Compulsory Voting: Residual Problems and Potential Solutions

The state-enforced compulsion to vote can be defended as a reasonable imposition on individual autonomy. This article moves on from this position to examine a number of residual problems with Australia's compulsory voting arrangements. While maintaining a commitment to the compulsory voting system, I suggest that, in order to protect the reputation of the practice and preserve the norm of universal participation, some reforms may be necessary. While the argument that it is reasonable to compel people to vote accepts that the state can legitimately penalise avoidance, I have doubts about the propriety of some current and past practices, specifically those relating to the legal consequences of avoidance and the public promotion of avoidance. One recommendation allows genuine 'conscientious objectors' to apply for exemption provided they meet a number of conditions. I also make suggestions that address the complaint that compulsion limits democratic choice.     

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.     

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.     

Information Provision and Individual Behavior: A Case Study of Voting at an English General Election

A basic premise of much work in behavioral geography is that spatial variations in decision making reflect the geography of information availability. Within this context, more attention has been paid to the behavior than to the provision of information. In this paper, both the supply of relevant information and its impact are modeled and analyzed, using the 1983 general election in England as a case study. Variations in campaign spending on information are identified, related to the party's standing in a constituency, and these variations are shown to have been related to the electoral outcome.     

Urban-Rural Voting Differences in Russian Elections, 1995-1996: A Rayon-Level Analysis

Two specialists on the electoral geography of post-Soviet Russia examine the results of the second national 1995 parliamentary election and the June and July 1996 presidential elections in the Russian Federation. The scale of analysis is the rayon level, based on a data set of roughly 300 rayons drawn from nine representative oblasts across the country. The data permit urban-rural and regional patterns in electoral behavior to be elucidated with greater precision. Although urban and rural effects are pronounced, the analysis reveals the importance of many other local contextual factors less amenable to quantification. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers H10, O10, R1O. 1 figure, 7 tables, 24 references.     

Presidential Leadership of Congressional Civil Rights Voting: The Cases of Eisenhower and Johnson

Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson presented dramatically contrasting styles of leadership in their relationships with Congress. Yet each was successful in securing passage of monumental civil rights legislation in very different political environments. Focusing on the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we show that both Eisenhower and Johnson attracted support from the opposition party's faction at the far end of the ideological spectrum while retaining support from his own party's dominant faction. The analysis suggests that it is not the president's leadership style alone that produces legislative results, but a proper mixture of leadership style and the political environment.     

A Tale of Three Variables: Exploring the Impact of Alternative Measures of Presidential Approval On Congressional Voting

This study explores the impact of three distinct measures of public approval on congressional voting. Specifically, we test for the relative impact of a president's national approval, his partisan approval, and his district- (or state-) level approval on congressional support, measured at the level of individual members of Congress. Though we remain consistent with other arguments that hold presidential approval is likely to act as a background variable rather than a determinant of congressional voting, we maintain that theoretically more meaningful relationships between public opinion and congressional voting can be developed. Specifically, we argue that a more relevant test can be made which includes opinion measured closest to where that opinion is likely to matter to members, namely among electoral copartisans and district-level constituencies. We estimate various models (bivariate and integrated multivariate), and find strong support for our hypotheses that, to the extent members of Congress use public approval as a voting cue, they do in fact pay far more attention to partisan and constituency interests than they do to national opinion.     

Class and other cleavages: Voting behaviour in New South Wales in the 1980s

The success with which Labor and the Liberal/National coalition identified with particular categories of voters is examined within the context of successive State elections in New South Wales during the 1980s. Results indicate that class and primary vs secondary economy cleavages dominate voter behaviour, the balance between the two largely reflecting a decade of differential swings towards Labor and the coalition between metropolitan and non‐metropolitan electorates at successive elections.     

Voting Technology,Political Institutions,Legal Institutions and Civil Society: A Study of the Hypothesis of Cultural Lag in Reverse

The 2000 Presidential election was plagued by butterfly ballots and ‘pregnant chads’. Electronic voting systems, lacking verifiable paper trails that are subject to possible fraud, promise to wreak havoc with the 2004 Presidential election. There is a great diversity of systems of voting technology in the 50 states: from paper ballots, lever‐operated machines and punch cards to optical scanners and electronic systems. Associated with each technology is an estimated error rate. The underlying theory of this paper was set forth by William F. Ogburn in his famous book entitled Social Change, published in 1922. Dividing culture into material and non‐material elements, Ogburn argued that non‐material elements lag behind material elements. His explanation for this lag is that technology, which underlies material culture, changes at a faster rate than elements of non‐material culture. Obgurn did not contemplate the possibility of a reverse lag, viz., technology lagging behind non‐material culture. In analyzing the anomalous relationships between voting technology, political institutions and legal institutions, a striking instance of a ‘reverse cultural lag’ is discerned. To eliminate the phenomenon of the reverse cultural lag, there is a need for a federally‐funded program of a uniform, state‐of‐the‐art voting technology, plus an amended Help America Vote Act, to implement the innovations in the 3,114 counties. The complex problems reviewed in this paper point to a vexing question: how do we educate an electorate in a democratic society—such as the United States in the twenty‐first century—to be responsible for ensuring that periodically‐elected representatives implement the will of the people?     

Postmaterialist and Economic Voting in Australia, 1990-98

Recent research in Australian sociology and political science has debated the extent to which postmaterialist values and economic self-interest shape voting in federal elections. Some researchers have argued that postmaterialist values have partly displaced materialist concerns with physical security and economic well-being in Australian public life. This displacement, coupled with the adoption by major political parties of postmaterialist 'quality of life' issues such as the environment, has meant that voting in Australia has come to be more dependent on postmaterialist values than on perceptions of economic interest. Other research, however, has found no relationship between postmaterialist values and voting behaviour, while economic evaluations remain a strong determinant of voting behaviour. Part of the disagreement reflects methodological differences in the research. But different methodological problems compromise each of the previous studies. In this paper we use data from the 1990, 1993, 1996 and 1998 Australian Election Studies to investigate postmaterialist and economic voting in the Commonwealth House of Representatives and the Senate. Using various statistical methods, we first explore bivariate relationships between key variables and then use multivariate models of postmaterialist and economic voting to adjudicate between the contending positions.     

Challenging the Australian Government Approach Towards Expatriate Voting: The Case of Italy

In 1999 the Australian government dropped its objections to the Italian legislation that contemplated postal voting and parliamentary representation for its Italian citizens resident abroad. This was a significant turning point for the Australian government approach on the question of voting rights for expatriate communities in Australia voting in their homeland elections. Based on undisclosed government sources and interviews with former Australian diplomatic and government officials, this paper will recall and examine the Australian government's reaction to the Italian political debates leading up to, and eventual passage of, the Italian expatriate vote legislation.