The Political Consciousness of Post-Industrialism@@@The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1017/S0022381600007702

Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations

Retrospective Voting in American National Elections.

For the Many or the Few: The Initiative, Public Policy, and American Democracy. By John G. Matsusaka. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. 206p. $29.00. In the most recent wave of initiative use in the American states, citizens have passed an eclectic range of ballot measures. Voters have banned gay marriage, punished negligent doctors, prohibited the confinement of pregnant pigs, limited the taxation and spending powers of state governments, funded stem cell research, and ended affirmative action. Critics of the process claim that this plebiscitary system is out of control, with special interests dominating the process and threatening democratic governance. Defenders, in contrast, claim that ballot measure outcomes reflect the will of the people and are certainly more representative of public opinion than legislative bodies.

For the Many or the Few: The Initiative, Public Policy, and American Democracy

Abstract It has been suggested that political distrust is associated with lower levels of voter turnout and increased votes for challenger or populist parties. We investigate the relationship between political (dis)trust and electoral behaviour using the 2009 Belgian Election Study. Belgium presents an interesting case because compulsory voting (with an accompanying turnout rate of 90.4 per cent) compels distrusting voters to participate in elections. Nevertheless, distrusting voters are significantly more inclined to cast a blank or invalid vote. Second, distrust is positively associated with a preference for extreme right (Vlaams Belang) and populist (Lijst Dedecker) parties. Third, in party systems where there is no supply of viable challengers (i.e. the French-speaking region of Belgium), the effect of political trust on party preference is limited. We conclude that electoral effects of political distrust are determined by the electoral and party system and the supply of electoral protest.

Where Do Distrusting Voters Turn if There is No Viable Exit or Voice Option? The Impact of Political Trust on Electoral Behaviour in the Belgian Regional

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 participati...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0032321720923257

Do Populist Parties Increase Voter Turnout? Evidence from over 40 Years of Electoral History in 31 European Democracies

Diagnoses of a democratic recession or ‘hollowing out’ of democracy are numerous and varied but usually encompass the following symptoms: a decline in turnout and other forms of political participation; policy making that is increasingly detached from ordinary citizens and their preferences; and an erosion of trust in government and satisfaction with democracy among citizens – all of which ultimately challenge the legitimacy of democratic institutions. Direct democracy is one of the most prominent, far-reaching and popular remedies proposed in response to such diagnoses. It, by allowing citizens to directly vote on questions usually decided by representatives, seems intuitively appealing as an obvious extension and deepening of democracy. In this article I survey the potentials but also pitfalls of an increased institutionalization of direct democracy and use thereof in the countries of the EU focusing on the three key aspects identified above: representation, turnout and citizens’ political support.

Direct Democracy in Europe: Potentials and Pitfalls

Economic performance is a key component of most election forecasts. When fitting models, however, most forecasters unwittingly assume that the actual state of the economy, a state best estimated by the multiple periodic revisions to official macroeconomic statistics, drives voter behavior. The difference in macroeconomic estimates between revised and original data vintages can be substantial, commonly over 100% (two-fold) for economic growth estimates, making the choice of which data release to use important for the predictive validity of a model. We systematically compare the predictions of four forecasting models for numerous US presidential elections using real-time and vintage data. We find that newer data are not better data for election forecasting: forecasting error increases with data revisions. This result suggests that voter perceptions of economic growth are influenced more by media reports about the economy, which are based on initial economic estimates, than by the actual state of the economy.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2053168015589624

Vintage errors: do real-time economic data improve election forecasts?:

Voter turnout in second-order elections is on a dramatic decline in many modern democracies. This article investigates how electoral participation can be substantially increased by holding multiple of these less important elections simultaneously. Leading to a relative decrease in voting costs, concurrent elections theoretically have economies of scale to the individual voter and thus should see turnout levels larger than those obtained in any stand-alone election. Leveraging as-if-random variation of local election timing in Germany, we estimate the causal effect of concurrent mayoral elections on European election turnout at around 10 percentage points. Exploiting variation in treatment intensity, we show that the magnitude of the concurrency effect is contingent upon district size and the competitiveness of the local race.

/pdf/how-to-increase-turnout-in-low-salience-elections-quasi-1bzz5w0d8v.pdf

How to Increase Turnout in Low-Salience Elections: Quasi-Experimental Evidence on the Effect of Concurrent Second-Order Elections on Political Participation*

Do voters judge their national economy relative to economic performance abroad? In 2013 we took advantage of the German Bundestag election to test this hypothesis predictively. Nearly two months prior to the election, we published an election forecast relying on a theory-driven empirical model of election outcomes that draws on previous election outcomes; characteristics of the government and of voters; and, most originally, the relative economic performance of Germany (‘benchmarked' growth) in comparison to the three other most important economies in Europe – France, the UK and Italy. Our forecast put the outgoing coalition government of CDU/CSU and FDP at 47.05 per cent of the popular vote deviating from the actual outcome of 46.3 by 0.75 points. This makes our forecast one of the most accurate in this election cycle. Despite one-and-a-half months of lead time, our forecast performed on par or slightly better than the last poll results issued only two days before the election.

/pdf/a-predictive-test-of-voters-economic-benchmarking-the-2013-1pln6laamt.pdf

Arndt Leininger

Papers

Do Populist Parties Increase Voter Turnout? Evidence from over 40 Years of Electoral History in 31 European Democracies

Direct Democracy in Europe: Potentials and Pitfalls

Vintage errors: do real-time economic data improve election forecasts?:

How to Increase Turnout in Low-Salience Elections: Quasi-Experimental Evidence on the Effect of Concurrent Second-Order Elections on Political Participation*

A Predictive Test of Voters' Economic Benchmarking: The 2013 German Bundestag Election