The political geography of macro-level turnout in American political development

Aggregate turnout rates are among the central indicators of democratic performance in the American polity. Despite the considerable implications of macro turnout, however, most studies of turnout focus instead on the micro level. As a consequence, we know little about how local, political, and historical influences have impacted turnout over the course of American political development. The result is a somewhat impoverished conception of turnout that often removes the political from political participation. In this article, I argue for a new, macro-level perspective that highlights the political dimension of turnout by placing turnout in the local political settings in which it has taken place. I contrast two competing explanations of macro turnout variation across local electorates, a political account and Elazar's cultural thesis, and discuss their implications for the political geography of macro turnout in American electoral history. I then examine this political geography by employing a local indicator of spatial association (a LISA statistic) to identify the spatial structuring of macro turnout in the United States from 1828 through 2000. I demonstrate that a political perspective provides greater leverage than Elazar's cultural perspective in explaining the political geography of macro turnout in the United States.     

Money talks: Decentralized personalism and the sources of campaign funding

Many scholars suggest that candidates are increasingly personalizing their campaign efforts, local organizations, and even their messaging. A variety of temporal factors have been identified as fueling this personalization of politics, including the decline of partisanship, evolving media norms, and changes in party organization such as the adoption of primaries. The personalization of politics is linked to spatial, or geographic, factors, as well. Research suggests that in geographically defined electoral systems, personalized campaigning most often involves a focus on district-level issues and that this translates into parliamentarians prioritizing local interests in the legislature. One potentially important factor that has been relatively understudied in explaining personalization is money, especially its geographic source. Using an innovative dataset that pairs candidate survey responses with administrative financial data, we test whether candidates are less likely to run personalized campaigns when their local party organization receives a higher proportion of its total income from the party at the centre. Our findings suggest that the degree to which campaign funds are raised locally or transferred from the central party office helps shape the message that local candidates convey to voters, although not how they get their message out.     

Representation and local democracy: Geographical variations in elector to councillor ratios

In a democracy, one person's vote should count as much as another's vote. While a range of factors can affect this, including the electoral system, party support bases, party campaigning, and the effectiveness and identity of representatives, a key principal is that for each political unit the number of electors per representative should be as equal as possible. Only when equality in electorate to representative ratios is established can equity in other demographic infrastructures be pursued. To achieve representation equality in English local authorities the Electoral Commission's Periodic Electoral Review process considers for each electoral ward the number of councillors, current and forecasted electorates and revisions to boundaries. Here, using 2005 boundaries, we examine variations in elector to councillor ratios in England. Comparing these ratios with 2001 Census data, we investigate whether variations relate to ethnic minority population distributions.We found considerable differences in representation ratios between four types of local authority. Generally, County Districts have fewer electors per councillor and therefore better representation ratios. There are progressively higher ratios for Unitary Authorities and London Boroughs; Metropolitan Districts have most electors per councillor. Comparing each ward's ratio with the representation of its associated district we found most wards lie within what might be considered an acceptable range of variation. Sub-district representation variability relates to urban–rural variations in ward extent and the use of one-, two- and three-seat systems. There is no evidence that variations in ward ratios relate systematically to distributions of ethnic minorities. Despite this, to capture local population characteristics, we advise utilising ethnic group demographic characteristics when forecasting electorates.     

Preservation of and Access to South Seas Photographs

In August 2001, in a constitutional reform of potentially far-reaching consequences, Papua New Guinea's parliament voted to change the country's electoral system. As a result of this decision, all elections held after 2002 will be conducted under a system of preferential voting. A similar system was used for Papua New Guinea's first three elections between 1964 and 1972, before the change to a first-past-the-post system at independence in 1975. This paper, drawing on a combination of historical records, election studies and recent observations, looks at the historical impact of both electoral systems in Papua New Guinea, and at the different kinds of political behaviour encouraged by them, including their divergent influences upon election campaigning, candidature rates, support levels for successful candidates, electoral violence and the party system. It concludes by examining the potential consequences of a return to preferential voting in Papua New Guinea.     

Party registration choices as a function of the geographic distribution of partisanship: a model of `hidden partisanship' and an illustrative test

The Public Choice literature has identified conditions in which voters in multi-candidate contests would have an incentive to vote strategically rather than vote for the most preferred candidate or candidates. In the US, where party registration and party primaries play a critical role in the electoral process—especially in states with closed primaries—the existence of multiple layers of elections across constituencies can induce strategic falsification of party registration that is tied to the geographic distribution of electoral strength. Following V. O. Key, we should expect that a long history of one party dominance in local elections should encourage voters to register in the party whose elections are most determinative of electoral choices, even if that is not the party with which they most identify. However, in many states, while politics may be dominated by one party locally, there may be real two-party competition for at least some offices at the state level and for the presidency.We use a `natural experiment' to view the link between party registration and voting for president and obscure judicial offices in order to test the hypothesis that, for whichever party is the minority party in the local unit, party registration will understate the voting support in presidential or other statewide elections, where that party's candidates have a realistic chance to win. In the modern South this hypothesis can be shown to imply that the relationship between Republican party registration and vote shares for Republican candidates for president or statewide office ought to be curvilinear. To test this and other related hypotheses, we examine data on political units (e.g. counties) with considerable variation in party registration and concomitant variation in the extent of one-party dominance of local politics by looking at county level data from North Carolina for the presidential elections and obscure judicial elections in 1984 and 1996. As hypothesized, for the North Carolina data the relationship between party registration and voting can best be fit by a quadratic function, but the strength of the quadratic term is much less for the 1996 data, reflecting the increase in Republican registration and the success of local GOP candidates in the 1990s.     

Continuity or Discontinuity in the Recent History of the Australian Labor Party?

Recent characterisations of the Australian Labor Party as a ‘cartel party’ suggest that there was, after the 1970s, a fundamental discontinuity in Labor's history. We assess this contention not only in terms of the ALP's policies but also the mechanisms which link it with different classes and social groups: Labor's electoral support, membership and local branches, the backgrounds of the Party's parliamentarians and leaders, the role of trade unions inside the ALP, and its sources of funding. While there have been some quantitative changes in these characteristics, we conclude that Labor remains, on balance, a ‘capitalist workers party.’     

Electoral databases: big brother or democracy unbound?

Modern political campaigning is becoming increasingly professionalised to the extent that in Australia today the major parties use electoral databases to assist with their campaigns. The electoral databases of the Coalition (Feedback) and the Australian Labor Party (Electrac) store information on the constituents of each House of Representatives seat. The information gathered in the databases, such as the policy preferences and party identification of individual voters, are used by candidates for House seats to tailor correspondence to swinging voters, and to identify potential party supporters. Party organisations aggregate the information in the databases and use it to conduct polls and focus groups of swinging voters, and to tailor policy development and campaign strategies. Electoral databases have the potential to improve the level of communication between elected representatives and their constituents. There are, however, a number of ethical problems associated with their use. While the usefulness of the databases to the major political parties is undeniable, their use underlines the trend in modern campaigning towards targeting swinging voters at the expense of the majority of the electorate. Considerable public resources are devoted to the smooth operation of the databases. They would be much less effective were political parties not exempted from the Privacy Act. The use of personal information collected by members of parliament by political parties should be more closely regulated. Despite the wishes of the major political parties to keep their operation a secret, the advantages and disadvantages of the use of electoral databases should be more widely debated.     

Local voting at local elections revisited: ‘Friends and neighbors voting’ at mayoral elections in rural Poland

Voters' tendency to support local candidates, often referred to as ‘friends and neighbors voting’, is a spatial-political phenomenon studied for over 70 years. The last decade has seen a revival of interest in this issue. Relevant studies typically focus on large-scale national electoral contests, such as national parliamentary elections. The research efforts targeting local elections are, by contrast, scarce, in most cases dating back to the 1970s. In this article, we address this relative gap in the electoral geography literature and study ‘friends and neighbors voting’ at the most recent set of mayoral elections in Poland, held in 2018. Based on a rich dataset, covering elections in over 700 rural municipalities, we demonstrate strong local candidate effects in both voter choice and voter turnout. The results point to the potential relevance of both geographic distance and a place (locality) attachment; voters tend to prefer candidates living close to them and candidates enjoy an additional surplus of votes in their home localities. Our results also tend to echo the sparse previous findings emphasizing the possibility that the presence of a local candidate boosts voter turnout in a given area. While the limitations of our data do not allow unequivocal conclusions about the exact mechanisms driving the aforementioned effects, we put forward a number of plausible, grounded conjectures as to how such effects may operate.     

‘We Lost on the Numbers,But for Us It's a Victory’: New Caledonia's 2018 Referendum on Self-Determination

On 4 November 2018, more than 141,000 voters in New Caledonia went to the polls to determine the political status of the French Pacific dependency. A referendum on self-determination, the culmination of a 20-year transition under the 1998 Noumea Accord, posed the question: ‘Do you want New Caledonia to accede to full sovereignty and become independent?’

In an unprecedented turnout, 56.67 per cent of voters decided to remain within the French Republic, while 43.33 per cent voted Yes for independence. These figures, with a clear majority opposing full sovereignty, suggest a setback for New Caledonia's independence coalition Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste (FLNKS). In reality, the size of the Yes vote has disappointed partisans of the French Republic and opened the way for a second referendum in 2020.

After briefly outlining the 1998 Noumea Accord, the article details the results and participation rates in the November 2018 vote. It then focuses on different aspects of the referendum campaign, including: the role of opinion polling, administration of the referendum by the French state; disputes over electoral registration; international monitoring; key objectives of the anti-independence parties; grassroots campaigning by the FLNKS and the significance of the youth vote. It flags some issues in the aftermath of the referendum, as New Caledonians prepare for the next local elections to be held on 12 May 2019.     

New Labour,new electoral system,new electoral geographies?: A review of proposed constitutional changes in the United Kingdom

The United Kingdom electoral system remained virtually unchanged throughout the twentieth century but three reports (two of them commissioned by the Labour government elected in 1997) published in late 1998 propose significant changes in: the administration of elections, with specific reference to increasing turnout rates; the funding of political parties and electoral campaigns; and the electoral system itself—with a recommendation for a system that is broadly proportional but retains the link between (most) MPs and single-member constituencies. This paper reviews those reports, relates them to the geography of electoral behaviour in the UK, and explores the geographical implications of their major recommendations.     

Beverley,Inderauuda and St John: A Neglected Reference

Abstract

This article examines the 1852 Sunderland election campaign as an example of a borough election in the fluid political situation of the 1850s. It seeks to demonstrate the complex interaction of national and local issues, influence, personalities and personal interests in the context of the town's previous electoral history, and the influence that memories of incidents in previous campaigns exerted on the contest. It argues that it was, and was perceived by contemporaries to be, primarily a contest between interests within the Liberal party rather than one between Conservatives and Liberals. The article seeks to identify the problems this presented in the management of the election and the tactics and means employed in the presentation of the campaigns to the public, particularly in the use made of local newspapers. The bitterness of the contest and the volume of, at times contradictory, evidence that has survived allow for a more detailed examination than is possible for many elections of this period, enabling at least some insight to be gained into the complexity of the underlying manoeuvres and the shifting motives and loyalties of the participants. The article concludes by examining briefly the results of the election but acknowledges the difficulties of attempting to go beyond the contest and its result to reach any detailed understanding of voters' motivations.     

Ballots and billions: Clive Palmer's personal party

Founded and led by the billionaire businessman, Clive Palmer, the Palmer United Party (PUP) achieved what was arguably the best debut result of recent decades at the 2013 Australian federal election. This article examines PUP's ideology, organisation and campaigning strategies along with the implications of its experiences to date for Australian party politics. Based on an analysis of original party documents, policies, media communications and semi-structured interviews with PUP candidates and key figures across Australia, we find evidence of a party which is utterly dominated by its leader, which was deliberately never built to last, whose ideology cannot be easily classified and whose campaigning was well-funded but extremely disorganised. We conclude that its experience shows how more professionalised new personal parties in Australia should be able to do even better electorally in the future.     

Structures and Members: An Overview of The Cumann na nGaedheal Party Organisation, 1923–33

This article re‐examines Cumann na nGaedheal's approach to party organisation. Cumann na nGaedheal has been portrayed as a badly organised, ‘top‐down’ party that suffered electorally for its reluctance to match the structure and organisation of its main anti‐Treaty rival, Fianna Fáil. Moreover, the party has been caricatured as a conservative organisation with little affinity for the ideology of the Irish revolution. While recent studies have reappraised Cumann na nGaedheal's engagement with the revolutionary inheritance, while highlighting underappreciated aspects of the party's electoral innovations, its organisational structures require further scholarly attention. Closer scrutiny of Cumann na nGaedheal's organisational structures sheds further light on its fate as nationalist Ireland's first party of government and ultimately its demise as a distinct party in 1933.     

Spatial Variations in Straight- and Split-ticket Voting and the Role of Constituency Campaigning at New Zealand’s First Two MMP Elections: Individual-level Tests

Elections held under the MMP system provide opportunities for substantial split-ticket voting, whereby electors support one party in the list contest but another in the constituency contests. At New Zealand's first two elections using this system—in 1996 and 1999—37% and 35% of the voters, respectively, employed a split-ticket strategy. Estimates of the amount of splitting in each constituency between each pair of parties—in a seven-party system on each occasion—have allowed the successful testing of hypotheses relating its volume to party prospects in the constituencies and the amount of local campaigning. These findings are replicated in comparable analyses at the individual scale using survey data.     

Electoral salience and the costs of voting at national, sub-national and supra-national elections in the UK: a case study of Brent, UK

This paper considers the impact of distance to polling station upon electoral turnout. Using polling station level data from a London borough, it examines three types of election – parliamentary, European and local elections – over a twenty year period. The UK is notable among western liberal democracies for its relatively large turnout gap – the percentage point difference between turnout at elections for the Westminster parliament compared to that for other institutions, including local councils and the supra-national European parliament. This research considers the hypothesis that in high information, high salience elections for the national parliament the costs of voting associated with travelling to a polling station to vote in person are perceived as either low or insignificant but that in low information, low salience elections, those costs are perceived as higher and may act as a deterrent upon voting. A series of multi-level models consider the relationships between the dependent variable, percentage turnout, and a range of independent variables, including socio-economic characteristics, marginality as well as the spatial context. We show that there is indeed a relationship between distance and voter turnout, and other spatial and contextual variables, which are stronger for the lower salience European and local elections than for the higher salience national elections. Hence we conclude that the local geography of the polling station can have a significant impact on voter turnout and that there should be a more strategic approach to the siting of polling stations.     

The Multiple Roots of Party Loyalty: Explaining Republican Dissent in the U.S. House of Representatives

Why does any member of Congress choose to be loyal to one's party? The conventional wisdom is that party loyalty stems from constituent expectations, electoral concerns, or a lawmaker's ideological beliefs. However, this neglects two other, less-instrumental reasons for sticking with a political party: partisan identity and personal connections with party leaders. I test these alternative theories as well as conventional ones on a set of key moments in the 113th Congress (2013–2014) when rebellion against House Republican leadership by the rank-and-file was especially noteworthy. The results provide some support for both the party identity and personal connection hypotheses. They also indicate that although constituency characteristics help predict the likelihood of dissent from GOP leaders, there is little evidence for the electoral hypothesis, while cross-cutting ideological preferences as well as preferences along the traditional left-right spectrum prove statistically significant. In short, evidence reveals both personal and instrumental roots of party loyalty in Congress.     

‘Slightly Constitutional’ Politics: Fianna Fáil's Tortuous Entry to the Irish Parliament, 1926–7

Fianna Fáil is Ireland's largest political party since 1932, and has been in office for almost 60 years, mostly as a single-party government. Despite this impressive electoral and parliamentary history, the party's constitutional origins are fraught with ambivalence towards Irish state institutions. Fianna Fáil's early years, perhaps eclipsed by subsequent electoral successes, have received relatively little attention from historians and most general works content themselves with a couple of lines about the oath of allegiance with an underlying assumption that entry to the Irish parliament was inevitable. The aim of this article is to show how the process that brought Fianna Fáil into parliamentary politics was haphazard and unpredictable. Through extensive use of party literature and parliamentary party minutes from the 1920s, this article presents a detailed account of Fianna Fáil's evolving attitude towards the oath of allegiance and how it succeeded in overcoming ideological reservations to take its seats in the Irish Free State legislature.     

Corruption-mitigating policies: The case of Italy

One of the circumstances likely to be associated with the intensity of both investigative and legislative efforts designed to curb political and bureaucratic corruption is institutional reform. Since the characteristics of electoral and party systems seem to be associated with variations in the intensity of anti-corruption efforts cross-nationally, it was reasonable to think that changes in the characteristics of these systems in Italy in the 1990s would be reflected in a corresponding change in the efforts of legislators and members of the judiciary to tackle corruption. Prior to the 1990s Italy's tripolar party system and its numerous concomitants placed considerable obstacles in the way of the willingness and the ability of judicial investigators and parliamentarians to deal with the corruption emergency. The 1993 electoral law reform, the eventual emergence of a largely bipolar party system and the circumstances surrounding these processes considerably diminished the significance of the aforementioned obstacles, yet there has been little noticeable increase in anti-corruption efforts. This is probably explicable in terms of the electoral effects of such efforts and suggests that institutional change is at most only one of a number of conditions that must be fulfilled in order for more strenuous efforts to be observed.     

The Candidates of the Liberal Unionist Party, 1886–1912*

Historians have hitherto based discussion of the electoral performance of the Liberal Unionist Party on incomplete data regarding the candidates of the party, as published sources, including F.W.S. Craig's British Parliamentary Election Results, 1885–1918, the standard reference work, include a number of cases where the party label of a Unionist candidate (either Liberal Unionist or Conservative) is uncertain or incorrect. Utilising a wide range of primary and secondary sources, this article resolves a number of these cases, and thus creates the most accurate list of Liberal Unionist candidates available. The creation of this list allows for accurate analysis of the party's history, and the article makes some preliminary observations based on the data presented. Among these observations are that the Liberal Unionists comprised a consistent percentage of the overall Unionist Party in the house of commons, that the number of seats contested by Liberal Unionists remained steady through the January 1910 election, and that existing interpretations of the electoral pact between the Liberal Unionists and Conservatives may be flawed.     

E. J. Nanson,Social Choice and Electoral Reform

The most distinctive Australian contribution to institutional design is the construction of electoral systems. This paper locates the work of E. J. Nanson 1850-1936; Professor of Mathematics, University of Melbourne, 1875-1922 in its intellectual context. After setting out the puzzle of the frequent discoveries and disappearances of axiomatic social choice, and its awkward relationship with electoral reform, the paper explores Nanson's arguments in both social choice and electoral reform. The first were good; the second disappointingly weak. Nanson's failure to influence Australian institutional design at the foundation of the Commonwealth and the subsequent adoption of Nanson's recommendations for Senate elections are analysed.