The observed rate of Americans voting for a different party across successive presidential elections has never been lower. This trend is largely explained by the clarity of party differences reducing ...indecision and ambivalence and increasing reliability in presidential voting. American National Election Studies (ANES) Times Series study data show that recent independent, less engaged voters perceive candidate differences as clearly as partisan, engaged voters of past elections and with declining rates of ambivalence, being undecided, and floating. Analysis of ANES inter-election panel studies shows the decline in switching is present among nonvoters too, as pure independents are as reliable in their party support as strong partisans of prior eras. These findings show parties benefit from the behavioral response of all Americans to polarization. By providing an ideological anchor to candidate evaluations, polarization produces a reliable base of party support that is less responsive to short-term forces.
On October 27, María Corina Machado, was declared the winner of the presidential primary elections organized by the National Commission, a civil society association. With more than 92% of the votes, ...she has become the new face of the Venezuelan opposition. Despite having popular support, her ability to run for the presidency in 2024 is in doubt. Since June 2023, the political ban she was once subject to in 2015 has been extended for fifteen years, which the Venezuelan Supreme Tribunal of Justice (STJ) confirmed on October 30 following an electoral administrative appeal by the pro-government parliamentarian Brito Rodríguez. This blog details why Machado’s disqualification violates Venezuela’s constitution and should be seen as Maduro’s latest attempt to obstruct the holding of free and fair elections in 2024.
Elections are now common in low-income societies. However, they are frequently flawed. We investigate a Nigerian election marred by violence. We designed and conducted a nationwide field experiment ...based on anti-violence campaigning. The campaign appealed to collective action through electoral participation, and worked through town meetings, popular theatres and door-to-door distribution of materials. We find that the campaign decreased violence perceptions and increased empowerment to counteract violence. We observe a rise in voter turnout and infer that the intimidation was dissociated from incumbents. These effects are accompanied by a reduction in the intensity of actual violence, as measured by journalists.
The proliferation of elections in even those states that are arguably anything but democratic has given rise to a focused interest on developing methods for detecting fraud in the official statistics ...of a state's election returns. Among these efforts are those that employ Benford's Law, with the most common application being an attempt to proclaim some election or another fraud free or replete with fraud. This essay, however, argues that, despite its apparent utility in looking at other phenomena, Benford's Law is problematical at best as a forensic tool when applied to elections. Looking at simulations designed to model both fair and fraudulent contests as well as data drawn from elections we know, on the basis of other investigations, were either permeated by fraud or unlikely to have experienced any measurable malfeasance, we find that conformity with and deviations from Benford's Law follow no pattern. It is not simply that the Law occasionally judges a fraudulent election fair or a fair election fraudulent. Its "success rate" either way is essentially equivalent to a toss of a coin, thereby rendering it problematical at best as a forensic tool and wholly misleading at worst.
The victory of Mr. Donald Trump came as a surprise to a wide range of market participants. Some of the elements of his economic plan were envisaged to affect all US sectors. This paper assesses the ...reactions of disaggregated US stock market to the 2016 US presidential election results, and possible deregulation that is to follow after his inauguration. We find that the different US sectors were significantly and varyingly influenced by the election result, and were greatly reactive during the days after the inauguration. This underscores that uncertainty tends to persist and even rises since the President‐elect took office.
The campaign leading to the 2016 US presidential election included a number of unconventional forms of campaign rhetoric. In earlier analyses, it was claimed that the Trump victory could be seen as a ...form of protest voting. This article analyzes the determinants of voters’ choices to investigate the validity of this claim. Based on a sample of the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, our analyses suggest that a Trump vote cannot be explained by a lack of trust in politics or low levels of satisfaction with democracy, as would be assumed given the extant literature on protest voting. However, indicators of racist resentment and anti-immigrant sentiments proved to be important determinants of a Trump vote—even when controlling for more traditional vote-choice determinants. Despite ongoing discussion about the empirical validity of racist resentment and anti-immigrant sentiments, both concepts proved to be roughly equally powerful in explaining a Trump vote.
Summary of the pre-election period and elections to the National Council of the Slovak Republic, which took place on 30 September 2023. As a result, there have been changes in the Slovak political ...scene, as well as opportunities to create a new parliamentary majority.
Afghanistan: In the September 28 presidential election, incumbent Ashraf Ghani was reelected with 50.6 percent of the vote, avoiding a runoff and defeating Afghanistan Chief Executive Abdullah ...Abdullah, who received 39.5 percent. The results were announced on February 18, after months of recounts following accusations of fraud and technical failures on election day. Local election observers criticized the transparency of the vote, and Abdullah also declared victory.
In the context of Turkiye's most recent parliamentary and presidential elections ("seçim" in Turkish), social media has played an important role in shaping public debate. It is of utmost importance ...to capture social media trends during the 2023 Turkish elections, since it uncovers a great deal of information of election propaganda, political debates, smear campaigns, and election manipulation by domestic and international actors. We provide a comprehensive dataset for social media researchers to study Turkish elections, develop tools to prevent online manipulation, and gather novel information to inform the public. We are committed to continually improving the data collection and updating it regularly leading up to the election. Using the #Secim2023 dataset, researchers can examine the social and communication networks between political actors, track current trends, and investigate emerging threats to election integrity. Our dataset and analysis code available through Harvard Dataverse and Github, respectively.
Despite evidence that women win when they run for office, the number of women in the US House of Representatives has not increased substantially. I argue that women win when they run because women ...engage in strategic behavior by emerging in locations where they are most likely to win. While strategic behavior is a necessary condition for increasing women's representation in office, it is not a sufficient condition. Analyzing regularly scheduled elections between 1992 and 2014, I demonstrate that women engage in strategic behavior by emerging in elections where they are most likely to win. However, the electoral opportunities for women are far from “gender neutral” and are shaped by the parties. Democratic and Republican women are most likely to emerge as candidates in districts where they are likely to win the primary and general elections; however, Republican women face even more constrained electoral opportunities.
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