Cumulative Voting and Electoral Competition

This article presents a content analysis of 93 televised adwatches that appeared on ABC, NBC, and CBS network evening news programs during either the 1996 presidential primary (n = 40) or general election campaign (n = 53). Since the media's role in a democracy often is highlighted by its responsibility to provide citizens with information needed to make informed and rational decisions, this article analyzes political adwatches in regard to the social responsibility theory of the press. Findings indicate that CBS Evening News journalists did a better job at incorporating adwatch recommendations suggested by academicians to improve voter understanding about potentially misleading advertising con tent. However, content analysis of 298 primary and general election presidential candidate ads revealed that television journalists did not identify or discuss ethically suspect technological manipulations present in a large percentage of the 1996 spots.

This paper considers whether the rules governing state political parties help to explain primary election outcomes. I theorize political parties will see lower levels of competition during primary elections when they have bylaws that centralize power within the state central committee. To test this expectation, I created a dataset of state-level party rules by collecting and coding provisions within the bylaws of all 100 state-level Republican and Democratic parties. I operationalize party centralization of power as whether or not elected officials are represented within each party’s formal membership, their state central committee, and whether or not each party has an endorsement or neutrality policy when it comes to contested primaries. I find the centralization of party power does correlate with lower levels of competition in primary elections for the House of Representatives in 2018 and 2020. Specifically, parties are more likely to see uncontested primaries when they guarantee ex-officio state committee membership to their co-partisan elected officials and are more likely to see fewer candidates in general when they guarantee ex-officio state committee membership to their co-partisan elected officials and when they do not have rules that require the state central committee to remain neutral during contested primary elections. While evaluating the causes of this trend is beyond the scope of this paper, these findings appear to be driven by Republican primaries.

Theory suggests that majoritarian/plurality elections depress voter participation and that proportional election systems encourage greater voter mobilization and turnout. We examine the effect that cumulative voting (CV) has on turnout in local elections in the U.S. Variation in social/cultural context is largely held constant by our design while election system varies, allowing us to identify the unique effect CV has on turnout. We test if turnout is higher when CV is used in the same context as plurality rules. Consistent with expectations about institutional effects, turnout is about 5 percentage points higher under CV than in similar plurality elections.

Previous research has largely concluded that House elections have become less competitive in the modern era. Our research examines one area where we expect to observe more competition—namely, primary elections. In this article, we investigate when and where a state legislator will emerge to run in a congressional primary. All else equal, we expect that state legislators who can carry a large portion of their old state reelection constituency to the “geographic” congressional constituency will be more likely to emerge and receive a higher vote share in the election. Using geographic information systems (GIS) techniques, we are able to derive a measure of constituency congruency by focusing on the degree of intersection between state legislative and congressional districts. Our results indicate that state legislators are more likely to emerge in a primary if constituency congruency is high, especially in open seat contests. Congruency does not appear to provide an electoral advantage at the polls.

ABSTRACTWhich voters prefer having more choice between parties and candidates in an election? To provide an answer to this question, we analyse the case of a radical change from a closed-list PR system to a highly complex open-list PR system with cumulative voting in the German states of Bremen and Hamburg. We argue that the approval of a personalised electoral system is structured in similar ways as support for direct democracy. Using representative surveys conducted prior to all four state elections under cumulative voting in 2011 and 2015, we analyse which individual factors determine the approval, disapproval, or indifference towards the new electoral law. The results indicate that younger voters as well as supporters of left parties are much more likely to support a personalised electoral system. In contrast to previous studies, political interest only has an impact on the indifference towards the electoral system. More generally, our results show that a large proportion of voters does not appreciate personalised preferential electoral systems which seems to be a result of the complexity and magnitude of choice between parties and candidates.

We propose a model in which two parties select the internal organization that helps them win the election. Party choices provide incentives to the politicians who represent them. Depending on whether politicians are opportunistic or partisan, we identify four effects. First, a selection effect: intraparty competition gives parties more candidates to choose from. Second, an incentive effect: intraparty competition adds a hurdle and impacts on candidates' incentives. Third, a trust effect: because of the incentive effect, intraparty competition is a signal to uninformed voters. Finally, with partisan preferences, an ideology effect appears. Ideology is a public good in a competitive party and induces free riding. Intraparty competition is valuable when voters are badly informed or intraparty competition is weak. These results rationalize the introduction of direct primaries in the United States, the organizational changes in Western European parties since 1960, and the organizational differences between centrist and extreme parties.

PurposeIn light of the phenomenon of blogging in the 2004 US presidential campaign, this article aims to examine blogging during the 2005 British general election campaign. The article seeks to establish how widespread blogging was, the extent of bloggers' partisanship, what issues blogs were concerned with, what the purpose of the messages posted by the bloggers were, and what if any impact blogs had beyond the immediate community of users.Design/methodology/approachThese questions were addressed through a content analysis of over 300 blogs and 1,300 posted messages, by additional searches of the Lexis‐Nexis newspaper archive, and via the use of internet poll data on blogging.FindingsThe research showed that blogging in the UK is in its infancy. There were few bloggers posting messages about the campaign and few people accessed blogs regularly. Most of the comments posted focused on campaign issues and were observational. While some of the bloggers exhibited an overt partisan identity, most did not. There was also some evidence of partisan networks, with blogs of a particular partisan/ideological position hyperlinking to others with a similar outlook. However, unlike the 2004 US presidential election campaign, blogs had no impact on the campaign news agenda.Research limitations/implicationsDespite extensive research it is difficult to ascertain whether the sample of blogs examined in the research represented the entirety of the election campaign blogosphere. Nevertheless, the findings provide important insights into the evolving online election communication environment in the UK.Originality/valueThe study is the first to examine systematically the blogging about the general election campaigns in the UK.

Based on village authority which is a form of village government, the village head has a role in the splendor of the democratic party in Indonesia which will be held on February 14 2024, but the role of the village head is so important as the head of the village government, it is necessary to study the head's neutrality. villages in general election campaigns and regional head elections in Indonesia. The method used in this research is normative juridical. The method used in carrying out the research is carried out by collaborating in the form of data and field facts. The problem approach used in this research is normative. The neutralistic implementation of village heads based on the election law and village law in elections shows that the Division for Handling Violations of the Election Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) of DKI Jakarta Province, Benny Sabdo, emphasized that the campaign activities of election participants are prohibited from involving the State Civil Apparatus (ASN) and village heads and factors. The basic thing about the neutrality of village heads in elections is that there is concern that there will be a conflict of interest between village officials and the community and this is also regulated in Law Number 7 of 2017 concerning elections in Article 20 Paragraph 2 which states that village officials are among the parties who are prohibited from being included by the implementer or team. campaign in election campaign activities. The prohibition on village officials from taking part in practical politics is also contained in Law no. 6 of 2014 concerning Villages, Article 29 letter g states that village heads are prohibited from being administrators of political parties and in letter j village heads are prohibited from participating and/or being involved in election campaigns and/or Pilkada. Village officials are advised not to get involved in political activities, either as cadres and campaign activists.

To counter mis/disinformation, fact-checking organisations are used as sources by journalists to challenge false or misleading statements, especially during election campaigns. But how different fact-checkers editorially construct their analysis and question dubious claims remains under-researched. Drawing on a case study of reporting during the UK’s 2019 General Election campaign, we interviewed senior editors and journalists, and conducted a systematic content analysis of 238 fact-checking stories produced by BBC’s Reality and Channel 4’s Full Fact, along with a fact-checking organisation, Full Fact, in order to critically assess their editorial judgements about the selection of news and use of sources. Our study revealed that fact-checking services at the BBC and Channel 4 were not closely integrated into their routine news production, and that the independent fact-checker, Full Fact, questioned claims differently to broadcasters. We also found that the broadcast agenda of fact-checkers centred on party political agendas and drew on a narrow range of institutional sources to question claims. Overall, we argue that if broadcasters relied more heavily on their fact-checking in routine coverage—beyond election campaigns—they would more effectively counter mis/disinformation, especially if a wider range of expert sources were drawn upon to scrutinize claims.

Measuring Electoral Competitiveness: With Application to the Indian States

This chapter places ranked choice voting (RCV) within the context of electoral systems. Preferential voting elections include the alternative vote (AV) for choosing a single winner and the single transferable vote (STV) to select multiple winners. Electoral systems for parliamentary elections in Australia and Ireland provide the rationale and history of these forms of RCV. Plurality or first-past-the-post elections serve as the benchmark for comparisons, and other broad electoral systems such as proportional representation and mixed-member proportional systems are introduced and contrasted with ranked choice. Similar electoral systems with complementary goals are discussed. Cousins to RCV include the supplementary vote, approval voting, cumulative voting, and the Borda count. Examples are introduced and compared to preferential systems. The philosophical origins of STV and RCV from Thomas Hare forward are outlined. RCV may lead to computational paradoxes such as Condorcet cycling and violations of fundamental assumptions such as monotonicity.

This article explores the effects of female enfranchisement on the nature of political identity formation in Dutch election campaigns between 1922 and the early 1980s. It argues that women voters played a key role in the imagination of the Netherlands as a ‘pillarised society’ in which political constituencies were represented as stable and based on ‘objective’ characteristics like class and religion. The continuous representation of women as politically ignorant and indifferent served to maintain a self-identity that made women susceptible to ‘be educated’ and ‘learn to understand’ their political identity. The second feminist wave did much to upturn dominant representations, but older discourses proved persistent. The call to take women more seriously as members of the demos, again resulted in a separate treatment of women in political propaganda, with organisations like MVM and the parties' (rebranded) women's clubs, as well as commercial women's magazines now playing a key role in their ‘political education’.

While scholars disagree about whether and how much campaigns persuade voters, they increasingly agree that campaigns inform voters about the candidates and help voters bring their votes in line with their interests. Some argue that campaigns serve mostly to help voters bring their choices in line with preexisting political predispositions. This paper examines the crystallization of voter preferences during the 2008 presidential election campaign. The authors rely on polls from each month of the election year campaign to assess whether and how the structure of vote choice changed. The results show that certain election day predictors of the vote—especially party identification—became increasingly important predictors of preferences during the election cycle. Even the increase in party effects is mostly confined to the period leading up to the party conventions, well before the general election campaign even began. The structure of preferences evolved over the course of the long campaign.

According to Joseph A. Schlesinger, modem American political parties are driven by the desire to win office, and policy objectives are secondary. The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of minority legislative parties in the context of Schlesinger’s market- based definition of political parties. The objective of this paper is to determine if institutional competition has similar consequences for legislative parties as individual competition has for individual candidates. Analysis of the senate minority parties in Maryland, North Carolina, Delaware, Virginia and Ohio reveals that institutional interparty competition and the probability of gaining majority status have a dramatic effect on the nature, influence, organization and cohesion of minority parties. Noncompetitive minorities tend to give little emphasis to the external and campaign responsibilities of the party organization, are not penalized for their minority status, are poorly organized and tend not to vote along party lines. On the other hand, competitive minorities give great attention to the elections, are highly organized and vote in a cohesive manner. Ironically, increased corporate party organization and activity are accompanied by decreased individual influence and success for members of the minority party.

Term limits advocates argued that their reform would make state legislative campaigns more competitive and less expensive, and limited early studies suggested that it may have achieved those goals. But now, with evidence from more than a decade of experience with reform, we re-examine the effects of terms limits on electoral competitiveness and campaign spending in California Assembly elections. We find that while term limits initially suppressed campaign spending, they did not check its growth for long. Today, California's state legislative elections are as expensive in real dollars as they have ever been. In terms of electoral competitiveness, state legislative incumbents are in no more danger of losing their seats today than they were in the pre-term limits days of the late 1980s. Furthermore, open-seat races are not any more competitive under term limits than before them; however, we do find a modest, but significant, decline in incumbents' average winning margin since the imposition of term limits. But since term limits have made fewer incumbents eligible to run for office, this incumbency advantage helps fewer people than it once did. Yet, for the most part, rather than being supplanted by citizen-legislators, career politicians have simply adapted to the constraints imposed by term limits.