2025 RAS AdCom Election Results

The article examines the results of the Portuguese parliamentary elections held on January 30, 2022. It compares the results of the leading political parties in the elections of 2015, 2019 and 2022, and characterizes all the leading Portuguese political parties represented in parliament from 2015 to 2021. The results of the government led by the leader of the Socialist Party, A. Costa, are presented. The results of the government headed by the leader of the Socialist Party, A. Costa, formed by the results of the 2015 elections are presented. The reasons for maintaining the rating of this government and its impact on the election campaign are revealed. The article examines how the coronavirus pandemic and the government's actions to overcome its consequences influenced the course and results of the election campaign. The activities of the main opposition parties in this country are assessed: the liberal-conservative Social Democratic Party, the right-wing radical populist Chega Party and the Liberal Initiative Party. The course of the election campaign and its main topics are examined, as well as other political parties that were elected to the parliament as a result of these elections: the Liberal Initiative, the Left Bloc and the Unionist Democratic Coalition. The positions of the leading political parties of the country regarding their attitude to the new government coalition are presented. The state of Russian-Portuguese relations is analyzed. It forecasts how the results of the elections will affect the formation of the new government of this country and the relations between Russia and Portugal.

Presidential coattails are frequently addressed in American politics, but we know little about their impact on the outcomes in elections for the House. Yet it is here that they are most significant. If presidential coattails do affect congressional elections, they can be the cause of increased support for the president (from new representatives of his party) and increased support for policy change (from representatives of a new generation). This research examines the relationship between how well a president runs in a congressional district and the success of the congressional candidate of his party in winning the district. The analysis is done for each of the six presidential elections from 1952 through 1972, and is done separately for the North and South as well as for the country as a whole. In every instance, constituency party strength is controlled in order to isolate the impact of the presidential candidate on the congressional outcome. The basic conclusions are that presidential coattails have had a declining impact on the outcomes in congressional elections since 1952 and that in recent elections their impact has declined to the vanishing point. This, it is argued, is primarily due to the increasing lack of competitiveness of congressional districts.

We study the complexity of estimating the probability of an outcome in an election over probabilistic votes. The focus is on voting rules expressed as positional scoring rules, and two models of probabilistic voters: the uniform distribution over the completions of a partial voting profile (consisting of a partial ordering of the candidates by each voter), and the Repeated Insertion Model (RIM) over the candidates, including the special case of the Mallows distribution. Past research has established that, while exact inference of the probability of winning is computationally hard (#P-hard), an additive polynomial-time approximation (additive FPRAS) is attained by sampling and averaging. There is often, though, a need for multiplicative approximation guarantees that are crucial for important measures such as conditional probabilities. Unfortunately, a multiplicative approximation of the probability of winning cannot be efficient (under conventional complexity assumptions) since it is already NP-complete to determine whether this probability is nonzero. Contrastingly, we devise multiplicative polynomial-time approximations (multiplicative FPRAS) for the probability of the complement event, namely, losing the election.

Fierce debate continues over Taiwan's 2004 presidential election. The election-eve shooting of President Chen Shui-bian and Vice President Annette Lu is the pivotal factor in these discussions. Most analyses of the shooting incident have been more focussed on inferring the truth about this criminal case, and debate about whether or not the incumbent president benefited from this shooting. (1) However, when solving a criminal case without significant and direct evidence, any hypothetic deductive logic is just one possibility. The opposition, which lost the presidential election by 0.2 per cent of the vote, accused the incumbent bloc of using the shooting incident to mislead voters into sympathising with Chen Shui-bian. (2) These contentions inevitably caused the legitimacy of the 2004 Taiwanese presidential election results to be questioned. The concept of legitimacy contrasts with the concept of legality. As a great deal of the classic literature in politics and jurisprudence has already discussed these concepts, no attempt is made in this article to discuss them in detail. The focus here is on forward-looking thinking--how to reduce the possibility that any such incident like the 2004 election-eve shooting could occur in the future. (3) The article begins by considering the normative aspect: Should any legitimacy be given to the outcome of the presidential election? Then the positive aspect is examined: How do we redeem the legitimacy of the presidential election results? How do we avert doubts about the legitimacy of future presidential elections? Accordingly, the specific purposes of this article are: firstly, to show the difficulty in resolving the current dissension over the legitimacy of the 2004 Taiwanese presidential election results during the process of seeking answers for the normative and positive questions; and secondly, to remind researchers of the importance of the forward-looking aspect of this serious issue. Methodology The focus here is on the benchmark approach abstracted from Ronald Coase by Bingyuang Hsiung. (4) Coase's approach can be summarised as follows: setting a reference point, treating this point as a benchmark and then comparing and contrasting this benchmark with the selected topics. Hsiung also suggests: we apply the benchmark approach, we have to consider why to choose this benchmark point but not the others. (5) In economics, benefit and cost are mentioned in the same breath, and cost-benefit analysis is also a useful tool in many studies. For example, if the expected benefits of a specific policy are greater than the expected costs, then implementing the policy will add to total social welfare. Nonetheless, the benefit of Taiwan's presidential election results without legitimacy problems may not be easy to measure. For individuals, the benefits of legitimacy are highly subjective. When the outcome of an election is legitimate, some people may be quite satisfied with it, but others may not care. How can we compare, for different people, the degree of benefit in having no legitimacy problem; or how can we use a measurable index to make comparisons? Even if some indirect measurements are used, the results of comparison may not be clear. When the outcome of an election lacks legitimacy and needs resolution, using the concept of costs is clear and objective. In the case of the 2004 presidential election in Taiwan, if a re-vote is one method to redeem its legitimacy, then the functional expenses that Taiwan's Central Election Commission (CEC) would pay for holding the re-vote is a definite cost. If a multi-party political consultation is another method to redeem the legitimacy of the presidential election results, then the resources that the two rival blocs need to invest in the consultation are measurable costs. For instance, each bloc may need to hold its own plenary session to reach common consent, and the two blocs may negotiate many times with each other about confirming the legitimacy of the presidential election results. …

Since COVID-19, more and more people helplessly rely on the virtual world. Today, nearly 94 percent of Americans have access to the internet, which means that there are 331.1 million internet users nationwide. In the recent society, hints and encouragement about voting are inevitably put on someone who is on social media. The information they received is extremely possible to influence their decision making on the political level. In the previous two elections in 2016 and 2020, social media seemed to play a vital role during the process. This paper investigates the inherent relationship between the result of the elections and public behaviors on social media through data comparison and case study, and also tries to figure out whether they affect each other directly or not as well. Due to the uncertainty and the ambiguousness, other factors, such as Public emotion. The occurrence of images and videos, Social media algorithms, Fact checking organizations, that may exist will also be taken into account to ensure the all-sided consideration. Overall, after many sets of data comparison shows that the social media does not directly affect the result of the presidential election, however, the outcome is the combination of each factors that were mentioned above. All in all, this study offers the voters several other aspects they have to think about when they are making such political election decisions, which force them to think deeper and wider.

The concept of distance rationalizability of voting rules has been explored in recent years by several authors. Roughly speaking, we first choose a consensus set of elections (defined via preferences of voters over candidates) for which the result is specified a priori (intuitively, these are elections on which all voters can easily agree on the result). We also choose a measure of distance between elections. The result of an election outside the consensus set is defined to be the result of the closest consensual election under the distance measure. Most previous work has dealt with a definition in terms of preference profiles. However, most voting rules in common use are anonymous and homogeneous. In this case there is a much more succinct representation (using the voting simplex) of the inputs to the rule. This representation has been widely used in the voting literature, but rarely in the context of distance rationalizability. We show exactly how to connect distance rationalizability on profiles for anonymous and homogeneous rules to geometry in the simplex. We develop the connection for the important special case of votewise distances, recently introduced and studied by Elkind, Faliszewski and Slinko in several papers. This yields a direct interpretation in terms of well-developed mathematical concepts not seen before in the voting literature, namely Kantorovich (also called Wasserstein) distances and the geometry of Minkowski spaces. As an application of this approach, we prove some positive and some negative results about the decisiveness of distance rationalizable anonymous and homogeneous rules. The positive results connect with the recent theory of hyperplane rules, while the negative ones deal with distances that are not metrics, controversial notions of consensus, and the fact that the $\ell^1$-norm is not strictly convex.

The Constitutional Court Decision Number 97 / PUU-XI / 2013 is a constitutional affirmation of the Court to relinquish its authority to resolve disputes over the results of regional head and deputy regional head elections. Given that conceptually the elections for regional heads and deputy regional heads are not included in the general election regime. After the decision of the Constitutional Court was issued Law Number 1 of 2015 as amended several times, most recently by Law Number 6 of 2020 which explicitly regulates and mandates the establishment of a special judicial body to handle disputes over election results. Neither the Constitutional Court decisions nor the Laws explain in detail the design of a special court that deals with disputes over election results. Therefore, this paper intends to answer research questions about; first, if the Constitutional Court has put the authority to resolve the election result dispute, what is the direction of the Constitutional Court’s thought in designing the settlement of the election result dispute based on decision Number 97/PUU-XI/2013? Second, the Constitutional Court Decision has been enumerated into the Election Law, is it in line with the Constitutional Court’s thoughts in the decision Number 97/PUU-XI/2013 with the normalization in the Election Law regarding disputes over results? third, how is the design of a special judicial body in line with the decision Number 97/PUU-XI/2013 and the Election Law? The research method used in this research is normative research with a statutory approach, conceptual approach, and case approach, with sources of literature law and prescriptive analysis techniques. The findings of this study are; First, the Decidendi Ratio of the Constitutional Court decision Number 97/ PUU-XI/2013 seems to implicitly place the authority to resolve disputes over the results of the elections as part of the authority of the Supreme Court. Second, the normalization of the Pilkada Law related to the settlement of election result disputes is in line with the Constitutional Court’s decision. Third, the design of a special electoral judiciary body is formed under the Supreme Court.

Competence ratings in US predict presidential election outcomes in Bulgaria

Historical Institutions and Electoral Outcomes: The Case of India after Decolonization

The large adoption of Twitter during electioneering has created a valuable opportunity to monitor political deliberation nationwide. Recent work has analyzed online attention to forecast elections results addressing some limitations of opinion polling. However, the reproducibility of such methods remains a challenge given that most of them rely on the number of political parties or candidates mentions. In this study, we propose a method to infer citizens' political alignment in order to predict elections results. To this end, first we collect 750K tweets posted during 2015 Venezuelan Parliamentary election either inside the Venezuela's bounding box or by its political leaders. Second, we build a dictionary characterizing the political leader's speech applying automated content analysis to our corpus. We show that the automatically generated dictionary is an useful tool to improve the accuracy on political election results prediction tasks. Third, using a data set of 1,000 manually-annotated individuals, we show that a support vector machine (SVM) classifier trained on our political dictionary predicts the user political alignment with 87% of accuracy. Finally, using our political dictionary, we design a simple metric to quantify the political lining reflected in a given tweet. We find that the tweets categorized with this metric reflect election results, with 98.72% of accuracy (1.28% mean squared error).

This perspective advances a theoretical framework that examines the influence of green political marketing and sustainability initiatives on electoral outcomes in developing countries, leveraging Stakeholder Theory to provide novel insights into the strategic integration of environmental narratives and sustainable development agendas in political campaigns. By applying Stakeholder Theory, this study sheds light on the mechanisms through which sustainability-driven governance emerges, revealing how political actors' engagement with stakeholders’ shapes voter perceptions and electoral outcomes. The proposed framework suggests that green political marketing enhances voter engagement and shapes public perception, positioning sustainability as a decisive factor in presidential elections. The paper offers policy implications that highlight the need to embed sustainability within political governance strategies, strengthen environmental regulatory enforcement, and promote inclusive stakeholder participation. Bridging the domains of green political marketing, sustainability, and governance, this study contributes to the growing body of literature on how sustainability considerations are reshaping electoral behavior and democratic processes in developing economies, while also demonstrating the utility of Stakeholder Theory in understanding the complex dynamics among green political marketing, sustainability, and electoral outcomes.

This article investigates the causal effect of the majority party's electoral outcomes on the allocation of government spending in Japan, using prefectural data from 1981 to 1999. We first articulate the difficulty in consistently estimating the majority party's influence on the allocation of government spending due to the endogeneity of electoral outcomes. The endogeneity of electoral outcomes is more serious when the majority party makes decisions on the allocation of government spending in order to win the elections. The amount of rainfall on election days offers an exogenous variation of the electoral outcomes of the majority party across regions. Therefore, we use the amount of rainfall on election days to estimate the causal effect of the electoral outcomes on the allocation of government spending. The weather on election days affects the behavior of voters in many regions, in turn affecting the majority party's electoral outcomes. We can reject the null hypothesis that the majority party's electoral outcomes have no impact on the allocation of government spending.

Wishful thinking (WT) is the link between preference (wish) and expectation (prediction). New Zealand voters (N = 605) were asked to predict election outcomes 8 to 10 weeks prior to the 1990 general election and to state their preference for one of the two major parties (Labour or National). Strong and consistent WT effects were found, with more favorable outcomes being predicted for the preferred party. Level of confidence in their prediction also contributed to anticipated election outcomes. A minority of respondents who displayed accurate information about the outcome of the previous election showed no WT effect in their predictions. An instruction to be objective, designed to increase rationality, was ineffective in reducing WT. Independent of preference and WT, predictions of nationwide election outcomes also varied as a function of electorate of residence. Mechanisms contributing to WT, adaptive and maladaptive aspects of WT, and the human capacity for rational control are discussed.

The study titled “Effect of Ad-hoc Staff Training and Development on Election Outcomes in Kano State, Nigeria”, a quantitative survey research design was adopted. Data collection was done through the administration of structured questionnaires to the population of 300 ad-hoc staff in Kano state. The use of secondary sources includes reports from INEC on its past elections as well as guidelines on the ad-hoc staff training). The data collected were analyzed using inferential and descriptive statistics which include the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and multiple regression analysis. The findings of the study have shown that training on technological skills have great impact on the efficiency of Election Day activities, with a p-value of 0.000. On the other hand, the duration of training as an independent variable did not affect the efficiency and accuracy of electoral activities, with a p-value of 0.127. Pre-election training content as an independent variable was found to be statistically significant on the accuracy of electoral outcomes, with a p-value of 0.000. the study concludes that when ad-hoc staffs are well trained, the election delivered are more credible, even with more realistic voter-turnout and vote counts. Consequently, it was recommended that training for ad-hoc staffs should be extensive and effective. INEC should ensure training on technological expertise as well as the pre-election training on the conduct and ethics of electoral processes. Also, periodic training should be carried out as part of the refresher courses aimed at ensuring staff competence and updates on innovations in the electoral process. Keyword: Ad-hoc Staff Training, Election Outcomes, election technological skills and duration of training

This article investigates whether parliamentary election outcomes affect the consumption of households belonging to scheduled castes and tribes (SC/STs), which are the poorest Indian households and constitute one-quarter of the population. Using arguably exogenous variation in party affiliation introduced by close election outcomes, this article finds that expenditures of SC/ST households were higher in regions where candidates more sympathetic to the groups were successful. These results demonstrate that SC/ST welfare responds to election outcomes in instances when successful politicians do not belong to SC/STs themselves and that electing candidates from left-leaning political parties can have a significant economic impact on the lives of poor and minority voters.