District Voter Turnout and Dyadic Representation in Congress

One of the most important tools by which citizens can influence their elected officials' behavior is through voting—the electoral connection. Previous studies demonstrate that the opinions of voters are better represented than the opinions of nonvoters within an electoral jurisdiction, but we do not know whether jurisdictions with higher levels of aggregate voter turnout are better represented by their elected officials compared to those with lower levels of turnout. Using data compiled across five congressional sessions (2003–2013), this article investigates whether congressional districts with higher voter turnout are better represented by their member of Congress (MC). We find evidence that district voter turnout positively conditions the relationship between district opinion and MC voting behavior even after accounting for the possible effects of electoral competition and district income and racial demographics. In addition, we uncover evidence that partisan differences exist in this conditioning effect such that higher voter turnout enhances roll call voting responsiveness among Democratic MCs but not among Republican MCs. These findings suggest that congressional districts as a whole benefit from a political responsiveness standpoint when more of their constituents turn out to vote and contribute to literatures on political representation, political participation, democratic accountability, and the U.S. Congress.     

Race-based districting: does it help or hinder legislative representation?

This paper assesses the impact of using race-based districts on membership diversity of the US Congress and state legislative chambers as well as on electoral competition and voter participation in US Congressional and state legislative elections. In the 1990s membership diversity has increased in the US House of Representatives and state legislative chambers due to increased reliance on the use of race and ethnicity in drawing Congressional and legislative districts. But anecdotal evidence suggests that the creation of more homogeneous districts may lead to a decline in electoral competition, and thus a decline in voter participation in elections held within those districts. Uncompetitive Congressional or state legislative districts are posited to reduce the incentives for candidates or parties to mobilize voters and to restrict the electorate to habitual voters only. A lack of incentives to vote in district elections may diminish overall participation and have consequences in elections for statewide offices. I examine electoral competition and voter participation in recent Congressional and state legislative elections to determine whether electoral competition and voter participation have decreased, and whether that decrease can be linked to changes in the homogeneity of districts. I conclude by suggesting that bodies who adopt districting plans as well as those charged with a review of such plans take into account how line drawing affects electoral competition and voter participation as well as membership diversity.     

Modeling the effect of mandatory district compactness on partisan gerrymanders

Geographic compactness standards have been offered as neutral and effective standards constraining redistricting. In this paper, we test this allegation. Redistricting is treated as a combinatoric optimization problem that is constrained by compactness rules. Computer models are used to analyze the results of applying compactness standards when political groups are geographically concentrated. Several population models are used to generate populations of voters, and arbitrary plans are created with combinatoric optimization algorithms. We find that compactness standards can be used to limit gerrymandering, but only if such standards require severe compactness. Compactness standards are not politically neutral—a geographically concentrated minority party will be affected by compactness standards much differently than a party supported by a geographically diffuse population. The particular effects of compactness standards depend on the institutional mechanism that creates districts.     

“Reckless,cavalier, dismissive,petty and vengeful”?: The impact of municipal constituency change on candidate diversity

The demographic composition of electoral districts has an important influence on the identities of candidates because they affect the political opportunity structures of ethnic minorities and other marginalized groups. The 2018 municipal election in Toronto, Canada provides a unique opportunity to examine how changes to electoral districts impacted the participation of visible minority candidates. At the end of the initial nomination period, the right-wing populist provincial government of Doug Ford reduced the number of city council wards from 47 to 25, which also affected the boundaries of school board districts. Candidates and aspirants then had the opportunity to re-register in the new constituencies. This change constitutes a natural experiment that allows us to isolate the impact of district structure on the relationship between demographics and candidate ethnicity. Using logistic and Poisson regression modeling, we compare the proportion and number of Visible Minority and White candidates before and after consolidation. Contra expectations, we did not find any effect on minority candidates, but show some evidence that consolidation reduced opportunities for Whites. We trace this unexpected finding to the geographic patterns of ethnic settlement.     

One Party,Two Traditions: Radicalism and Pragmatism in the Australian Greens

The 2004 Australian federal election established the Australian Greens (Greens) as the third largest political force in the country behind the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the Liberal Party in electoral terms. Despite the Greens’ electoral achievements, the party has been largely dismissed as a radical single-issue political party. This paper will argue that while radicalism is an institutionally entrenched feature of the Greens in both organisational and programmatic terms, there are also strongly pragmatic aspects to the party's modus operandi. It suggests that the Greens are astute political operators who use radicalism in a highly pragmatic way to achieve their political objectives.     

The boundaries of suburban discontent? Urban definitions and neighbourhood political effects

Residents of city and suburban neighbourhoods have diverged in the way they vote, with inner-city dwellers preferring political parties on the left while suburbanites increasingly vote for parties on the right. Yet it is not clear whether such a division is more evident between residents of central and suburban municipalities (the jurisdictional hypothesis), or between residents of neighbourhoods differentiated by urban form and, by assumption, lifestyle (the morphological hypothesis). While there are clear reasons for the predominant reliance on municipal differences in research based in the U.S. and other countries, it is not evident that these reasons apply in the Canadian context. This article examines how urban boundaries articulate electoral differences between metropolitan residents in Canada's three largest urban regions, using aggregate election data for federal elections between 1945 and 2000, survey data from the 2000 Canada election study and a series of indices developed by the author. It is found that while trends towards city–suburban polarization are similar regardless of the boundaries used to define the zones, in the Canadian case the results are stronger and more significant when boundaries based on urban form (between pre-and post-war development) are employed. The implications of these results for the relationship between urban space and political values in Canadian cities are then discussed.     

Assessing South Carolina's 1990s congressional districting

In this study, the authors employ a computer-intensive method to assess the factual basis for a race-as-predominant-factor claim against South Carolina's congressional districting plan. They use four algorithms that weight traditional districting criteria (equal population, the preservation of county integrity, and district area compactness) to generate 10,000 alternative plans containing a total of 60,000 congressional districts. Based upon the analysis of these plans, the authors conclude that: (1) race is a factor in the design of South Carolina's congressional districts; (2) race predominates over the preservation of county lines; and (3) race may predominate over district compactness.     

From 'black‐balling' to 'marking': the suburban origin of redlining in Canada, 1930s–1950s

Redlining occurs where institutional mortgage lending is the norm and where lenders decline to loan in specific areas. The term originated during the 1930s in the United States, where it was promoted by federal agencies and acquired racial connotations. Recently, redlining has been uncommon in Canada, but contemporary reports, archival records and parliamentary debates show it was widespread from the 1930s to the 1950s. Contemporaries distinguished the 'black‐balling' of remote areas, where it was impossible to make loans, from the 'marking' of districts in urban areas where companies could lend but chose not to do so. Only the latter can be regarded as redlining. As defined by Canadian housing agencies, most 'marked' areas were in unregulated, owner‐built suburbs that lacked services. The suburban origin of redlining in Canada had little to do with the distribution of ethnic minorities. As long as it lasted, roughly until the late 1950s, it perpetuated social class diversity in Canadian suburbs.     

THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE 1989 ELECTIONS OF PEOPLE'S DEPUTIES OF THE USSR (PRELIMINARY RESULTS)

In the first Soviet paper written on electoral geography in the USSR, a team of scholars analyzes results of recent elections to the Congress of People's Deputies. An introductory section explains the rationale for greater attention to electoral geography and assesses Western research from a Soviet perspective. Interesting spatial insights (supplemented by maps) are offered on whether existing electoral districts provide equitable representation for the population, on voter turnout (including negative voting against “establishment” candidates), and the level of social-political activism. A concluding section surveys prospects for the further participation of geographers in the study of electoral processes (translated by Jay K. Mitchell, PlanEcon, Inc., Washington, DC 20005).     

Do Lawyers Get More Votes?

ABSTRACT

In many western democracies, law has been the dominant occupational background of politicians. This raises the question whether lawyers get more votes when they run for election compared to non-lawyers. To our knowledge, this question has not been examined empirically over an extended period of time. Our study aims to fill this lacuna. We collected longitudinal data about the careers of all candidates in Canadian federal elections from 1921 to 2015. Our dataset is composed of about 32,000 observations including the occupation and electoral performance of every candidate who ran for office. Our analysis shows that lawyers do get more votes but that their personal electoral boost is very small.     

Defining the community of interest as thematic and cognitive regions

When deciding where to draw the boundaries for electoral districts, officials often strive to ensure that communities of interest are not split up but kept wholly within those boundaries. But what constitutes a community of interest is vague, with legal and academic sources describing either a thematic region with shared demographic and land-use traits, or a cognitive region that is meaningful to people and commonly agreed upon. This study, conducted in the city of Santa Barbara, California, seeks to identify communities of interest at the sub-city level as both thematic regions—by clustering Census tracts and land parcels according to classes of relevant variables—and cognitive regions—by surveying residents about the size and locational extent of their community and finding areas of agreement. We then assess the degree to which the two types of regions overlap as a way to evaluate how well the two meanings correspond. We also examine the amount of overlap between the two sets of regions and the city council electoral districts that were recently created in Santa Barbara. Our study finds that the two types of regions correspond relatively well to each other in this test city, but that the electoral districts correspond more to the thematic regions, understandable given that the district creation made no attempt to survey residents about their beliefs.     

Four Pathways to Aboriginal Self-Government in Canada

Abstract

Recent decades have seen the rising of a vital, multifaceted politics in Canada, focused on the future relations between Aboriginal peoples and the Canadian state. While there are many debates about specific arrangements, there is consensus that the negotiated establishment of Aboriginal self-government constitutes a major piece of unfinished business for the Canadian federation. This essay seeks to contribute more structure and focus to contemporary debates by examining four different models of Aboriginal government: “mini-municipalities,” a third order of government institutions, the public government federal option, and nation-to-nation relations. Each form has different implications for the relationship between Aboriginal and Canadian political communities, and each has different implications for the institutions and practices of Canadian federalism. We argue that further concurrency of powers and greater asymmetries in intergovernmental relations are likely to be notable features of the Canadian federation, and that no single model or pathway is likely to emerge as the dominant one in the near and medium term.     

COMPACTNESS AND ELECTORAL BOUNDARY ADJUSTMENT: AN ASSESSMENT OF ALTERNATIVE MEASURES

Spatial compactness has been proposed as a suitable criterion for assessing whether electoral boundaries reflect partisan interests. Although several different measures of spatial compactness have been developed, only limited efforts have been made to compare and evaluate them in the context of electoral redistricting. This paper assesses alternative spatial compactness measures and applies conceptually appealing measures to the provincial ridings proposed by British Columbia's Royal Commission on Electoral Boundaries (1988).     

The Fiscal-Electoral Nexus in Australia, 1976-94

This article re-evaluates existing political business cycle theory in the specific context of the political economy of Australian fiscal policy since the mid-1970s. Whereas 'traditional' political business cycle models, formulated within a Keynesian framework, assume a high level of state autonomy over fiscal policy, this article argues that an environment of fiscal restraint has been imposed on Australian federal governments over the study period. Given the historical dynamics of Australian economic policy which inform this study, a hypothesis is developed which reflects the policy optimisation dilemma which has confronted Australian federal governments when formulating fiscal priorities in a pre-election context. On one hand, there are pre-poll demands for expansionary fiscal settings from the electorate; on the other, there are demands from financial markets and domestic neoliberal interests for fiscal restraint. Reflecting the fact that identifiable costs are associated with implementing expansionary fiscal policy settings, it is hypothesised that such an approach will be adopted only in times of greatest political need, when an incumbent government is facing a popularity deficit in a pre-election context. While the study confirms that the fiscal-electoral effect is relatively weak, electoral demands do still influence the fiscal priorities of Australian federal governments. This is particularly so with the case of personal taxation relief, a policy approach that appears to be more acceptable to financial markets, key neoliberal interests and some segments of the electorate.     

Jobs,crime, proximity and boats: explaining Australian public attitudes to immigrant numbers

Despite the importance of immigration to Australia, there is little systematic research on the causes of support among Australian citizens for increased, stable or decreased immigration. This paper advances our understanding of Australian public attitudes to immigration levels in the light of the established international literature on public opinion and immigration. Using 2013 Australian Electoral Study (AES) data, we show that, as in other countries, Australian citizens’ attitudes to immigrant numbers are partly driven by a combination of sociotropic economic considerations and perceptions of the socio-cultural impact of immigrants. In addition, we argue that political mobilisation has an impact on attitudes toward immigration that has not received sufficient attention. We demonstrate that citizens who accepted the Coalition's rhetoric on asylum seeker arrivals were more likely to want overall immigrant numbers reduced. Finally, we combine the individual level AES data with electoral district level data to test the impact of contact with immigrants on attitudes to immigrant numbers. Australians living in electoral districts with higher percentages of non-white immigrants are more likely to want lower immigrant numbers than those living in districts with fewer non-white immigrants.     

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.     

Issue Salience and Bill Introduction in the House and Senate

I propose that many if not most bills introduced in the House and Senate represent electoral position taking on the part of members. Thousands of bills are introduced every year, only a fraction of which are passed into law, much less seriously considered in the chamber. Moreover, bills are very good position-taking devices in that they can appear to voters to be a credible step in the electoral process. I search for electoral motivations by examining the content of the bills members introduce. For five different policy areas, and in both the House and the Senate, I find strong correlations between indicators of issue salience in members’ districts and the number of bills the member introduces within the policy area. In addition, in the House the relationship between salience and bill introduction is strongest among vulnerable members, although in the Senate vulnerability does not influence the relationship.     

Cultural Nationalism,Anti-Americanism,and the Federal Defense of the Canadian Football League

ABSTRACT

During the 1960s nationalism flourished in Canada as did American influence, both cultural and economically, as well as separatist sentiment in Quebec. The Canadian federal government became more interventionist to combat threats to Canadian sovereignty: internal threats from Quebec and external threats from the United States. The federal government used sport as a nation-building tool and eventually acted to protect the Canadian Football League (CFL) as a display of resistance to Americanization and in an attempt to unite French and English. Canadian football had become a symbol of the nation and therefore could be used by the government in a symbolic way to resist cultural imperialism and promote national unity. On two occasions the federal government acted to ensure the CFL preserved its Canadian identity; first, to prevent Canadian-based football teams from joining an American professional football league, and second, to prevent American-based teams from joining the CFL. John Munro was the key Canadian politician who formulated policy to protect Canadian football.     

The Role of Provinces,States, and Territories in Shaping Federal Policy for Indigenous Peoples’ Health

ABSTRACT

Under both Canadian and United States law, the availability and quality of healthcare and health services to Indigenous peoples are primarily a federal responsibility. Nevertheless, sub-national authorities—most importantly provinces, states, and territories—play a crucial role by virtue of covering (often through federal mandate) services, and regulating health facilities and health personnel off-reserv(ation). While both federal governments have undertaken efforts to transfer, within their fiduciary obligations, their responsibilities for Indigenous peoples’ health to the management of Indigenous peoples themselves, that transfer has considered or included provincial, state, and territorial authorities and resources unevenly, and, in some cases, in tension with the objectives of respecting standards for quality and access. This article applies the methodology used by Canadian researchers of the sub-national health authority issue to the health transfer experience in the United States. The article summarizes findings that demonstrate similar deficiencies as those present in the Canadian transfer process. The article further outlines the experiences of Hawai`i and Ontario as offering models through which to address some of these deficiencies. The article finally suggests that there is a positive relationship between greater participatory models adopted by provinces, states, and territories and better health outcomes among Indigenous groups so included.     

Federal Aid and Rural County Highway Spending: A Review of the 1980

The Reagan/Bush Administrations cut back federal support for state and local governments during the 1980s, causing total real resources available to finance local roads and bridges to increase very slowly between 1977 and 1989. The effect of federal aid on spending for infrastructure has been subject to debate for many years. Some studies have indicated that federal aid is stimulative, while others report that federal aid substitutes for local resources. This article examines the effect of state and federal aid on county highway spending. The analysis demonstrates that, in 1987, federal aid was stimulative but state aid was not. In light of changes brought about by the Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA), we can expect federal aid to have a stronger relationship with local highway spending.