Scale,Factor Analyses,and Neighborhood Effects

Studies of potential neighborhood effects have been constrained in most situations by the absence of small‐area data generated to characterize the local contexts within which individuals operate. Using small‐area data from the U.K. Census, this paper Illustrates the creation of bespoke neighborhoods—local areas defined separately for each individual in a sample survey—at a variety of scales, and their characterization using factor analysis techniques. Theories of neighborhood effects are uncertain as to the spatial scale at which the relevant processes operate, hence the value of exploring patterns consistent with those processes at a range of spatial scales. One problem with such comparative study is the incommensurability of regression coefficients derived from analyses using factor scores as the independent variables. The work reported here adapts a procedure introduced for reconstituting partial regression coefficients to circumvent that problem, and illustrates that patterns of voting at a recent British general election showed neighborhood‐effect‐like patterns at two separate scales simultaneously—with individual voter characteristics held constant.     

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.     

National Uniformity,and State and Local Effects on Australian Voting: A Multilevel Approach

The existence and extent of influences arising within spatial contexts is an important issue in the study of voting behaviour. This paper extends previous Australian research by using the relatively new technique of multilevel analysis to draw together individual survey data from the 1993 Australian Election Study and ecological census data to investigate the question. The results show that, once individual voter characteristics are taken into account, influences on first preference voting for the ALP at the 1993 election were quite uniform nationally, with relatively small spatial variations. Moreover, those spatial variations which were present were at the divisional, not the state, level and can be almost completely explained by a very small number of sociotropic factors, especially a local economic prosperity influence and the well-known rural-urban cleavage. As far as influences on voting at the 1993 election at the level of individual voters are concerned, these multilevel analyses provide some new insights, as well as confirming some previous results.     

The Impact of Proportional Representation on Turnout: Evidence from New Zealand

Theories of voter turnout assume that institutional arrangements can alter incentives for participation. Countries with proportional representation (PR) are assumed to increase the incentives to participate because they reduce the proportion of votes that are wasted, giving voters a stronger incentive to participate and parties a stronger incentive to mobilise voters. This paper departs from previous cross-national studies by employing individual-level data during a transition between electoral systems in one country. We used survey data collected before and after electoral reform in New Zealand to examine patterns of participation among political minorities. As a direct test of individual change, the analysis was supplemented with survey data from the last election held under first past the post (FPP) merged with validated participation data from the following election held under PR. We found that the adoption of PR in New Zealand has succeeded initially in fostering more positive attitudes about the efficacy of voting. In New Zealand's first election held under PR, voters who were on the extreme left were significantly more likely to participate than previously, leading to an overall increase in turnout.     

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.     

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.     

Split ticket voting in Australia: Dealignment and inconsistent votes reconsidered

This article critically examines the traditional American assumption that split ticket voting represents an indicator of partisan dysfunction and dealignment. It is argued that this assumption ignores the impact of system‐specific voting structures on voting patterns. Thus, we propose alternatively to explore ticket spitting in Australia, where a system of preferential vote and proportional representation creates very different structural opportunities for voters to pursue tactical votes that need not engender dealignment. Aggregate and survey data from the 1987 and 1990 federal elections are analysed. Aggregate results show a general upturn in voting consistent with tactical voting, while survey results suggest Australian ticket splitters are a tactically aware, politically interested subset who, in the context of wavering, but not supplanted partisanship, utilise especially Senate minor party votes to put a brake on major party hegemony.     

Electoral inequalities in the 1990 federal elections

Due to the concentration of Australian Labor Party voters, that party has to poll more votes than the Liberal and National Parties to win an election. That is not a gerrymander, for no matter how fairly the boundaries were drawn, Labor would still need to poll more votes than its opponents under the preferential, single‐member constituency voting system. Nevertheless, even under perfectly fair electoral redistributions, Labor is bound to come off worst because Labor voters are more highly concentrated than non‐Labor voters.     

Parties,Participation and Outcomes: The 2008 Victorian Local Government Elections

In November 2008, voters in Victoria participated in local government elections under a system that has been subject to significant reform since the 1980s. This paper seeks to discern trends from the outcomes and identify significant structural features of the reformed system. With regards to outcomes, the paper highlights the high success rate amongst incumbent councillors and the strong sense of successful candidates being independent of political parties. The paper argues that these outcomes have been particularly influenced by the proliferation of electoral districts with relatively small voting populations or by the use of multimember electoral systems in larger districts. The variety of systems used underpins a localised and ‘clientelist’ politics that militates against the dominance of political parties over the contest. The paper also draws attention to the comparatively low rate of voter participation in an election in which compulsory voting applies. It argues that voter absenteeism was particularly noticeable in municipalities with large numbers of residents renting properties and might be explained as a form of ‘renters’ illusion’ impacting on voting behaviour.     

Political party support in the Korean fifth republic: An ecological analysis 1981–1985

The absence of surveys detailing the voting intentions and past voting behaviour of Koreans has left obscure important aspects of party development during the Fifth Republic. Ecological analysis of district level voting returns for the 1981 and 1985 National Assembly elections is used to find two distinct patterns of voter continuity. In 1985 the ruling Democratic Justice Party was able to hold its 1981 voters while attracting considerable support from former opposition party voters. The opposition parties, in contrast, showed great turmoil, lost voters being compensated for by gains from other parties. These two patterns are attributed to a pro and anti‐government cleavage in Korean society. The pro‐government voters had a natural home in the ruling party while the anti‐government voters lacked a single focus and, hence, were more volatile.     

"Colorblind" Policy in Black and White: Racial Consequences of Disenfranchisement Policy

Disenfranchisement policies were formulated with discriminatory intent in several states ( Behrens, Uggen, and Manza 2003 ; Mauer 2001 ; Preuhs 2001 ). Does such discrimination persist? Do disenfranchisement laws disparately impact black voters? I argue that disenfranchisement policies target black citizens and impact black voters disparately compared with white voters. I show that disenfranchisement laws have a disparate impact on the black community that becomes increasingly disproportionate as disenfranchisement laws increase in severity. I find that disenfranchisement policies have a significant independent effect on voting rights in the black community and do not have a similar effect on white voters. I conclude that the ability of the black community to achieve adequate representation is substantially diminished as fewer and fewer blacks qualify for voter registration.     

Italian candidates under the Rosato mixed electoral system. In search of personal votes in the plurality tier?

The Rosato law has established a new electoral system featuring single-member districts (S.M.Ds) along with a prevailing proportional tier. S.M.Ds are typically associated with individual incentives to cultivate a personal vote and with a more direct link between representatives and their local constituency. This article investigates patterns of personalized votes in the Italian elections of March 2018 by analysing voting data about candidates for the Chamber of Deputies who ran in the plurality tier. Results reveal that only a minor – although not negligible – portion of Italian voters cast their ballot for an individual candidate only, and that these votes had almost no impact on the outcomes of competition in S.M.Ds. Moreover, some interesting differences across geographical areas, parties and coalitions emerge in the use of personalized vote.     

A spatial interaction model of vote dispersion

How do votes disperse through a territory? Studies of spatial voting patterns have largely focused on the influence of local factors on voting. The “Friends and Neighbors” model (Key (1949)) explains the advantage of candidates running for office in the locality with which they are associated (Arzheimer and Evans (2012, 2014): Collignon and Sajuria (2018); Horiuchi et al. (2018); Jankowski (2016); Hunt (2020); Munis (2021)), and the “neighbor” effect helps to explain why votes spread. More recent studies have found that the dispersion of votes decreases with distance (Put et al. (2020); Arzheimer and Evans (2012)). However, we know little about how spatial patterns of voting emerge or the mechanism behind the neighbor effect. We argue that this effect depends on the neighbors’ access to information about a candidate, which is constrained by the way information flows. Although scholars have argued that information is a relevant driver explaining the dispersion of votes (Bowler et al. (1993); Arzheimer and Evans (2012); Evans et al. (2017); Campbell, Cowley, Vivyan, and Wagner (2019)), no research has examined the relevance of the network through which information flows. We propose that a spatial interaction model (Wilson (1971)) allows us to predict where this information flows or the voting pattern that will form. Taking advantage of a quasi-natural experiment in Brazilian legislative elections in 1974 and 1978, we show that votes spread through areas of influence created by a hierarchy of cities based on the flows of exchanges among them, including information. We then use our spatial interaction model to predict voting patterns in the elections of 1978 using data from the 1974 elections. Our findings show that the spatial interaction model results fit the data quite well and can help predict spatial patterns of voting.     

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.     

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.     

Spatial variation in populist right voting in Austria, 2013–2017

The recent wave of populism sweeping Europe and the Americas generated considerable interest among political scientists, economists, sociologists and to some extent, geographers. The vast majority of these studies focuses on individual voter decisions or national comparisons over time but neglects the within-country spatial variation of the populist vote. This paper addresses this shortcoming and applies spatial econometric techniques to explore possible explanations for spatial variation in the increase of the populist right vote between the 2013 and 2017 national elections in Austria for 2118 municipalities. Spatial variation in voting shares can result from (1) compositional effects, regional differences in the composition of voters with different characteristics, (2) broad spatial, historically evolved institutional differences, such as membership to one of the nine states, (3) unequal integration of different types of regions into the global economy, such as peripheral regions, central urban regions, old industrial regions or tourist areas, (4) spatial vote spillovers due to localized social networks, and (5) unobserved spatial processes. We find that the populist right vote gains in Austrian municipalities are affected by all processes, but that the type of regions becomes insignificant once we correct for unobservable spatial structures in the regression framework. The increase in the share of foreigners, the share of foreigners, income and inequality levels, educational differences, selected state membership, as well as spatial spillovers of populist right voting are all important to explain spatial variation in the rise of the populist right vote.     

Florida in the 2000 presidential election: historical precedents and contemporary landscapes

Given the social and spatial dynamics of the electoral college, small groups of voters can profoundly shape national outcomes. This paper examines the 2000 election in Florida in three ways. First, it offers historical depth by comparing and contrasting the 2000 and 1876 presidential elections. Second, it portrays the spatial distribution of votes across the state. Third, it applies a combinatorial analysis of the power of small groups of Florida voters to influence the 2000 presidential election to demonstrate the discrepancy between their influence compared to those of voters nationwide.     

Leadership and voting: the connection at the state level

While it is now well established that Australian party leaders at the national level influence political choice in federal elections, little systematic study has been undertaken of the equivalent role that State Premiers and Opposition Leaders might play. In the 2001 Australian Election Study (n=2010), questions were asked of a national probability sample of voters about respondent feelings towards their State Premier and State Opposition Leader, in addition to equivalent questions about Prime Minister John Howard, Opposition Leader Kim Beazley and other major political figures in federal politics. The data generated by this survey thus provide an opportunity to investigate the impact that contemporary State political leaders have on electoral choice. The analysis produces mixed results, but the findings show that State leaders generally do have an impact on voting behaviour in State elections, although in some cases this influence is eliminated when account is taken of voter attitudes towards the federal leaders. The analysis also affords an opportunity to test the extent of crossover between State and federal politics, in terms of how much State leaders influence federal voting and vice versa. While the results are somewhat uneven, they do indicate that some State leaders influence federal voting and that the federal leaders do influence voting in some States.     

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.