Winning an election, not a popularity contest Leinwand, Benjamin; Ge, Puyao; Kulkarni, Vidyadhar ...
Significance (Oxford, England),
August 2021, 2021-08-01, 20210801, Volume:
18, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Benjamin Leinwand, Puyao Ge, Vidyadhar Kulkarni and Richard Smith consider a range of scenarios – from the realistic to the implausible – for how a US presidential candidate can win an election with ...only a small fraction of the popular vote
Benjamin Leinwand, Puyao Ge, Vidyadhar Kulkarni and Richard Smith consider a range of scenarios – from the realistic to the implausible – for how a US presidential candidate can win an election with only a small fraction of the popular vote.
This volume offers a number of forensic indicators of election fraud applied to official election returns, and tests and illustrates their application in Russia and Ukraine. Included are the ...methodology's econometric details and theoretical assumptions. The applications to Russia include the analysis of all federal elections between 1996 and 2007 and, for Ukraine, between 2004 and 2007. Generally, we find that fraud has metastasized within the Russian polity during Putin's administration with upwards of 10 million or more suspect votes in both the 2004 and 2007 balloting, whereas in Ukraine, fraud has diminished considerably since the second round of its 2004 presidential election where between 1.5 and 3 million votes were falsified. The volume concludes with a consideration of data from the United States to illustrate the dangers of the application of our methods without due consideration of an election's substantive context and the characteristics of the data at hand.
This book attempts to redirect the field of voting behavior research by proposing a paradigm-shifting framework for studying voter decision making. An innovative experimental methodology is presented ...for getting 'inside the heads' of citizens as they confront the overwhelming rush of information from modern presidential election campaigns. Four broad theoretically-defined types of decision strategies that voters employ to help decide which candidate to support are described and operationally-defined. Individual and campaign-related factors that lead voters to adopt one or another of these strategies are examined. Most importantly, this research proposes a new normative focus for the scientific study of voting behavior: we should care about not just which candidate received the most votes, but also how many citizens voted correctly - that is, in accordance with their own fully-informed preferences.
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