Targeted Issue Messages and Voting Behavior

Pre-electoral surveys typically attempt, and sometimes fail, to predict voting behavior on the basis of explicit measures of agreement or disagreement with a candidate or political position. Here, we assessed whether a specific brain signature of disagreement with one’s social values, the event-related potential component N400, could be predictive of voting behavior. We examined this possibility in the context of the EU referendum in the UK. In the 5 weeks preceding the referendum, we recorded the N400 while participants with different vote intentions expressed their agreement or disagreement with pro- and against-EU statements. We showed that the N400 responded to statements incongruent with one’s view regarding the EU. Crucially, this effect predicted actual voting behavior in decided as well as undecided voters. The N400 was a better predictor of voting choice than an explicit index of preference based on the behavioral responses. Our findings demonstrate that well-defined patterns of brain activity can forecast future voting behavior.

White Privilege: Psychoanalytic Perspectives looks at race and the significant role it plays in society and in clinical practice. Much of the effort going into racial consciousness-raising rests on the concept of unearned privilege. In this book, Neil Altman looks deeply into this notion, suggesting that there are hidden assumptions in the idea of white privilege that perpetuate the very same racially prejudicial notions that are purportedly being dismantled. The book examines in depth the structure of racial categories, polarized between white and black, that are socially constructed, resting on fallacious ideas of physical or psychological differences among peoples. Altman also critically examines such related concepts as privilege, guilt, and power. It is suggested that political positions are also artificially polarized into categories of liberal, left and conservative, right, in ways that contribute to stereotyping between people with different political leanings, foreclosing mutual respect, dialogue, and understanding. Finally, White Privilege: Psychoanalytic Perspectives explores the implications for the theory and practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, discussing these ideas in detail and depth with clinical illustrations. Drawing on Altman’s rich clinical experience and many years of engaging with racial and societal problems, this book offers a new agenda for understanding and offering analytic practice in contemporary society. It will appeal to clinicians, psychoanalytic therapists, and anyone with an interest in social problems and how they manifest in society and in therapy today.

This chapter uses the cleavage positions of Candidates to the European Parliament (CEPs) to as representative of their parties’ political positions. Three surveys of CEPs track the evolution of party supply in European party systems. In 1979 parties were primarily aligned along a Left–Right economic cleavage. Gradually new left and Green parties began to compete in elections and crystallized and represented liberal cultural policies. In recent decades new far-right parties arose to represent culturally conservative positions. The cross-cutting cultural cleavage has also prompted many of the established parties to alter their policy positions. In most multiparty systems, political parties now compete in a fully populated two-dimensional space. This increases the supply of policy choices for the voters. The analyses are based on the Candidates to the European Parliament Studies in 1979, 1994, and 2009.

Do U.S. voters care about the policy positions of a candidate when choosing prosecutors? Conventional wisdom suggests the public favors punitiveness and that prosecutorial elections are apolitical. I argue that voters do care about the policy positions of prosecutors, but different information environments induce different voting behaviors. Using a conjoint experiment across four information settings, I show how policy congruence plays an important role in shaping voter’s decisions when candidates’ policy information is available. When policy information is sparse, voters take cues to infer candidates’ political leanings even in nonpartisan or low-information electoral environments. Contrary to the dominant view that the public favors punitiveness, my results suggest that the public is not unequivocally harsh. These findings speak to the possible benefits that society can reap from increasing the level of information available in prosecutorial elections. The findings also call into question the prevalent view that elections ought to compel prosecutors to adopt tough-on-crime stances that result in a highly incarcerated populace.

The political culture of Oregon has long had a reputation for innovative policy, maverick politicians, and independent political thought, but instead of using the term to describe the state's political leanings, the editors of Oregon Politics and Government believe a more accurate descriptor would be schizophrenic. Oregon Politics and Government provides not only an overview of the state's politics and government; it also explains how the divide between progressives and conservative populists defines Oregon politics today. Early in the state's history, reformers championed many causes: the initiative and referendum process for setting public policy, the recall of public officials, the direct election of U.S. senators, and women's suffrage. Since then, the state has asserted control over beaches, imposed strict land-use laws, created an innovative regional government, introduced voting through the mail, allowed for physician-assisted suicide, and experimented with universal healthcare. Despite this list of accomplishments, however, Oregon is divided between two competing visions: one that is tied to progressive politics and another that is committed to conservative populism. While the progressive side supports a strong and active government, the conservative populist side seeks a smaller government, lower taxes, fewer restrictions on private property, and protection for traditional social values. The struggle between these two forces drives Oregon politics and policies today. Richard A. Clucas is an associate professor of political science at Portland State University. He is the editor of State and Local Government: Concepts and Cases and the general editor of About U.S. State Government: An Encyclopedia of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Branches. Mark Henkels is a professor of political science and administration at Western Oregon University. Brent S. Steel is the director for the Master of Public Policy Program at Oregon State University. He is a coeditor of Political Culture and Policy in Canada and the United States: Only a Border Apart? and the author of Environmental Politics and Policy.

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, liberal feminism has garnered the spotlight on equal rights for women. However, what factors contribute to men and women developing liberal feminist ideologies? This is important to understand as this ideology is predictive of support for political and social policies that are currently under debate in the United States. In this survey study (149 heterosexual men and 233 heterosexual women) we examined attitudinal and ideological variables that underlie liberal feminist ideology. The results of this study indicate that heterosexual men scored significantly lower on liberal feminist ideology and significantly higher on traditional attitudes toward women, hostile and benevolent sexism, gender‐specific justification, rape myths, and conservative political affiliation compared to heterosexual women. Furthermore, traditional attitudes toward women, hostile and benevolent sexism, gender‐specific justification, rape myths, political leanings, and gender accounted for almost 70% of the variance in liberal feminist ideology. Participant gender did not moderate the regression analyses, suggesting that men and women are influenced similarly in determining what attitudes predict liberal feminist ideologies. Implications for support for public policy are addressed.

When parties change their political positions, they risk being perceived as opportunistic and insincere by voters. How can parties change their positions without losing face? In this study, I argue that parties can combine positional change with a promise-based strategy to try to mitigate the reputational loss of this shift. Instead of focusing on the past, a party can attempt to gain credibility by taking high responsibility for a future policy. Since parties mostly lose credibility by diluting their ideological positions, I expect the promise-based strategy to be particularly useful in such situations. After identifying promises in hundreds of election manifestos across 32 countries, I show that parties make more promises when they dilute their position compared to when they stick to their position or crystallize it. This effect is statistically significant and increases when parties dilute their positions on their most salient issues. These results have implications for parties’ communication strategies and our understanding of credibility in modern politics.

This short policy paper considers US counterterrorism policy with particular attention to treatment of detainees in matters of challenging detention, interrogation, trial of detainees, and release. It analyzes the existing US war on terror and considers future policies that would address both national security concerns and human rights/civil liberties concerns. The paper is written by two experts and advocates in counterterrorism-related issues, coming from the center right and the center left in American politics, as part of a project of the Stanley Foundation, Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide, which publishes papers by pairs of experts coming from conservative and progressive points on the political spectrum, on US foreign policy topics in preparation for the 2008 elections. The purpose of the joint essay is to explore common ground between political positions that might otherwise go unaddressed, while identifying differences in policy positions. Kenneth Anderson is research fellow with Stanford's Hoover Institution, and Elisa Massimino is Washington Director of Human Rights First, which has been a leading human rights advocate in issues of the war on terror.

IntroductionAlthough both rational choice theory and emotion provide some explanatory power for individual voting behavior, few studies to date have simultaneously examined the effects of rationality (cognition) and emotion (affect) on vote choice. This study aims to fill that void and to explore the relative effects of rationality and emotion on individual political preferences.MethodsUsing data from the 2000–2016 American National Election Studies, we conducted statistical analyses to estimate the effects of the party differential and the emotion differential on individual voting decisions.ResultsFindings indicate that voters take competing parties’ policy positions as well as their emotional responses to competing candidates into consideration to make their voting decisions. That is, individual voting decisions are guided by both affect and rationality. Furthermore, affective orientations appear to exert a larger impact on vote choice compared to rational considerations.DiscussionThe results call greater attention to the affective underpinnings of voting decisions and suggest that models that exclude or otherwise minimize the influence of emotional considerations on vote choice are incomplete or underspecified.

The political process in the United States appears to be highly polarized: evidence from voting patterns finds that the political positions of legislators have diverged substantially, while the largest campaign contributions come from the most extreme lobby groups and are directed to the most extreme candidates. Is the rise in campaign contributions the cause of the growing polarity of political views? In this paper, we show that, in standard models of lobbying and electoral competition, a free-rider problem amongst potential contributors leads naturally to a divergence in campaign contributors without any divergence in candidates' policy positions. However, we go on to show that a modest departure from standard assumptions | allowing candidates to directly value campaign contributions (because of \ego rents or because lax auditing allows them to misappropriate some of these funds) | delivers the ability of campaign contributions to cause policy divergence.

Various authors have argued that the behavior of voters as well as parties in most West European countries is structured mainly by an ideological `left-right' dimension. However, it remains unclear how the dimension labeled `left-right' by those studying party behavior relates to voters' perceptions of this dimension of conflict. This study assesses the extent to which Dutch voters' perceptions of parties' left-right positions reflect policy positions of parties determined by the contents of election programs. The research design is dynamic, allowing one to observe changes in party positions, as well as dynamic changes in the structure of a party system. The analyses show that the contents of party programs are strongly linked to voters' perceptions of parties' left-right positions, but that the strength of this linkage has decreased gradually since the late 1970s. Repercussions for political representation are discussed.

TV and Radio broadcasting institutions in their function as a means of mass communication, play an important role in disseminating credible information to the public in the 2020 North Sulawesi Governor and Deputy Governor elections. The Governor and Deputy Governor candidate pairs and their success teams also took advantage of this means to convey their political messages, in the form of visions and missions and work programs, and information on their track record of success along with invitations to vote. From the 2020 Pilkada news broadcasts and campaign advertisements such as those aired on LPP TVRI North Sulawesi Station, Kompas TV Manado, Kawanua TV, LPP RRI Manado, LPP RRI Tahuna and other mass media, the public gets enough information about the track record and ideas of the candidate pairs to be elected so that it becomes a consideration in making choices. Political messages containing invitations delivered by candidates for Governor and Deputy Governor indirectly influence the attitude of voters in making their choices. With this function, the media is able to supply the information needs of the audience. In political communication, the most realistic fact to be used as a measure of the success of message delivery is the increasing number of audiences who agree on what the content of the message is and more explicitly are willing to become followers of political communicators. With the opinion of the community as communicants or recipients of political messages, that their choice when voting is partly influenced by the message of the political communicator.

Online voting advice applications (VAAs) have become very popular and may significantly influence voting behaviour. It is therefore important to ask which model of party choice VAAs follow. We establish that VAAs see party choice largely as proximity-based issue congruence, with some elements of the directional and salience models. We then assess how well VAAs follow the proximity model by comparing policy positions extracted from 13 VAAs in seven European countries with established policy measures from expert surveys and party manifestos. Party positions extracted from VAAs show strong convergent validity with left-right and economic positions, but compare less favourably with immigration and environment measures. The voting advice given to users is also inherently limited: VAAs mostly disregard accountability, salience, competence and non-policy factors; they treat policy positions and not outcomes as paramount; and they can be subject to strategic manipulation by political parties. As recommended by their designers, voters should treat these applications as tools and guides rather than as stringent recommendations.

This chapter provides an overview of the book’s arguments and describes its contributions to the literature on electoral politics in Africa’s diverse, multiparty systems. The book offers a novel conceptualization of swing voters in contexts where ethnic identities, rather than policy positions or ideological orientations, structure voter preferences. It explains why presidential candidates concentrate campaign efforts on reaching potential swing voters arrayed across a diverse electorate. It traces through how the pursuit of swing voters affects policy choices. The chapter situates Kenya in the context of broader regional trends and describes the data used to examine voter behavior, campaign strategies, and policymaking.

Political elections are influenced by various factors, including social, economic, cultural, and individual preferences that shape voter behaviour. Key elements such as party affiliation, candidate characteristics, policy positions, and socioeconomic status significantly contribute to election outcomes. This study aims to identify the key factors influencing political decisions among Generation Z voters, particularly those supporting Cerint Iraloza in the 2024 Legislative Election in West Sumatra. Using in-depth interviews with 30 Generation Z respondents, the research explores driving factors such as social media marketing, candidate image, political branding, and information-seeking behaviour. The findings reveal that social media influence and trust in the candidate are the primary factors guiding voter decisions. Social media serves as the main platform for Generation Z to access political information, engage in discussions, and form opinions about candidates. This study highlights the role of social media in shaping the candidate’s image and how trust and online engagement are key determinants of political decisions among young voters.