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.     

Scotland’s Electoral Geography Differed from the Rest of Britain’s in 2017 (and 2015) – Exploring its Contours

The rapid expansion in support for the Scottish National Party (SNP) between the 2010 and 2015 general elections substantially changed the country’s electoral geography, as again did its relative decline at the next election in 2017. At that last contest, however, the SNP won many seats with fewer than 40% of the votes cast, a situation very different from that in the rest of Great Britain. That difference – which had a considerable impact on the formation of a government in June 2017 – came about because of the nature of the competition in individual seats.     

Spatial Variations in Straight- and Split-ticket Voting and the Role of Constituency Campaigning at New Zealand’s First Two MMP Elections: Individual-level Tests

Elections held under the MMP system provide opportunities for substantial split-ticket voting, whereby electors support one party in the list contest but another in the constituency contests. At New Zealand's first two elections using this system—in 1996 and 1999—37% and 35% of the voters, respectively, employed a split-ticket strategy. Estimates of the amount of splitting in each constituency between each pair of parties—in a seven-party system on each occasion—have allowed the successful testing of hypotheses relating its volume to party prospects in the constituencies and the amount of local campaigning. These findings are replicated in comparable analyses at the individual scale using survey data.     

Evaluating an Entropy‐Maximizing Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem: Split‐Ticket Voting in New Zealand, 1999

For geographers, one important aspect of the ecological inference problem relates to the analysis of spatial variations in individual behavior. Obtaining estimates of this behavior, in the absence of direct data, is often difficult, and the “solution” to the ecological inference problem propounded by G. King is not relevant in all circumstances. An alternative, using a different approach, has been used for some time in electoral studies but has lacked “real” data against which to assess the accuracy of its estimates. The availability of such data for New Zealand's 1999 general election allows such an assessment to be made—with very favourable results. The estimates are then used to test hypotheses regarding the spatial variation in split‐ticket voting, again with considerable success.     

Positional issues, valence issues and the economic geography of voting in British elections

A body of research has built up in recent years linking thechanging geography of party support in British elections tovariations in the country's economic geography. Consistent withthe economic vote model, government support has been shown tobe higher than average in affluent areas and lower than averagein poorer areas. However, the great majority of such studieshave concentrated on elections between 1979 and 1997, a prolongedperiod of one-party rule. This article argues that this meansexisting research cannot differentiate between the very differentpredictions of positional and valence approaches to economicvoting since both suggest identical outcomes during Conservativeadministrations. By contrasting a period of Conservative rulewith a period of Labour rule, however, the article providesa test of the competing claims of the positional and valencearguments for an understanding of Britain's electoral geography.     

Labour electoral landslides and the changing efficiency of voting distributions

The translation of votes into seats under first–past–the–post electoral systems with single–member constituencies invariably results in disproportional allocations of seats relative to votes among the main two parties. It also tends to produce biased outcomes, with one party getting a more disproportionate share of the seats with a given share of the votes than does its opponent. In Great Britain, these biases favoured the Conservative party until the 1980s, but now strongly favour Labour. Production of those biases results from a variety of influences involving the interaction of the geography of party support with that of constituency boundaries. Increasingly, that interaction has favoured Labour: without any explicit manipulation of the constituency map to its own ends, it now benefits substantially from the equivalent of the malapportionment and gerrymandering cartographic abuses typical of the United States, because of its ability to manipulate its vote distribution within the constituency system.