Showing papers on "Voting behavior published in 2005"

Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted

Abstract: Why do people think and act politically in the manner they do? Despite the foundational nature of this question, answers are unfortunately incomplete and unnecessarily tentative, largely because political scientists do not take seriously the possibility of nonenvironmental influences. The suggestion that people could be born with political predispositions strikes many as far-fetched, odd, even perverse. However, researchers in other disciplines—‐ notably behavioral genetics—‐have uncovered a substantial heritable component for many social attitudes and behaviors and it seems unlikely that political attitudes and behaviors are completely immune from such forces. In this article, we combine relevant findings in behavioral genetics with our own analysis of data on a large sample of twins to test the hypothesis that, contrary to the assumptions embedded in political science research, political attitudes have genetic as well as environmental causes. 1

Politics in the Supermarket: Political Consumerism as a Form of Political Participation:

Abstract: Both anecdotal and case-study evidence have long suggested that consumer behavior such as the buying or boycotting of products and services for political and ethical reasons can take on political significance. Despite recent claims that such behavior has become more widespread in recent years, political consumerism has not been studied systematically in survey research on political participation. Through the use of a pilot survey conducted among 1015 Canadian, Belgian, and Swedish students, we ascertain whether political consumerism is a sufficiently consistent behavioral pattern to be measured and studied meaningfully. The data from this pilot survey allow us to build a "political consumerism index" incorporating attitudinal, behavioral, and frequency measurements. Our analysis of this cross-national student sample suggests that political consumerism is primarily a tool of those who are distrustful of political institutions. However, political consumers have more trust in other citizens, and they are disproportionately involved in checkbook organizations. They also tend to score highly on measures of political efficacy and post-materialism. We strongly suggest including measurements of political consumerism together with other emerging forms of activism in future population surveys on political participation.

Striking a Responsive Chord: How Political Ads Motivate and Persuade Voters by Appealing to Emotions

Abstract: Politicians routinely appeal to the emotions of voters, a practice critics claim subverts the rational decision making on which democratic processes properly rest. But we know little about how emotional appeals actually influence voting behavior. This study demonstrates, for the first time, that political ads can change the way citizens get involved and make choices simply by using images and music to evoke emotions. Prior research suggests voters behave differently in different emotional states but has not established whether politicians can use campaigns to manipulate emotions and thereby cause changes in political behavior. This article uses two experiments conducted during an actual election to show that: (1) cueing enthusiasm motivates participation and activates existing loyalties; and (2) cueing fear stimulates vigilance, increases reliance on contemporary evaluations, and facilitates persuasion. These results suggest campaigns achieve their goals in part by appealing to emotions, and emotional appeals can promote democratically desirable behavior.

Democracy, credibility and clientelism

Abstract: The authors demonstrate that sharply different policy choices across democracies can be explained as a consequence of differences in the ability of political competitors to make credible pre-electoral commitments to voters. Politicians can overcome their credibility deficit in two ways. First, they can build reputations. This requires that they fulfill preconditions that in practice are costly: informing voters of their promises; tracking those promises; ensuring that voters turn out on election day. Alternatively, they can rely on intermediaries -- patrons - who are already able to make credible commitments to their clients. Endogenizing credibility in this way, the authors find that targeted transfers and corruption are higher and public good provision lower than in democracies in which political competitors can make credible pre-electoral promises. The authors also argue that in the absence of political credibility, political reliance on patrons enhances welfare in the short-run, in contrast to the traditional view that clientelism in politics is a source of significant policy distortion. However, in the long run reliance on patrons may undermine the emergence of credible political parties. The model helps to explain several puzzles. For example, public investment and corruption are higher in young democracies than old; and democratizing reforms succeeded remarkably in Victorian England, in contrast to the more difficult experiences of many democratizing countries, such as the Dominican Republic.

Issue Salience, Issue Ownership and Issue-Based Vote Choice: Evidence from Canada

Abstract: According to the issue ownership theory of voting, voters identify the political party that they feel is the most competent, or the most credible, proponent of a particular issue and cast their ballots for that issue owner. Yet, the actual micro-level mechanism of such behavior has seldom been examined in the literature. We assess this question and, in the process, offer a refinement to the original model of issue ownership. We argue that while party ownership of an issue is important to individual vote choice, its effect is mediated by the perceived salience of the issue in question; issue ownership should only affect the voting decision of those individuals who think that the issue is important. The conditional effect of issue salience on ownership-based voting is demonstrated through individual-level analyses of vote choice in the 1997 and 2000 Canadian federal elections. The results strongly suggest that salience should be more explicitly integrated into the formulation of the theory and its empirical testing. The observed decline in the explanatory power of sociological determinants of vote choice over the past few decades has prompted scholars to more closely consider the role of political issues in individual electoral decisions. One explanation of issue-based vote choice that has emerged revolves around the idea of issue ownership (e.g., Budge and Farlie 1983; Petrocik 1996). According to this theory, parties and their candidates attempt to mobilize voters by emphasizing issues on which they hold a (usually long-standing) reputation of competence. Political parties in turn receive support on the basis of those issues they are perceived to own at election time. In this paper, we offer a refinement of the original model of issue ownership. We turn to a factor that has received little attention as an independent variable in the literature on voting behavior, namely issue salience. We argue that while party ownership of an issue is important to individual vote choice, its effect is mediated by the perceived salience of the issue in question. Specifically, we claim that a party’s competence on an issue should not influence voter behavior unless the issue is considered important. By making the role of issue salience more explicit both in the formulation of issue ownership theory and in its empirical testing, we hope to provide an explanation of issue-based vote choice that is more complete and representative of actual voter behavior. We begin by reviewing the previous work on issue ownership. We then discuss our refinement of the issue ownership model and test it by analyzing the individual-level determinants of vote choice in the 1997 and 2000 Canadian federal elections. The overall results support our main hypothesis that issue salience acts as a significant mediating variable in the relationship between issue ownership and vote choice.

Democracy, Public Expenditures, and the Poor: Understanding Political Incentives for Providing Public Services

Abstract: The incentives of politicians to provide broad public goods and reduce poverty vary across countries. Even in democracies, politicians often have incentives to divert resources to political rents and private transfers that benefit a few citizens at the expense of many. These distortions can be traced to imperfections in political markets that are greater in some countries than in others. This article reviews the theory and evidence on the impact on political incentives of incomplete information for voters, the lack of credibility of political promises, and social polarization. The analysis has implications for policy and for reforms to improve public goods provision and reduce poverty.

When Moderate Voters Prefer Extreme Parties: Policy Balancing in Parliamentary Elections

Abstract: This work develops and tests a theory of voter choice in parliamentary elections. I demonstrate that voters are concerned with policy outcomes and hence incorporate the way institutions convert votes to policy into their choices. Since policy is often the result of institutionalized multiparty bargaining and thus votes are watered down by power-sharing, voters often compensate for this watering-down by supporting parties whose positions differ from (and are often more extreme than) their own. I use this insight to reinterpret an ongoing debate between proximity and directional theories of voting, showing that voters prefer parties whose positions differ from their own views insofar as these parties pull policy in a desired direction. Utilizing data from four parliamentary democracies that vary in their institutional design, I test my theory and show how institutional context affects voter behavior.

Talking the Vote: Why Presidential Candidates Hit the Talk Show Circuit

Abstract: The 2000 presidential election found the major party presidential candidates chatting with Oprah Winfrey, Rosie O'Donnell, and Regis Philbin, trading one-liners with Jay Leno and David Letterman, and discussing rap music on MTV. This study investigates the impact of entertainment-oriented talk show interviews of presidential candidates, using the 2000 election as a case study. I consider why such shows cover presidential politics, why candidates choose to appear on them, and who is likely to be watching. This discussion yields a series of hypotheses concerning the effects of these interviews on public attitudes and voting behavior. I test my hypotheses through a content analysis of campaign coverage by entertainment-oriented talk shows, traditional political interview shows, and national news campaign coverage, as well as through a series of statistical investigations. I find that politically unengaged voters who watch entertainment-oriented TV talk shows are more likely to find the opposition party candidate likeable, as well as to cross party lines and vote for him, relative to their counterparts who are more politically aware or who do not watch such shows.

Political will, political skill, and political behavior

Abstract: The current study used Mintzberg's (1983) conceptualization of political will and political skill to evaluate the predictors and consequences of political behavior at work As elements of political will, we hypothesized that need for achievement and intrinsic motivation would predict the use of political behavior at work Furthermore, we argued that political skill would moderate the relationship between political behavior and emotional labor Data gathered from employees (N = 193) representing a wide array of organizations substantiated the proposed relationships Specifically, need for achievement and intrinsic motivation were positively associated with political behavior In turn, those opting to employ political behavior at work experienced a higher degree of emotional labor, but this relationship was found to operate differently at low and high levels of political skill Specifically, emotional labor was a consequence of political behavior for those low in political skill, but emotional labor reactions from political behavior were neutralized for individuals high in political skill Implications of these results, strengths and limitations, and directions for future research are discussed Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Ambivalence, information, and electoral choice

Abstract: Conventional wisdom views voter choice in House elections as preordained by party identification, incumbency, and perceptions of national conditions. In an analysis of voter behavior in House elections between 1990 and 2000, we find instead that voters are quite heterogeneous. Voters who hold ambivalent partisan attitudes, who typically constitute 30% of the electorate, reduce their reliance on party identification; this effect is entirely independent of the strength of identification. Individuals holding ambivalent partisan attitudes that both lack political knowledge and are presented with little campaign stimulus are more likely to engage in economic voting. Individuals holding ambivalent partisan attitudes that either are knowledgeable about politics or are presented with stimulating campaigns are more likely to engage in ideological voting. Thus, campaign competition and national partisan competition each play a role in assuring that ordinary voters may participate meaningfully in the political process.

Talking Politics and Engaging Politics: An Examination of the Interactive Relationships Between Structural Features of Political Talk and Discussion Engagement

Abstract: This study takes a process-oriented approach to understand the current status of political discussion research and identifies discussion engagement—discussion attention and integrative discussion—as an unexplored but important facet of political discussion. As a block, these two variables of discussion engagement independently accounted for significant variance in two criterion variables of political engagement, political knowledge and political participation, after controlling for not only a host of demographic, attitudinal, and media use variables but also three most researched structural features of political discussion—network size, discussion frequency, and network heterogeneity. In addition, the study analyzes the interplay between various attributes of political discussion in an attempt to untangle the dynamic relationships among features of political discussion in politics. Findings suggest that whether network size and heterogeneity mobilize or demobilize citizens may depend on whether they are a...

Flexing Muscle: Corporate Political Expenditures as Signals to the Bureaucracy

Abstract: When corporations and their employees spend money in the political arena, to what extent are they purchasing special treatment? Complaints about the deleterious effects of corporate money in politics are ubiquitous in American political discourse. However, in order to pinpoint the place of these expenditures in American democracy, and to appreciate fully the consequences of various reform proposals,itiscriticaltoidentifytheprecisemechanism through which any preferential treatment might occur. In this spirit, scholars have suggested that corporations make political expenditures because they hope to influence government behavior, through either explicit quid pro quos with legislators for constituency service or favorable votes (Baron 1989; Grossman and Helpman 1994, 2001), improved access to legislators (Hall and Wayman 1990; Langbein 1986), or enhancement of the electoral prospects of sympathetic incumbents(PooleandRomer1985).Empiricalevidenceverifying a definitive relationship between expenditures and specific policy change, unfortunately, has proven elusive. In a recent review essay, Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo, and Snyder (2003, 116) conclude, “Contributions explain a miniscule fraction of the variation in voting behavior in the U.S. Congress.” They suggest thatcontributionsarebetterthoughtofasconsumption goods that fulfill a desire to participate in politics than as investment in a political marketplace.

Agenda Building, Agenda Setting, Priming, Individual Voting Intentions, and the Aggregate Results: An Analysis of Four Israeli Elections

Abstract: This article reports the findings of the multistage agenda-setting process of four Israeli elections. In the first stage, agenda building, it is demonstrated that there is a close association between real-world indicators and media agenda. In the second stage, agenda setting, it was found that the level of television coverage of issues influences the proportion of surveys' respondents naming these issues as the nation's most important problems. In the third stage, priming, the analysis focused on electoral voting behavior in multiparty parliamentary elections rather than on the usual evaluations of the president's performance. At the individual level, there is evidence for a priming effect. At the aggregate level, the findings suggest that there may be a priming effect on the actual electoral success of various political parties.

When Europe Matters: The Impact of Political Information on Voting Behaviour in EU Referendums

Abstract: This article investigates how voters decide in referendums on European integration. More specifically, it analyses how political information influences voting behaviour. It argues that political information conditions the way in which people make decisions in referendums. The impact of political information is examined not only at the individual, but also at the contextual level. It is hypothesized that variations in the context of the referendum – the intensity of the campaign – produce differences in the way in which citizens act in referendums. As the intensity of the referendum campaign increases, more information is available to citizens and voters will rely more heavily on sophisticated criteria, such as attitudes and issue positions on the European Union (EU). While the informational context influences voting patterns, individuals also vary in their awareness of politics. It is argued that people with high levels of political awareness receive more information and consequently rely more on their ow...

Making sense of religion in political life

Abstract: ▪ Abstract After a long period of postwar neglect by mainstream scholars, religion assumed a new prominence in political science during the late 1970s. Despite the latter-day significance accorded religion by the discipline, the product of several unexpected real-world events, much of the recent research has focused on specific episodes or groups without drawing on or developing general theories. Social movement theory (SMT), particularly in its most recent incarnation, offers a way to address the three critical questions about religiously engaged political movements: What are the motives for political activity by religious groups? By what means do these groups facilitate political action? What features and conditions of the political system provide them opportunities for effective political action? This review explores various expressions of religiously based political action from the vantage point of SMT. We conclude that the translation of religious grievances into political action is contingent on a s...

“Bowling Together” isn’t a Cure-All: The Relationship between Social Capital and Political Trust in South Korea:

Abstract: While the social capital theory, popularized by Putnam, expects that associational life and social trust promote civic participation in political processes, some studies have demonstrated weak associations between social capital and political engagement. By applying these arguments of the limited impact of social capital, this study examines the relationship between social capital and political trust in South Korea. Survey data were analysed and it was found that both associational involvement and social trust were negatively related to trust in political institutions and commitment to voting. Furthermore, these negative relationships were mediated by citizen perceptions of poor institutional performance such as political corruption, suggesting that institutional performance is a crucial determinant of political engagement.

American Roulette: The Effect of Reminders of Death on Support for George W. Bush in the 2004 Presidential Election

Abstract: An experiment was conducted to assess the effect of a subtle reminder of death on voting intentions for the 2004 U.S. presidential election. On the basis of terror management theory and previous research, we hypothesized that a mortality salience induction would increase support for President George W. Bush and decrease support for Senator John Kerry. In late September 2004, following a mortality salience or control induction, registered voters were asked which candidate they intended to vote for. In accord with predictions, Senator John Kerry received substantially more votes than George Bush in the control condition, but Bush was favored over Kerry following a reminder of death, suggesting that President Bush's re-election may have been facilitated by nonconscious concerns about mortality in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.

Women for Women? Gender and Party Bias in Voting for Female Candidates

Abstract: In recent years, popular commentators have suggested that the Republican party could narrow the gender gap by nominating women candidates. This proposition assumes that (at least some) women voters’ partisan identification may be trumped by an affinity with their gender. I evaluate the claim that women voters are often induced to cross party lines on election day to support a woman candidate. Analyzing more than a decade of men’s and women’s voting behavior when male and female candidates face one another, I offer evidence that female candidates gain marginally greater support from their own gender. In a relationship not present with other male or female candidates, Democratic women candidates who face GOP men strongly benefit from Republican women voters’ crossover support.

Candidate Occupations and Voter Information Shortcuts

Abstract: Voters in low-information elections frequently rely on heuristics or information shortcuts when making their decisions of whom to support. While existing research on these shortcuts has examined many candidate characteristics, it has largely overlooked the potential of candidate occupational cues. This article uses experimental survey data conducted by the Los Angeles Times Poll in the 1994 statewide elections in California to analyze whether candidates' occupational ballot designations influence voters' choices. Specifically, it hypothesizes that voters use candidate occupational labels to infer candidates' competence or qualifications for the office in question. As the analysis demonstrates, candidate occupational cues have two simultaneous effects on voting behavior: they help voters make a decision in races where they otherwise might not have, decreasing abstention; and in races in which voters infer one candidate to have a qualification advantage, the addition of occupational designations makes voter...

Professors and their politics: The policy views of social scientists

Abstract: Academic social scientists overwhelmingly vote Democratic, and the Democratic hegemony has increased significantly since 1970. Moreover, the policy preferences of a large sample of the members of the scholarly associations in anthropology, economics, history, legal and political philosophy, political science, and sociology generally bear out conjectures about the correspondence of partisan identification with left/right ideal types; although across the board, both Democratic and Republican academics favor government action more than the ideal types might suggest. Variations in policy views among Democrats is smaller than among Republicans. Ideological diversity (as judged not only by voting behavior, but by policy views) is by far the greatest within economics. Social scientists who deviate from left‐wing views are as likely to be libertarian as conservative.

Explaining Vote Switching Across First- and Second-Order Elections Evidence From Europe

Abstract: Across Western democracies, individuals frequently vote for different parties in different elections. A variety of explanations have been proposed for this behavior. In the European context, scholars have focused on the idea that individuals may vote for different parties because some elections are less important than others (i.e., are “second-order” elections). In the U.S. context, scholars have focused on the possibility that individuals might vote for different parties because they care about how the two chambers will affect policy outcomes. In this article, the authors test among four alternative motivations for vote switching, two predicated on the notion that individuals treat one of the elections as second-order and two predicated on the notion that individuals care about policy outcomes from both chambers. The tests are performed by analyzing Euro-barometer survey data on individual voting behavior in European national and European Parliament elections. The authors find support for all four motiva...

Rigging elections with violence

Abstract: In most developing countries even today, political parties spend a substantial fraction of their resources in attracting voters through ideological exhortation as well as force. In this paper we present a model of political contest between two parties that compete in two distinct arenas though the goal of the contest in both arenas is the same-to garner more political support. In the first, which we call “ideological”, the contest involves no use of force. In the second, which we call “conflictual”, party activists use violence either to force ideological supporters of the competing party to vote in their favor or restrain them from voting. We show that a party with lower initial political support will resort to more political violence, ceteris paribus and as the fraction of undecided voters goes up, elections will tend to be less conflictual. We also show that if there is an incumbency advantage, then the resources devoted to creating political unrest increase in equilibrium and political competition is more violent. We also provide some historic and journalistic evidence that supports our results.

Dissatisfied Democrats or Retrospective Voters? Economic Hardship, Political Institutions, and Voting Behavior in Latin America

Abstract: This article examines recent trends in Latin American voting behavior and casts them in terms of sincere (economic) and strategic (electoral) concerns. It argues that thanks to years of economic adversity, Latin Americans have developed long, sophisticated economic memories. Although this has resulted in rising frustration with democratic government, according to recent opinion polls, it has not always led voters to punish all parties responsible for hardship at election time. A panel study of the region’s presidential systems demonstrates that citizens punish incumbents by voting for established nonincumbents when electoral laws reduce opportunities available to small parties in the systems, even if nonincumbents have also been blamed for hard economic times. More permissive electoral systems, in contrast, encourage citizens to reject all parties responsible for economic decline. The analysis demonstrates how economic and electoral concerns interact to affect voting behavior, political accountability, an...

Priming Gender: Campaigning on Women's Issues in U.S. Senate Elections

Abstract: The gender gap has been an important feature of American elections since 1980. Yet, most explanations for the effects of gender on voting behavior focus on differences between men and women without taking account of how campaign strategies may serve to highlight or mask these differences. I examine how Senate candidates act strategically in deciding whether and how to target women voters. I find that candidates make these decisions based largely on two factors: (1) the importance of these issues to the state's voters and (2) whether gender gaps had been decisive in previous statewide contests. Analysis of exit-poll data indicates that when campaigns focused more on women's issues, women became more likely to vote Democratic while the vote choices of men were unaffected. Thus, campaign strategies do appear to influence the importance of gender differences in voting behavior.

Metropolitan Latino Political Behavior: Voter Turnout and Candidate Preference in Los Angeles

Abstract: Most research on Latino voting behavior conclusively finds that as a group, Latinos vote at lower rates than other racial and ethnic groups in the United States. In this article, we argue that give...

Voters and Values in the 2004 Election

Abstract: A poorly devised exit poll question undermined meaningful analysis of voters' concerns in the 2004 presidential election. Twenty-two percent of voters picked moral values from a list of issues describing what mattered most in their vote, more than selected any other item. Various commentators have misinterpreted this single data point to conclude that moral values are an ascendant political issue and to credit conservative Christian groups with turning George W. Bush's popular vote defeat in 2000 into his three million-vote margin of victory in 2004. We suggest, rather, that while morals and values are critical in informing political judgments, they represent personal characteristics and ill-defined policy preferences far more than any discrete political issue. First by conflating morals and values and then by further conflating characteristics and issues, the exit poll's issues list distorted our understanding of the 2004 election. In this article, we examine the flaws in the 2004 National Election Pool exit poll's most important issue question and explore the presumed rising electoral importance of moral values and the conservative Christians who overwhelmingly selected this item. Using national exit poll data from 1980 through 2004 and other national surveys, we find that the moral values item on the issues list cannot properly be viewed as a discrete issue or set of closely related issues; that its importance to voters has not grown over time; and that when controlled for other variables, it ranks low on the issues list in predicting 2004 vote choices. The aggregated exit poll data also show that the voting behavior of conservative Christians is relatively stable over time, and these voters were not primarily responsible for Bush's improvement in 2004 over 2000.

Belonging and Doing: Political Churches and Black Political Participation

Abstract: The importance of the political church in Black political participation has brought to the attention of scholars the differences among Black churches and their effect on Black mobilization. The Black church has on many occasions transformed itself into a politicized organization. These political churches become settings that encourage political knowledge and skills (Tate, 1993) and communicate political activity as a norm (Calhoun-Brown, 1996). The earlier work on political churches has established the importance of these organizations for voter turnout and other forms of political participation. What has been left unexamined is the nature of the political churches themselves. This project disentangles these churches by looking at the heterogeneity within the structures of the political churches. In general, we seek to understand which of the internal activities of the political church tend to foster acts of political participation. We hypothesize that cost- underwriting activities and obligation-creating activities within the church setting have the greatest impact on participation. By examining a robust and expansive operationalization of the political church construct, we find that these types of political church activities matter more than other activities. In specifying how churches may work to directly affect the participation of their members, we seek to expand the scope of general comprehension of political churches.

Individual and Collective Choice and Voting in Common Pool Resource Problem with Heterogeneous Actors

Abstract: In this paper we investigate the effects of heterogeneity in common pool resource (CPR) problems. We examine whether heterogeneity impedes or facilitates coordination on an efficient use of a CPR by proposing and voting on allocation schemes. In a full information design we compare extractions and voting behavior in heterogeneous and homogeneous groups. If the CPR is extracted individually, we find no difference in efficiency between heterogeneous and homogeneous groups. However, when groups can vote on allocation schemes, homogeneous groups are more likely to reach an efficient agreement than heterogeneous groups.