Geolocation and voting: Candidate–voter distance effects on party choice in the 2010 UK general election in England

The effect of geographical distance between candidate and voter on vote-likelihood in the UK is essentially untested. In systems where constituency representatives vie for local inhabitants' support in elections, candidates living closer to a voter would be expected to have a greater probability of receiving that individual's support, other things being equal. In this paper, we present a first test of this concept using constituency data (specifically, notice of poll address data) from the British General Election of 2010 and the British Election Survey, together with geographical data from Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail, to test the hypothesis that candidate distance matters in voters' choice of candidate. Using a conditional logit model, we find that the distance between voter and candidates from the three main parties (Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat) matters in English constituencies, even when controlling for strong predictors of vote choice, such as party feeling and incumbency advantage.     

Yellow fever? The political geography of Liberal voting in Great Britain

The rise of the Labour Party after World War I forced the Liberal Party in Britain back into the nonconformist and remote ‘Celtic Fringe’, where local identity and religion rather than class remained the dominant political cleavages. The party has struggled to break out of these Liberal ‘heartlands’ ever since. However, in the 1997 General Election the Liberal Democrats won a total of 46 constituencies, their best result since 1929, despite a fall in their national share of the vote. While historical voting patterns and the level of religious nonconformity can help explain the success in the traditional heartlands seats we must turn to contemporary reasons for why the party were able to make gains in areas of historical weakness. Bridging the credibility gap through success at the local level or in by-elections has been particularly vital for the party. Building on the understanding gained from qualitative interviews with the party elite and case studies in key constituencies, we analyze the basis of Liberal Democrat support in 1997. Models that include data on historical patterns, demographics and the local political context are found to be particularly successful in explaining the party’s support.     

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.     

Surge and Decline: The Impact of Changes in Voter Turnout on the 2010 Senate Elections

Enthusiasm among Republican voters and a lack thereof among Democrats was cited by many post-election analyses as a contributing factor to the outcome of the 2010 midterm elections. Analysis of the aggregate county level voter turnout and results of the 2010 Senate races provides strong evidence of (1) a sharper decline in turnout from 2008 to 2010 in areas in which Barack Obama did well in 2008 and (2) a significant relationship between turnout changes from 2006–2010 and 2008–2010 and changes in the vote share of Democratic Senate candidates in 2010. In addition, a test of the referendum theory of midterm elections shows that declining presidential approval ratings, but not economic indicators, are predictive of the Democratic vote share in 2010. Despite previous findings that midterm and presidential electorates do not fundamentally differ, this analysis of the 2010 Senate elections provides evidence that differential turnout among core and peripheral voters is an important part of the explanation for the surge that occurs in presidential elections and the subsequent decline in voter participation during midterms.     

A century of constituency delimitation in India

Constituencies are de jure apportionment of space for the purpose of electing representatives of people living in the territorial limits of a democratic state. The elected representatives represent not only the people but also their respective segments of territory, the constituencies. These two — the land and the people — and the prevailing law of the country provide the basis for constituency boundaries and their delimitation. The laws concerning constituencies can have two dimensions. The first is related to the laws of enfranchisement as to who among the population have the right to vote. This gives the total number of electors and the number of representatives to be elected. The other aspect of constituencies is the actual drawing of boundaries and enclosing people within the constituency framework. This is indeed a sensitive issue for several reasons. First, a lack of understanding of the human geography of the area can divide up people who may in effect lose their representation or voice in the legislature. Second, the division of space into constituencies can be so organised that it may carve out either a safe support base for a party or a candidate, or create a combination of societal forces which are opposed to a particular party or candidate. This task should be assigned to impartial and non-partisan persons. Thirdly, a new boundary can change the pattern of electoral representation in the legislature. The degree of involvement of those who are largely to benefit from it varies from country to country according to its electoral laws. It varies from the largely neutral British case through slight party involvement in New Zealand to the total party involvement in the USA (Gudgin, G. & Taylor, P.J. (1979) Seats, votes and the spatial organisation of elections (p. 11), Pion Ltd, London). In South Asia, it varies from Sri Lanka where the Delimitation Commission consists purely of persons who are entirely out of politics, to India where the Delimitation Commission comprising of three persons (two of whom have generally been judges of the Supreme Court and State High Courts, and the third member has been the Chief Election Commissioner, ex-officio) associates in its deliberations nine politicians of different political shades in each state. Of these, four belong to the Lok Sabha (lower house of Indian parliament) and five to the Vidhan Sabhas (lower house of state legislatures) (Chandidas, R. (1971) Electoral system and political development. In: L.M. Singhvi et al., Elections and electoral reforms in India (p. 114). Institute of Constitutional and Parliamentary Affairs, New Delhi). But the Commission's verdict is final and can not be challenged even in the Supreme Court. In spite of the involvement of politicians, there have however been no or little reports of gerrymandering in India because of the constitutional safeguards. Nevertheless, it is also a fact that no study of the actual delimitation of constituency boundaries and its effect on electoral outcome and the geography of representation in India could be carried out due to the secrecy and non-availability of delimitation commissions' reports on the actual considerations for delimitation of constituency boundaries.Even though concepts of democracy, representative institutions, limitations on the arbitrary powers of the rulers, and the rule of law were practised in ancient India, and some of the representatives bodies like Gram Sanghas, Gram Sabha or Panchayats have survived up to now (Kashyap, S.C. (1994) Our constitution (p. 7), National Book Trust of India, New Delhi), the experience of electoral participation in a representative democracy in this country is hardly one century old. In fact, the twentieth century in India could be termed as the century of transformation from being subject of a British colony with no right to elect their own government to the largest democracy in the world. The electoral experience of India can be divided into two parts: selective enfranchisement in the colonial period and universal adult enfranchisement in independent India.     

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.     

Sources of electoral support for the Australian democrats in the house of representatives and Senate elections of 1990 and 1993: A comparative analysis

Election to the Australian Senate under proportional voting and statewide quotas gives to minor parties of the political centre a chance to win parliamentary representation otherwise denied them in the single member constituency‐based House of Representatives. Focusing on the Australian Democrats, vote splitting in the context of ? consistently higher levels of support for the Democrats in the upper house provides some evidence of differences among sources of electoral support between House and Senate, but within a context of general similarity of voter behaviour. Findings support a view that, as a party of ‘concerns’ rather than ideology, with a highly unstable support base, the future of the Democrats as other than a focus for protest must remain in doubt.     

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.     

The Dimensions of Politics and Voter Behaviour in Preferential Systems: The Case of Australia

This project examines the dimensions of politics and voter preferences in Australia. Evidence from an empirical spatial analysis provides that Australian parties and voters are organised along a unidimensional socioeconomic continuum. Numerous individual-level factors, including party identification, ideology and a host of demographic and opinion variables, predict voters' positions along the continuum. Moreover, voter locations are shown to relate strongly to vote choice, demonstrating the importance of socioeconomic positions to voter behaviour in Australia. Finally, because this approach allows for a full examination of voter preference orderings, it is important to the study of voting behaviour and representation under preferential electoral institutions in Australia and elsewhere.     

Voting and Not Voting in Early 18th-Century English Parliamentary Elections

This article uses data from 28 poll books to explore voter behaviour over time in early 18th-century English parliamentary elections (from 1710 to 1735). Voters in this period exhibited a high degree of partisan loyalty from one election to the next. But voters were also quite likely to drop out of the electorate between elections. As a case study of Sussex elections in 1734 shows, even among voters who made a definite promise to vote for a given candidate or set of candidates, there was a significant proportion who did not vote. While some non-voting can be explained as an attempt to avoid disobliging powerful patrons, this article argues that voters needed to be motivated to appear at the polls. The electoral culture of the early 18th century – treats, balls, public appearances by the candidates, etc. – should be understood as attempts to mobilise rather than to persuade potential voters.     

Fighting over friends and neighbors: The effect of inter-candidate geographic distance on intra-party competition

Previous studies on intra-party competition have largely neglected the role played by geographic distance between co-partisan candidates. In this study, we argue that candidates who live further away from intra-party competitors on the same party list benefit electorally from their remoteness. Moreover, we contend that the electoral effectiveness of exhibiting local personal vote attributes – a theoretically and empirically well-established candidate strategy to cultivate personal votes – also depends on the geographical proximity of localized co-partisan candidates. Using a unique and untapped dataset of more than 5,000 Finnish election candidates' home address coordinates over four consecutive parliamentary elections (1999–2011), we run beta regression models to examine the effects of candidate remoteness and nearest candidates' local characteristics on intra-party vote shares. To measure the remoteness of a particular candidate, we develop a novel index based on the distribution of co-partisans over concentric circles around that candidate. The empirical analyses show that the effect of geographic remoteness depends on local party strength and the degree of urbanization: candidates particularly benefit from more distant co-partisans in party strongholds and rural and suburban municipalities. Moreover, all models confirm that nearby located localized co-partisans decrease a candidate's own vote share. These findings have important implications for politicians' careers, party nomination strategies and future empirical research on intra-party competition.     

Method and Confusion in the Study of the Household: A Review

Abstract

When analyzing Woodrow Wilson's narrow victory in the presidential election of 1916, students of the Electoral College have focused on the closeness of the popular vote in California. None of them have noticed that Wilson's victory in the Electoral College depended on non-enforcement of the Penalty Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Using Morgan Kousser's analysis of voter disenfranchisement across the South between 1880 and 1910, this article demonstrates that Charles Evans Hughes would have won the electoral vote if the Penalty Clause had been enforced when the House was reapportioned following the 1910 census.     

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.     

Pooling the polls over an election campaign

Poll results vary over the course of a campaign election and across polling organisations, making it difficult to track genuine changes in voter support. I present a statistical model that tracks changes in voter support over time by pooling the polls, and corrects for variation across polling organisations due to biases known as ‘house effects’. The result is a less biased and more precise estimate of vote intentions than is possible from any one poll alone. I use five series of polls fielded over the 2004 Australian federal election campaign (ACNielsen, the ANU/ninemsn online poll, Galaxy, Newspoll, and Roy Morgan) to generate daily estimates of the Coalition's share of two-party preferred (2PP) and first preference vote intentions. Over the course of the campaign there is about a 4 percentage point swing to the Coalition in first preference vote share (and a smaller swing in 2PP terms), that begins prior to the formal announcement of the election, but is complete shortly after the leader debates. The ANU/ninemsn online poll and Morgan are found to have large and statistically significant biases, while, generally, the three phone polls have small and/or statistically insignificant biases, with ACNielsen and (in particular) Galaxy performing quite well in 2004.     

Disproportionality and bias in US Presidential Elections: How geography helped Bush defeat Gore but couldn't help Kerry beat Bush

The 2000 and 2004 US Presidential elections were closely fought contests, with in the first case victory in the Electoral College being denied to the candidate with the largest share of the popular vote. Disproportionality in the translation of votes into seats (in this case, from popular votes to votes in the Electoral College) is common to contests using a winner-takes-all electoral system. So is bias, whereby that disproportionality does not apply equally to each candidate. Analysis of the bias at those two elections shows that Bush was favoured at the first but not at the second. Identification of the bias components shows that Bush was advantaged by variations in the number of popular votes per Electoral College voter across the states, and also by variation in turnout. In 2000, his popular votes were also more efficiently distributed than Gore's; in 2004 they were less efficiently distributed than Kerry's, largely because of increased turnout – producing larger numbers of surplus votes – in states that were already safe for Bush.     

Re-examining Leader Effects: Have Leader Effects Grown in Australian Federal Elections 1990–2004?

It is well established that the popularity of party leaders exerts an important influence on vote choice in modern federal elections. Significant partisan and class de-alignment have been key drivers of this trend. Although Australia's development in this respect has been slower than in some other liberal democracies, it has nonetheless been significant, and has weakened voters' attachments to the major parties. This article examines six federal elections (1990–2004) and investigates whether the electoral impact of party leader popularity is continuing to grow, or whether the impact, although important, has been relatively stable or declining. We also investigate the impact of different methods of calculating leader effects on their implied size and, drawing on new data available in the most recent Australian Election Study surveys, present an alternative model of leadership effects that has not been assessable previously in the Australian context.     

Multiple Contexts as Cross-classified Models: The Labor Vote in the British General Election of 1992

Voters make their decisions in social and geographical contexts that can be seen as different levels in an overall data structure. Increasingly these structures are being analyzed by multilevel models, but this approach has so far been limited to structures that are strictly hierarchical. This paper outlines the approach of cross-classified multilevel models in which units at lower levels in the structure can be nested in more than one higher-level unit simultaneously. An appropriate modeling framework is outlined, models are specified, and particular attention is paid to efficient computation. The approach is illustrated through a cross-classified logit analysis of Labor versus Conservative support for a nationally representative sample of voting behavior for the 1992 British General Election. The data is structured so that individual voters at level 1 are nested within constituencies at level 2 which are cross-classified by geographical and functional regionalizations at level 3. A conclusion discusses the general utility of a cross-classified approach to geographically based contextual research, while two technical appendices provide details on model estimation.     

Australian Democracy: Modifying Majoritarianism?

The use of the single transferable vote (STV) for Australian Senate elections since 1949 has modified the majoritarianism of Australian democracy in two ways. First, it has increased the differences between the two houses of the legislature and hence strengthened the bicameral system. Second, it has operated like a true PR (proportional representation) system, and it has therefore increased the overall proportionality of political representation at the national level. In modern democracies, PR does not have negative effects on the quality of macroeconomic policy-making-contrary to the conventional wisdom on this matter. And PR has a strong positive effect on important democratic qualities like women's representation, income equality, voter turnout, satisfaction with democracy, and the proximity of the government to the median voter.     

The Greening of the Queensland electorate?

The Greens at the 2004 Queensland State election almost trebled their primary vote from 2001, an increase suggesting the party has already filled the vacuum left by the declining Australian Democrats as the State's principal Left-of-Centre minor party. This article argues, first, that much of this growth in support can be attributed to the substantial interstate migration to the State's southeast, a pattern that has contributed to a partial transformation of Queensland's traditional political culture to one more disposed to Green support. Second, given that this growth is set to continue, it is argued that the Queensland Greens are yet to maximise their vote. This article analyses the 2004 Queensland State election results to determine the impact of Green preferences under the State's Optional Preferential Voting (OPV) system, and to locate where geographically, and among whom demographically, Green support was strongest. A rudimentary profile of the ‘typical’ Queensland Greens voter is also offered.     

National Forces and the U.S. House Vote, 1980-2004: The Uncertain Progress of Nationalization

Much recent scholarly attention has focused on the theme of growing nationalization in U.S. House elections. In this study, I reach a mixed verdict concerning the extent to which national forces have become more determinative of the House vote from 1980 to 2004. Only voter partisanship, but not ideology, economic evaluations, or assessments of presidential candidates' personal qualities, has increased in importance during presidential year elections. Since presidential voting, on the other hand, has come to depend more heavily on all these factors except the last, this means that contrary to the conventional wisdom, the bases of House and presidential voting actually have grown less, rather than more, similar over time.