatory democracy in a new millennium, this article analyzes and makes a normative case for institutional and partisan forms of participation without decision making. I draw on field research and interviews conducted over the last decade on Democratic Party campaigns to argue against contemporary denunciations of partisanship and critiques of institutional participation by radical democrats. First, this article discusses the opportunities available for citizens to participate in electoral politics. Volunteering is often limited to fund‐raising and instrumental voter contacts given the constraints of electoral institutions. Although campaign volunteerism is a fundamentally limited form of civic engagement, institutional and partisan participation has democratic value. Campaigns are institutionally linked to political parties that offer distinct moral, ideological, and policy choices to citizens. Recent analytical and empirical work shows that contemporary political parties are constituted by relatively coherent networks of civil society and social movement organizations that devote considerable resources to electoral politics to shape primary and general election outcomes and advance their agendas in governance. This reveals electoral participation to be tightly linked to larger partisan dynamics and institutional sites of power.     

A General Equilibrium Model of Multi-Party Competition

The paper introduces a generalized spatial model that is motivated by the frequent changes in party identity and electoral laws that characterize transitional party systems. In this model, parties may (1) change their platforms, (2) their identities through coalitions and splits and (3) if they form a winning coalition, the electoral law. The equilibrium is defined as a state such that no party or coalition can strictly benefit from changing the electoral law, its platform, or from splitting or coalescing. The results show that while there are games with no institutional or coalitional-split equilibria, such equilibria do exist under relatively undemanding conditions. The main finding is that once an institutional and identity equilibrium is achieved, it is generically robust against small trembles in party platforms or voter preferences. This robustness facilitates greater stability in terms of institutions and party identities in mature party systems where such trembles are smaller than in transitional systems.     

THE ROLE OF CONSTITUENT TRUST IN CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS

The purpose of this inquiry is to introduce a new variable intothe study of congressional elections—constituent trust.Constituent trust is defined as the level of confidence thatconstituents have in their elected representative. This analysissuggests a strategy for measuring constituent trust and developsa model that relates constituent trust directly and indirectlyto electoral support. By pooling cross-sectional data drawnfrom the University of Michigan's American National ElectionStudies (1978–84), I demonstrate that when constituenttrust is salient in voter cognitions, it has a significant directinfluence on electoral support and is a better predictor ofelectoral support than the incumbent's party identification.In addition to its direct effects, I show that constituent trustindirectly influences electoral support because of its causalrelationship to incumbent popularity.     

A GREAT DIVIDE?

Since 1980 most social scientists have found little evidence in support of popular and recurring commentaries that identify religion (and evangelical Protestants, in particular) as a major source of conservative political trends in the United States. But in the past several years a new line of research has reported results suggesting that earlier studies underestimated evidence that partisan change among specific religious groups has contributed to an emerging Republican electoral advantage. We assess this latter body of research, presenting the most comprehensive analysis to date of the effects of religious group memberships on political outcomes in national elections from 1972 through 2000. We address the limitations of past studies by incorporating advances in the measurement of religious denomination, adjudicating competing statistical models of the changing interrelationship of religion and voter alignments and extending previous investigations by simultaneously considering the impact of religion on (1) voting behavior, (2) partisanship, and (3) the representation of religious groups within the Democratic and Republican parties' electoral coalitions. Our results refine and extend past studies of religion and political change, providing evidence of limited changes in group-specific voting coupled with much larger changes in religion-based partisanship and party coalitions.     

Old Voters on New Dimensions: Why Do Voters Vote for Pensioners’ Parties? The Case of the Netherlands

This article analyzes the electoral support of the Dutch pensioners’ party 50Plus. Due to its open electoral system and aging population, the Netherlands is a key case to study pensioners’ parties. Our study shows that this pensioners’ party appeals to voters who are characterized by their age and their dependence on the welfare state as well as their policy positions on new lines of political conflict. In particular, their position on the new economic dimension (which concerns welfare state reform) and the new cultural dimension (which concerns immigration and EU integration) is distinct. Moreover, even when the majority of voters for this new party once supported the larger mainstream parties, they are now dissatisfied with the established politics. With rapidly aging populations across established democracies, this study is not just relevant for those studying pensioners’ parties, but rather gives an important insight into the electoral dynamics and popular support for mainstream politics, the welfare state, and social security.     

How media diet,partisan frames,candidate traits,and political organization-public relationship communication drive party reputation

This study examined the ability of antecedents such as media diet and candidate traits to impact political organization-public relationships (POPRs), in turn affecting views on party reputation. As expected, survey respondents reported greater levels of relationship-focused communication and higher reputation assessments of their own parties, additionally rating their party’s candidate higher in authenticity and character. Connecting media diet and reputation, heavier use of partisan, traditional media (e.g., talk radio and cable news) indicated increased partisan divides, suggesting young and often inexperienced voters engage in motivated reasoning, seeking out information from sources that cater to their existing ideologies. This pattern was less pronounced for infotainment and social media sources, suggesting promising agenda-building opportunities for political PR practitioners. SEM analyses demonstrated the significant influence of candidate traits and POPR on party reputation, though manifestations of effects differed among Democrats and Republicans, the implications of which are discussed.     

Race,Religiosity, and the Women's Vote

Abstract

Much of our popular political discourse focuses on the Democratic character of the women's vote, but there is, in fact, considerable diversity among female voters. Important sectors of the female electorate have political concerns that are at odds with the Democratic Party, though they hold these preferences less strongly than do men. This article focuses on these differences between women and links them to electoral behavior in the 1996 presidential election. I argue that women, like men, cast their vote with the party that best represents their interests, as they understand them. African American women overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party in 1996, which is consistent with theories of racial group interests, but white women diverge politically.

The main finding of this research is that religious values play a central role in white women's voting behavior, even after taking into account ideological and partisan predispositions. We see this result, I argue, because religious and secular women correctly identify the Republican Party as the repository of social conservatism and the Democratic Party as embracing social liberalism.     

Competition for popular support: a valence model of elections in Turkey

Models of elections tend to predict that parties will maximize votes by converging to an electoral center. There is no empirical support for this prediction. In order to account for the phenomenon of political divergence, this paper offers a stochastic electoral model where party leaders or candidates are differentiated by differing valences??the electoral perception of the quality of the party leader. If valence is simply intrinsic, then it can be shown that there is a ??convergence coefficient??, defined in terms of the empirical parameters, that must be bounded above by the dimension of the space, in order for the electoral mean to be a Nash equilibrium. This model is applied to elections in Turkey in 1999 and 2002. The idea of valence is then extended to include the possibility that activist groups contribute resources to their favored parties in response to policy concessions from the parties. The equilibrium result is that parties, in order to maximize vote share, must balance a centripetal electoral force against a centrifugal activist effect. We estimate pure spatial models and models with sociodemographic valences, and use simulations to compare the equilibrium predictions with the estimated party positions.     

Gleich und gleich gesellt sich gern — auch im Wahlkampf?

Does the well-known effect of social position on party preference depend on the distance to election day? Based on findings on campaign effects, it is argued that the effect of social position on party preference could vary over time, especially it may react on changes in political communication in campaign phases: parties appeal to their social bases, and therefore the effect of social position on party preference may rise in election campaigns; furthermore, this means that throughout a parliamentary term the partisan effect of social position should first weaken and later rise again. These hypotheses are tested empirically against trend data (Politbarometer) and panel data covering the German federal elections 1972 to 1998. Empirically, however, the core hypotheses are rejected: the structuring effect of social position is almost constant throughout parliamentary terms. Hence, federal election campaigns in Germany do not strengthen the partisan effect of social position substantially.     

Nichts genaues weiss man nicht!?

What do voters really know about party platforms and how do they perceive the contents? Are there any relationships between party election platforms and electoral behavior? Despite of much research on parties, there are hardly any answers to these questions. If political parties devise programmes in order to influence political attitudes or electoral behavior, it will be necessary that these programmes are read by people. But it seems to be unclear if and how people do so. This article shows clearly that voters don’t know much about party manifestoes. Still, programmes are more important for voters than many people believe. Programmes are also an important factor for electoral behavior. But there is still a lack of data to get evident results.     

Rational voters in a partisanship model

This paper examines a voter model for the US which is interconnected with the partisan theory. In our model, voters are rational and forward-looking. They are perfectly informed about the preferences of political parties and about the state of the economy. The predictions of our voter model differ from the predictions of conventional voter models, according to which the incumbent benefits from low unemployment and low inflation, irrespective of its political colour. In a partisan setting, the democratic party benefits from high unemployment and the republican party benefits from high inflation. Regressions of presidential approval rates indicate that the predictions of both the partisan voter model and the conventional model are consistent with the data.     

Electorally Threatening Women? Understanding Gender Quotas in the French Socialist Party

ABSTRACT

Almost three decades ago, the French Socialist Party (PS) adopted a quota for women in the party leadership and for female candidates, and in the ensuing 25 years, the quota was increased and implemented at various times. The history of the PS' s gender-based quota raises the following questions: Why do party leaders adopt gender quotas at one time, increase quotas at another, and implement them in some elections, but not in others? In other words, how can we account for the decisions of political actors? This work seeks to answer these questions by examining the demands and actions of PS feminists. It shows that party women demanded gender quotas and frequently backed up their demands with ideational and electoral arguments that often appealed to male party officials. However, the success of these proposals did not depend on the ability of Socialist women to make convincing arguments; rather it depended on the presence of male party officials who had electoral incentives to support them. This work thus underscores the importance of taking party officials' electoral incentives into consideration when analyzing women's political representation.     

The Partisan Paradox: Religious Commitment and the Gender Gap in Party Identification

A large body of scholarly literature points to the growing influenceof religious devotion on U.S. partisanship. This article attemptsto reconcile the growing religious commitment cleavage in theAmerican party system with the commensurate growth in the gendergap. If women are, on average, more religiously devout thanmen, and if contemporary shifts in partisanship are disproportionatelyfounded on religious and cultural cleavages, then why are womenmore likely to identify with the Democratic Party? I pose threepossible explanations for this apparent paradox: (1) that theinfluence of religion is only considerable among the most committed;(2) that men and women politicize their religious beliefs indifferent ways; and (3) that gender differences in opinion onnonreligious issues sustain the partisan gap, over and abovethe conservative influence of religiosity. Findings from structuralequation analyses demonstrate that religious devotion affectsthe politics of men and women in similar ways. Religious commitmentaffects partisan choices but does not override the powerfuleffects of gender. Gender differences in support for the socialwelfare state and the preeminence of social welfare opinionin the partisan calculus of men and women largely explain thepersistence of the gender gap.     

Political equilibria with electoral uncertainty

After an election, when party positions and strengths are known, there may be a centrally located large party at the core position. Theory suggests that such a core party is able to form a minority government and control policy. In the absence of a core party, theory suggests that the outcome be a lottery associated with coalition risk. Stochastic models of elections typically indicate that all parties, in equilibrium, will adopt positions at the electoral center. This paper first presents an existence theorem for local Nash equilibrium (LNE) under vote maximization, and then constructs a more general model using the notion of coalition risk. The model allows for the balancing of office and policy motivations. Empirical analyses of elections in the Netherlands and Israel are used as illustrations of the model and of the concept of a structurally stable LNE. The figures and tables are reproduced from Schofield and Sened (2006) with permission from Cambridge University Press.     

Elections in Post-Communist Ukraine, 1994–2004: An Overview

The paper attempts a comprehensive and theoretically grounded analysis of all parliamentary and presidential elections carried out in Ukraine in the decade 1994 to 2004. It is organized into four sections. The first deals with the electoral system, how it came into being and has been amended, how it translates votes into seats, the "effective number" of political parties in the electorate and the legislature, and the battle over the electoral system itself during the presidency of Leonid Kuchma. In the second section, voting behaviour of the Ukrainian electorate is examined. Using voting data, along with the results of public opinion surveys and reports on the conduct of the various election campaigns, the paper sorts through the relevant determinants of voting choice to identify the most pertinent ones as they operate in the Ukrainian context. Generally speaking, such determinants are: (1) background social characteristics of the voters, including the regional and ethnic factors; (2) the public's assessments of the current political and economic conditions in the country; (3) individual voters' partisan identification and opinions on prominent issues; (4) their retrospective evaluations of the incumbents; (5) leadership qualities of the contenders; and (6) prospective evaluations of parties and candidates as to their expected performance in office. To determine which of these are consistently more important is an essential aim of the paper. The third section assesses the degree to which accountability has been achieved in any of these elections—those to the Verkhovna Rada of 1994, 1998, and 2002, and the presidential elections of 1994, 1999, and 2004. A penultimate section is devoted to evaluating the policy consequences of these elections: what difference have Ukraine's elections made to policies over the past decade? In the concluding portion, a characterization of the emerging party system is given along with a summing-up on the voting behaviour of Ukrainians in the post-communist era.     

Some Notes on Local Level Political Activism

Abstract

The large number of studies of the impact of Watergate have generally ignored its electoral repercussions. This paper helps to fill this void by reporting the results of a statewide panel study which investigated the effects of attitudes toward Watergate on shifts in political party identification between 1970 and 1974. We found a considerable amount of change in the partisan identifications of the panel members during the four years; however, while both parties suffered an overall loss of support to the “Independents,” the Republicans did lose considerably more support than did the Democrats. More importantly, the greater Republican losses were found to be significantly related to attitudes toward Watergate. It therefore appears that Watergate contributed to the shrinking proportion of Republicans within our panel. While the Republican losses were not of great magnitude, they appear sufficiently large to have had an effect on recent elections.     

Dynamic social media affiliations among UK politicians

Inter-personal affiliations and coalitions are an important part of politicians’ behaviour, but are often difficult to observe. Since an increasing amount of political communication now occurs online, data from online interactions may offer a new toolkit to study ties between politicians; however, the methods by which robust insights can be derived from online data require further development, especially around the dynamics of political social networks. We develop a novel method for tracking the evolution of community structures, referred to as ‘multiplex community affiliation clustering’ (MCAC), and use it to study the online social networks of Members of Parliament (MPs) and Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in the United Kingdom. Social interaction networks are derived from social media (Twitter) communication over an eventful 17-month period spanning the UK General Election in 2015 and the UK Referendum on membership of the European Union in 2016. We find that the social network structure linking MPs and MEPs evolves over time, with distinct communities forming and re-forming, driven by party affiliations and political events. Without including any information about time in our model, we nevertheless find that the evolving social network structure shows multiple persistent and recurring states of affiliation between politicians, which align with content states derived from topic analysis of tweet text. These findings show that the dominant state of partisan segregation can be challenged by major political events, ideology, and intra-party tension that transcend party affiliations.