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.     

Wading Knee Deep in Words,Words, Words": Senatorial Rhetoric in the Johnson and Clinton Impeachment Trials

A probit analysis of National Election Studies data finds that unlike earlier midterm elections, Republican mobilization significantly increased the vote for Republicans from Republicans in 1994, as Democratic mobilization did for and among Democrats in 1998. In these elections, mobilization asymmetrically increased perceptions of party differences, party preferences, and party loyalty in voting. In 2002, both Republican and Democratic mobilization efforts affected vote choice, significantly increasing support from independents.     

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 year of the insurgents: the 2008 US presidential campaign

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush's unpopularity at home and abroad and the looming threat of recession would have made a gripping drama of the 2008 presidential election campaign even without the ground‐breaking emergence of the first credible black and female candidates for the White House. But the defeat of the Democratic establishment's front‐runner, Hillary Clinton, by a little‐known freshman Senator of mixed ancestry suggested that this was to be the year of the insurgent, just as the Republicans rallied to the least loyal and most contentious of their candidates, the maverick Senator John McCain. The extraordinarily attractive and articulate Senator Barack Obama re‐wrote the rule book on winning primaries and caucuses with the help of Silicon Valley and an unprecedented turnout among black and young voters, before veering sharply to the centre once the nomination was secured. Orthodoxy returned at the conventions, with Obama picking a safe centrist as running mate and McCain choosing a Christian conservative, although generating great excitement by nominating a woman and undermining the usual democrat advantage among female voters. And for all the talk of a ‘new politics’, the year of the insurgents came down at the end, as US elections usually do, to a handful of swing states and the money and organization to win them.     

Do reluctant voters vote less accurately? The effect of compulsory voting on party–voter congruence in Australia and Belgium

We know compulsory voting is associated with higher levels of electoral turnout. It has been suggested that this leads to a trade-off with the quality of the vote, i.e. the ideological congruence between voters and the party they vote for. In this study, this claim is investigated using data from the 2007, 2010, and 2013 elections in Australia. We also include a comparison with two recent elections in Belgium, another country with compulsory voting. The results show that reluctant voters vote less ideologically congruent, but that this effect is mediated by political knowledge and political interest. However, this does not lead to less ideologically congruent election results at the aggregate level and compulsory voting does not have an impact on electoral results. We speculate that in future studies, it is important to make a distinction between reluctant voters, and those who take a strong hostile stand on the electoral process.     

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.     

Voter migration as a source of electoral change in the Rocky Mountain West

Examining county-level voting patterns since 1992, this paper describes the rising strength of the Democratic Party in the Rocky Mountain West and explores domestic migration (voter mobility) as a cause of the electoral change. Other theories of electoral change (voter conversion, voter mobilization and generational replacement) are analyzed and found less significant than a voter migration theory. A spatial autoregressive model also presents evidence of significant contextual “neighborhood effects” contributing to electoral change in the region. Relying on IRS tax-filer migration data, Census data and voting results for all Western counties since 1992, this work finds a significant correlation between growing Democratic strength and in-migration of new voters who generally hail from more Democratic environments than the Western counties into which they are emigrating. The strongest correlations emerge in counties where the share of creative class occupations is also growing quickly. Migrating voters are building a new Western community – a community of creative classes, childless households and urban professionals who are more likely to vote Democrat than the rural conservatives they are increasingly outnumbering.     

Poland Divided: Spatial Differences in the June 2003 EU Accession Referendum

Results of the June 2003 referendum on Poland's accession to the European Union are assessed by a noted American electoral geographer and a Polish historian, in terms of voter turnout, percentage "yes" vote, and percentage of eligible voters casting yes ballots. They then proceed to test the association between voting patterns and four basic variables that, according to pre-referendum surveys, would influence the patterns regionally: general east-west location within Poland (and proximity to the pre-existing EU border), rural-urban residence, occupation (in agriculture vs. industry/services), and unemployment/income levels. In concluding, the authors note possible implications for subsequent elections in Poland. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: H10, O18, R10. 2 figures, 5 tables, 35 references.     

Current Literature Bibliography

Two specialists on the electoral geography of post-Soviet Russia analyze spatial patterns emerging from parliamentary elections and a constitutional plebiscite held in December 1993. In addition to spatial patterns in the election and plebiscite returns, reference will be made in the analysis to underlying socioeconomic factors believed to influence voters and to interregional variations in voter characteristics. The extent to which such factors and variations are associated with voter preference, party affiliation, and voter turnout is tested using standardized regression techniques. Implications of current patterns for important forthcoming elections are explored. 5 figures, 5 tables, 20 references.     

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.     

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.     

Ecological Inference and Spatial Variation of Individual Behavior: National Divide and Elections in Catalonia

When in geography one reconstructs individual behavior starting from aggregated data through ecological inference, a crucial aspect is the spatial variation of individual behavior. Basic ecological inference methods treat areas as if they were all exchangeable, which in geographical applications is questionable due to the existence of contextual effects that relate to area location and induce spatial dependence. Here that assumption is avoided by basing ecological inference on a model that simultaneously does a cluster analysis, grouping together areas with similar individual behavior, and an ecological inference analysis in each cluster, estimating the individual behavior in the areas of each group. That allows one to capture most of the spatial dependence and summarize the individual behavior at a local level through the behavior estimated for each cluster. This approach is used to investigate vote switching in Catalonia, where voters split across a national allegiance divide on top of the ideological divide. That leads to Catalans having a lot of options to choose from, and to them voting differently depending on whether the election is for the Catalan parliament or for the Spanish parliament. To investigate that, the results in the two most recent pairs of such elections are analyzed by simultaneously clustering areas based on the similarity of their vote and vote switch patterns, and estimating one vote switch pattern for each cluster. As a result, Catalonia is partitioned into four clusters that have a strong spatial structure, with all the areas in the same cluster having similar demographic composition. The estimated vote switch patterns are quite different across clusters but very similar across pairs of elections, and they help assess how the differential voter turnout and the strategic dual vote effects vary in space.     

Participation and Representation in ATSIC Elections: A 10 Year Perspective

This paper examines participation and representation in ATSIC elections over the 10 year period since 1990. It attempts to identify patterns of participation and representation that seem to be emerging and what these might suggest about ATSIC's operation. By examining numbers of nominees compared to positions available, the paper suggests that ATSIC elected office has been fairly keenly and consistently sought and competed for by Indigenous people, though there may have been some slight initial reticence in the 1990 elections. By examining voter numbers and voter turnout, the paper suggests that voter participation nation-wide rose slightly from 1990 to 1996 and then largely stabilised in 1999. It also suggests that there have been significant variations from this national pattern at State and Territory levels and it explores some reasons for this. The paper also examines voter numbers and voter turnout at the ATSIC regional level since 1993 and finds that there has been much higher voter turnout in the sparsely settled regions of northern Australia and much lower voter turnout in the southern and urban areas. This is explained in terms of ATSIC program and expenditure priorities and in terms of polling place access. The final two sections of the paper examine the representation of women and Torres Strait Islanders among ATSIC elected representatives. Both are seen as significant issues which should be of some ongoing concern within ATSIC, alongside the issue of the southern/northern difference in voter participation.     

Commentary : Partication and representation in the 2002 ATSIC elections

This commentary updates earlier work on participation and representation in ATSIC elections. It adds analysis of the fifth round of ATSIC elections held in 2002 to those held in 1990, 1993, 1996 and 1999. It confirms and refines earlier findings relating to a number of different measures of participation and representation. It argues that overall voter turnout is reasonable given the voluntary nature of ATSIC elections. It discerns a distinctive geography of both voter turnout and candidate interest. It argues that women's participation in ATSIC elections as voters, candidates and in being elected as regional councillors is quite high, but that there is some falling away in women's election to the offices of commissioner and regional council chairperson. It notes some weakness in the representation of women as regional councillors in remote areas and an under-representation of councillors under the age of 35. It also discerns a distinctive geography in the election of Torres Strait Islanders to ATSIC regional councils. In all these instances, the commentary attempts to explain and understand the patterns of participation and representation, while also raising them as possible issues of concern for ATSIC. Explanations relate to ATSIC's program and service provision roles, different social meanings and types of Indigenous identity, the relative influence of European settlement norms on traditional patterns of Indigenous political behaviour, and the nature of public career life courses. The commentary suggests that the distinctive geographies and other patterns of participation and representation are both understandable and well entrenched, and are unlikely to change greatly in the future.     

(Un)Informed Voting? A Test of Compulsory Voting Feedback Effects

Compulsory voting is known to increase turnout and produce a more representative electorate, but there is considerable debate about whether it stimulates political learning. Analyses of political knowledge using cross‐national and intranational observational data arrive at mixed conclusions. Experimental research is similarly inconclusive. We attempt to reconcile these disparate results by employing a novel experiment that tracks political learning during real elections and randomly assigns some people to receive a punitive threat for failure to cast an in‐person vote. We demonstrate that compelled voter participation can increase voter participation and political learning, but also prompts anger.     

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 Politics of Cognitive Dissonance: Spin,the Media,and Race (and Ethnicity) in the 2008 US Presidential Election

This article examines the roles of spin, the media, and race (and ethnicity) in influencing voter behavior in the 2008 US presidential election. It invokes the concept of cognitive dissonance to explain how political strategists effectively propagandize – i.e., “reinvent their candidates” and “reinvent their opponents' actual record” – in order to successfully garner votes for their candidates. In particular, it considers spin and how spin and the media are used to shape public opinion by causing voters to distrust the veracity, credentials, and records of opposing candidates and to set the policy agenda. It also discusses how race, ethnicity, gender, and policy issues were used in the 2008 US presidential election campaign, and describes the impact of “spinning” on voter behavior and the election outcome. Equally important, it discusses the implications of the Obama victory for Canadian governance in two pivotal areas: domestic race relations and direct parliamentary representation of minorities. The article closes with a brief discussion of the symbolism attributed to Barack Obama's electoral victory by both American and Canadian voters.     

Sentimental Science: Recent Essays on the Politics of Presidential Selection

Most studies of Senate elections have used aggregate data to examine the sources of electoral success. These studies have shown that incumbency, challenger quality, and candidate spending are important sources of electoral outcomes. Yet research also suggests that issues matter in Senate elections. In this study, we show that the abortion issue was an important source of vote choice in some of the 1990 Senate elections.