Research on the effects of local election campaigning by party activists on electoral behavior has been confined almost entirely to the United States, where most findings suggest that there are ...significant effects. This note discusses reasons why such effects are also likely to exist, and may even be stronger, in Britain than in the United States. It then goes on to estimate models of the turnout and vote share for the Labour party in the 1987 general election in Britain. The results show that local campaigning by Labour party members had a significant influence on the Labour vote share in the 1987 election, but not on turnout. A model is developed using data from a national survey of Labour party members, together with a number of control variables to test relationships. The findings are similar to those by Huckfeldt and Sprague for gubernatorial and Senate elections in the United States.
This paper examines the influence of institutions and other contextual variables in a set of individual-level models of political participation, using a multi-level modelling strategy. It uses data ...from Citizenship Survey of the International Social Survey Programme conducted in 2004, to model relationships in many of the world's democracies. It examines the effects of variables that have been shown to be important in aggregate-level models of turnout, such as the effective number of parties, the distortions in representation associated with the electoral system, and the size of districts. It compares the institutional measures with other contextual variables that arise from rival models of individual-level political participation. The institutional variables have a modest impact on individual level turnout, but their impact is much less important in relation to other types of participation. For the latter, non-institutional contextual variables arising from models of political participation appear to be more important.
Britain (Not) at the Polls, 2001 Clarke, Harold D.; Sanders, David; Stewart, Marianne C. ...
PS, political science & politics,
01/2003, Letnik:
36, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Blurred ideas of popular sovereignty and universal suffrage are so interwoven in prevailing conceptions of British government that the obligation to vote becomes almost an aspect of the citizen's ...national identity. At the constituency level, turnout varied predictably with levels of party competition and socio-demographic characteristics, tending to be higher where the margin of victory had been narrow in 1997, and lower where there were large numbers of council tenants, ethnic minorities, and unemployed persons.
This chapter evaluates the use of rational choice theory to explain political participation in light of recent research into human decision-making in psychology and neuroscience. It finds that the ...rational choice model, which is based on an axiomatic approach to theory-building, fails to explain why individuals participate in politics. Part of this is due to a deductive approach to theory-building derived from economic methodology which is at odds with reality, but also to problems associated with rational choice models which are not adequately dealt with in their application. That said, rational choice accounts of participation provide an important normative explanation of the problems facing citizens when they are deciding to participate. In particular, the approach helps to identify contradictions in the relationship between individual and collective decision-making.
In the 2010 British general election the pollsters did well in correctly forecasting the Labour and Conservative vote shares, but they did much less well in predicting the Liberal Democrat share. The ...fact that the Liberal Democrat forecast alone was seriously out is reassuring in one sense because it means that methodological problems with the polls are unlikely to be the explanation for what happened. If there are methodological lessons to be learned from this for the wider polling industry they relate to attempts to measure the probability that an individual will turn out and vote before the election day. A number of agencies have reported data on voting intentions from respondents who say that they will definitely vote, and this can be used to adjust the data. There may very well be survey mode effects with a willingness by respondents to claim voting varying between face to face, telephone and Internet surveys. The challenge is to derive measures that overcome these problems.
Defect-based quantum systems in wide bandgap semiconductors are strong candidates for scalable quantum-information technologies. However, these systems are often complicated by charge-state ...instabilities and interference by phonons, which can diminish spin-initialization fidelities and limit room-temperature operation. Here, we identify a pathway around these drawbacks by showing that an engineered quantum well can stabilize the charge state of a qubit. Using density-functional theory and experimental synchrotron X-ray diffraction studies, we construct a model for previously unattributed point defect centers in silicon carbide as a near-stacking fault axial divacancy and show how this model explains these defects' robustness against photoionization and room temperature stability. These results provide a materials-based solution to the optical instability of color centers in semiconductors, paving the way for the development of robust single-photon sources and spin qubits.
In common with most other mass democratic parties the Conservative party has a large group of active members who sustain the party over time. A model is developed to explain variations in activism ...within the party, which takes account of the ‘paradox of participation’. The results, based on the first national random sample survey of Conservative party members, show that activism is motivated by three classes of factors. Activism is motivated, firstly, by a variety of selective incentives, such as ambitions for elective office. It is motivated, secondly, by a desire for the party to achieve policy goals. These are ‘collective goods’, which are subject to the problem of free-riding. However, since activists can influence policy outcomes, via their contacts with party leaders, they have high levels of personal efficacy and a direct incentive to participate, which can override the paradox of participation. Finally, activism is motivated by expressive concerns, as measured by the strength of the respondent's partisanship, a motivation for involvement which lies outside a narrowly cast rational choice model of political participation.
The 2001 British Election Study Internet Poll Sanders, David; Clarke, Harold D.; Stewart, Marianne C. ...
Journal of political marketing,
12/13/2004, Letnik:
3, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper reports on the findings of the Internet component of the 2001 BES and compares them with those of the other BES pre-election surveys. Part 1 outlines the rationale that underpins the ...introduction of Internet polling as a supplement to more traditional methods of assessing mass public opinion. Part 2 describes the marginal distributions on the key dependent variable-the projected vote shares of the main political parties-of the three pre-election polls that were conducted using BES questionnaires. Intriguingly, the (unweighted) Internet-based poll provided a better guess of the actual vote shares in the subsequent election than either of the two conventional polls. Part 3 provides a more detailed comparison of the profiles of the face-to-face and Internet-based polls. It shows how the Internet poll, compared with the face-to-face poll, was skewed demographically towards the professional classes and politically towards the Conservative Party. Part 4 explores the extent to which the use of the Internet poll might result in spurious causal inferences being drawn about the sources of voting preferences in the 2001 UK election. A simple, direct-effects causal model is estimated using both the face-to-face probability sample data and the Internet survey data. The results suggest that, although the raw probability and Internet samples differ significantly, the relationships among the key variables do not differ significantly across the two samples. We conclude that Internet polling has an important part to play in gauging and analysing public opinion in future UK elections.
Thatcherism and the Conservative Party Whiteley, Paul F.; Seyd, Patrick; Richardson, Jeremy ...
Political studies,
June 1994, Letnik:
42, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Neither spatial models of party competition nor the ‘Westminster’ model of British politics explain the phenomenon of Thatcherism. One explanation of its success, examined by Crewe and Searing, ...suggests that Mrs Thatcher sought to convert the Conservative party and the wider electorate to her distinctive brand of liberal Whiggism and traditional Toryism. They found little evidence of the success of this, however, among the British electorate as a whole. In this paper, data from the first national survey of Conservative party members demonstrates that she had little success in converting the Conservative party to these ideas either, although she did have a secure ideological base within the party. The results also suggest that her successor, John Major, has a rather different support base within the party from that of Mrs Thatcher. The implications of these findings for spatial models of party competition and the Westminster model of British politics are discussed.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
This paper uses the theoretical framework developed by Granger in his analysis of causality in dynamic systems to examine the short-term causal relationships between party identification, issue ...perceptions, candidate evaluations, and voting behavior in the United States. The results show that the revisionist analysis, which suggests that partisanship is an endogenous function of cognitive-based issue perceptions, is not supported. However, the revisionists are correct in asserting that partisanship is unstable over time. But the stability of partisanship is a separate question from its exogeneity in the vote function. It is argued that partisanship is a tally of affective evaluations, which are quite distinct from issue-based evaluations. Partisanship, candidate evaluations, and issues all independently Granger-cause voting behavior, and the former is more important than the latter in determining the vote choice.
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