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This paper reviews explanations for split ticket and straight voting and explores their application to an STV case, the Irish election of 2011 using mock-ballot data from the 2011 irish election study. There are several reasons why this is worthwhile. The first is that STV provides a variant on more widely studied cases and so allows us to further...
This article is about comparative voting behaviour in referendums on the EU and explores variation within one country rather than variations across countries. This enables us to control for broad national context while allowing variations in the immediate referendum context, in terms of campaign intensity and incumbency. It analyses voting behaviou...
‘Friends and neighbours voting’, that is, the propensity of voters to support local candidates, is a characteristic of a number of contemporary democracies. The Republic of Ireland is one of the settings where this phenomenon has been explained and documented very comprehensively. In this paper, we study local candidate effects in the most recent I...
The 2011 election in Ireland was one of the most dramatic elections in European post-war history in terms of net electoral volatility. In some respects the election overturned the traditional party system. Yet it was a conservative revolution, one in which the main players remained the same, and the switch in the major government party was merely o...
The paper explores a question raised by the 2011 Irish election, which saw an almost unprecedented decline in support for a major governing party after an economic collapse that necessitated an ECB/IMF ‘bailout’. This seems a classic case of ‘economic voting’ in which a government is punished for incompetent performance. How did the government lose...
The impact of local campaigning on voter choice has been studied within the theme of mobilisation. Grassroots effort can attract votes efficiently, but campaign contact is (potentially) endogenous, so results showing positive effects could be flawed. Experimental solutions to this problem are possible, but could also have low external validity. Dra...
This eBook contains some of the first fruits of a large collaborative project funded by the EU’s DG Research under their FP7 Programme: an “infrastructure design study” whose ultimate goal is “Providing an Infrastructure for Research on Electoral Democracy in the European Union” – a title that gives rise to the unlovely acronym PIREDEU, used repeat...
At no time in history has the number of women elected to Dáil Éireann surpassed 14 per cent of the total membership. In spite of significant social changes, the use of a proportional electoral system and no obvious bias among voters, the number of female TDs remains stubbornly low by international standards. This paper examines why, if the prospect...
Non-ipsative measures of party preference (preference ratings for each of the parties of a political system) have become common in election studies. They exist in different forms, such as thermometer ratings or feeling scores, likes and dislikes scores, or choice propensities. Usually only one of these is included in a single survey, which makes it...
After seven waves of European Parliament elections and European Union enlargement to 27 states, the time is ripe to analyse the temporal robustness of the second-order model. We pool all the elections in a single evaluation and also look at election-by-election variations. We analyse changes in party performance over time in all EU states as well a...
The decision to establish direct elections to the European Parliament was intended by many to establish a direct link between the individual citizen and decision making at the European level. Elections were meant to help to establish a common identity among the peoples of Europe, to legitimise policy through the normal electoral processes and provi...
In recent years, different methods have been proposed to estimate the political effects of low voter turnout. This article contributes to the discussion by assessing the performance of multiple imputation in estimating the partisan effects of low turnout. Using the 2002 Irish General Election as a case study, we demonstrate how multiple imputation...
This paper uses the Irish component of the Comparative Candidate Survey project to explore constituency level campaigns in Ireland. In the context of generalisations about candidate-centred politics, it addresses three questions: how far do local campaigns focus on the candidates themselves, what is the role of the candidates in obtaining the resou...
This paper addresses the issue of whether voters indicate a preference for a government rather than, or in addition to a preference for a party, when they cast a ballot under the system of the single transferable vote (STV). It thus contributes to the existing literature on strategic coalition voting by examining whether coalition preferences matte...
This article examines how voters attribute credit and blame to governments for policy success and failure, and how this affects their party support. Using panel data from Britain between 1997 and 2001 and Ireland between 2002 and 2007 to model attribution, the interaction between partisanship and evaluation of performance is shown to be crucial. Pa...
This chapter looks directly at trends in attitudes towards how Scotland should be governed. Did the SNP's success in the 2007 election really signify a growing demand for independence? And even if people in Scotland still have doubts about the merits of independence, does this necessarily mean that they are content with the degree of autonomy affor...
This chapter examines how voters behaved in the local elections themselves. Did many people avail themselves of the opportunity to express support for more than one party? Or did most voters support all of the candidates of their preferred party and no others? In addressing these questions, this chapter compares findings directly with the evidence...
Does the 2007 election indeed mark a revolutionary break in Scotland's links with the rest of the United Kingdom and in the importance of personality in local elections? Or does it simply mark an evolution in the country's politics? It brings together the threads of the analyses to consider in each case whether the revolutionary or the evolutionary...
This chapter focuses specifically on how one can best account for the success of the SNP in 2007. First, it considers how those who voted for the SNP in 2007 had behaved in the previous Scottish election in 2003. Second, it compares the demographic profile of the nationalist vote in 2007 with its character four years previously. Third, it assesses...
This chapter considers how people in Scotland have reacted to the experience of devolution. It examines whether they feel that devolution has improved the way in which their country is governed. It also examines how their experience changed their views about the way in which the Union operates. This chapter notes that the advocates of devolution ar...
Even if it were the case that people in Scotland want more autonomy and that support for independence has increased, it does not necessarily follow that this is why the SNP achieved its breakthrough in 2007. This chapter examines the role that evaluations of the performance of government and voters' attitudes towards some of the key policy debates...
This chapter considers recent trends in the strength of people's attachments to parties in Scotland. It looks at how strongly attached to a party people say they feel. It also garners valuable evidence by looking at how people behave under the two-vote AMS system used in Scottish Parliament elections. For voters who feel strongly attached to a part...
This chapter considers some of the underlying forces that could have helped undermine support for the Union. Perhaps, the creation of the Scottish Parliament has influenced people's sense of national identity. It examines whether the Scottish people now are less likely to feel British and more likely to feel distinctively Scottish. It also examines...
Two battles were being fought when Scotland went to the polls on 1 May 2007. The first contest was for the 129 seats in the devolved Scottish Parliament. The second tussle was for 1,222 seats on all of the country's 32 local councils. Both events appeared to represent a watershed, or even a revolutionary change in the nature of Scottish politics. I...
Women are greatly underrepresented in elected office. A large literature on the subject has considerably advanced our understanding of this phenomenon, but many questions remain unanswered. Using original aggregate and individual-level data, the authors explore the interplay of candidate gender, partisanship, incumbency, and campaign spending in a...
Against a background of the Irish government’s concerns with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and the British government’s wishes for a more quantitative Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), our study conducts a relative impact assessment of the study of politics, government, political science, and international relations in Ireland. Impact is meas...
This article assesses a number of explanations for vote switching in European Parliament elections. These include the theories of surge and decline and referendum voting, advanced to explain mid‐term elections in the US as well as the theory of EP elections as second order national elections. Hypotheses deriving from each theory are set out and a n...
Advocates of STV claim it provides strong incentives to undertake constituency service. However, international experience indicates that candidate evaluations do not necessarily significantly influence how people complete a STV ballot. This paper analyses how voters in Scotland completed their ballot papers in the 2007 local elections, at which STV...
A puzzle in research on campaign spending is that while expenditure is positively related to votes won, this effect is far more strongly, or even exclusively, enjoyed by challengers rather than by incumbents. We unearth a new explanation for the puzzle, focusing on the hidden, yet variable, campaign value of office perquisites which incumbents depl...
Positive effects of campaign spending on electoral outcomes have been found in several comparative, multiparty contexts (e.g. Britain, France, Japan, and Australia) but very few of these systems use proportional representation (PR). The handful of studies that have examined spending effects in multi-party elections (e.g. Brazil, Flanders) have foun...
For the first time in Irish electoral history, the 1999 local elections required candidates to publicly declare their campaign expenditures. Drawing on these data, we explore patterns in campaign spending and assess their impact, both on candidate success and on turnout. First, examining the elections contested by 1,838 candidates from 180 local co...
Reif and Schmitt (1980) discussed elections to the European Parliament as second- order national elections. Results of second-order elections are influenced not only by second-order factors, but also by the situation in the first-order arena at the time of the second-order election. In the 28 years and five more sets of European Parliament election...
All one has to do is use a properly drawn sample of the electorate large enough to minimise random sampling error, get honest answers from everyone, do the questioning close enough to the time of voting to minimise changes in voting intentions, anticipate how the undecided will vote, and, finally, distinguish between voters and non-voters in the el...
Positive effects of campaign spending on electoral outcomes have been found in several comparative, multiparty contexts (e.g. Britain, France, Japan, and Australia) but very few of these systems use proportional representation (PR). If positive effects from spending are robust, however, then we would also expect to find that they generalize to syst...
The referenda conducted in France and Denmark in 1992 to ratify the Maastricht Treaty are often seen as giving evidence of ‘true’ attitudes towards Europe. In this paper we dispute this assumption, presenting evidence that shows referenda in Parliamentary systems with disciplined party governments to be subject to what we call a ‘lockstep’ phenomen...
We propose a novel method for estimating the partisan effects of low voter turnout. Treating non-voters as missing data points on a variable measuring vote choice, we use a statistical model of multiple imputation to estimate the missing values on reported party choice at 28 elections in 25 countries in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems da...
Low electoral turnout has become common in many countries. Whether this is a problem for a democracy depends on—among other things—whether higher turnout would have made other parties more relevant. This introductory article discusses the findings and approaches of previous work on this question and summarizes the findings of the work published in...
The inclusion of non-ipsative measures of party preference (in essence ratings for each of the parties of a political system) has become established practice in mass surveys
conducted for election studies. They exist in different forms, known as thermometer ratings or feeling scores, likes and dislikes scores, or support propensities. Usually only...
Abstract Under many electoral systems voters can choose between candidates and under some, between candidates of the same party, a situation that makes it possible for candidates to seek a personal vote. Studies of particular countries have shown,how personal voting is apparent in the success of particular types of candidates, notably incumbents, b...
After six sets of European Parliament elections, do voters primarily use these elections to punish their national governments or to express their views on European issues? We answer this question by looking at all European elections (1979–2004) in all 25 EU states. We find that almost 40% of the volatility in party vote-shares in European elections...
The fifth set of elections to the European Parliament in 2004 saw twentyfive countries sending representatives to the parliament in Brussels and Strasbourg, more than twice the number who participated in the first elections in 1979. On the face of it this presents anyone wishing to predict what may happen at such elections with a great deal more un...
European elections provide unique opportunities for studying the complex interactions between elites and citizens in the interrelated spheres of domestic and European politics, partially because these elections link domestic and European politics. While their nature as second-order national elections makes European elections an integral part of the...
Cohen (1963: 13) made the well-known observation that the media do not so much tell people what to think as tell them what to think about. The same argument is often made with respect to parties in election campaigns as they try to ensure that the focus of the campaign will be on issues that are positive ones for them, or which they own (Schattschn...
The papers in this volume were presented at an academic workshop held in Lisbon May 11-13, 2006 on the subject of the European Parliament elections of 2004. The workshop was convened by Michael Marsh (Trinity College Dublin) and Hermann Schmitt (MZES, University of Mannheim) and organised locally by Marina Costa Lobo, André Freire and Pedro Magalhã...
The Republic of Ireland provides an interesting case in which to explore party identification as, like the US, it has a party system not closely aligned to social structures as well an electoral system, the single transferable vote, which allows voting across party lines. This article uses data from the first Irish Elections Study to explore the st...
The electoral law in many European countries permits voters to indicate preferred candidates within a party list rather than to make a choice only between parties. This paper examines briefly the various voting arrangements which allow this and considers in some detail the patterns of their utilization and their possible consequences. Whilst such b...
Traditionally Irish party leaders, elected by their own parliamentary parties, endured a security of tenure only likely to be broken by personal electoral defeat. Now they live under a much more demanding regime. Leaders are challenged frequently and at least one has been deposed. Whereas once successions were managed now contests are normal, and t...
Forthcoming in Democratization This article analyzes the differences and similarities in citizen participation between the new democracies of central and eastern Europe and the established democracies of the west. Citizens in the post-communist countries participate less in politics than their western neighbours. The article asks why this is the ca...
Are referendums on EU treaties decided by voters’ attitudes to Europe (the ‘issue-voting’ explanation) or by voters’ attitudes to their national political parties and incumbent national government (the ‘second-order election model’ explanation)? In one scenario, these referendums will approximate to deliberative processes that will be decided by pe...
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Voting is a habit. People learn the habit of voting, or not, based on experience in their first few elections. Recent research has shown that elections that do not stimulate high turnout among young adults leave a footprint of low turnout in the age structure of the electorate as many individuals who were new at those elections fail to vote at su...
A large-scale survey of the members of Fine Gael, Ireland's second largest party, marks the first exploration of the membership of an Irish political party. Fine Gael members turn out to be of long standing (the average member joined in 1976) and to be older than the party's voters. Their levels of activism appear respectable, and most perform a li...
Abstract This paper examines the opinion congruence of voters and representatives in European Parliament elections taking nation as the constituency of interest, an implied model of representation similar to that in a classic Miller and Stokes analysis. Congruence is greater for some countries than others. MEPs are even less representative of their...
The result of the Irish general election of 2002 saw the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrat coalition government returned to office, the first time that an incumbent government had been re-established since 1969. The established opposition, and in particular Fine Gael, did very poorly, and there were significant seat gains for Sinn Féin, Greens and i...
Although perceived by candidates and parties as important in affecting political outcomes, the link between spending and success in multi- candidate, multiparty election campaigns remains unproven. Not only are there relatively few studies of campaign spending effects in multi- party systems, there are none examining the effect under the Single Tra...
My re-election campaign commenced in January 2002. No election date had yet been set but the campaign for many candidates was already underway. This meant that the campaigning for this election was the longest campaign in many years. As it happened the election was called on Thursday 25 April and polling day was Friday 17 May.
The purpose of this chapter is to explain why and how the remarkable changes outlined in the previous chapter came about. Why did the voters return an incumbent government for the first time in more than 30 years? What accounts for the reversal that drove Fine Gael back to a level of support not seen by the party since 1948? And why did those voter...
Michael Gallagher, Michael Marsh and Paul Mitchell (eds). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. xxxv + 276pp., £19.99 pbk, ISBN 0 333 96835 2
In this paper we describe the role of national election studies in voting behavior research in Europe and the United States. We begin with an overview of the organizational development of election studies emphasizing those elements that have influenced design and data collection over time. We then consider the theoretical influences reflected in th...
In the 1990s Seyd and Whiteley devised a 'general incentives theory' to explain variation in levels of activism among members of political parties. The theory takes into account individual members' assessments of a variety of potential costs and potential benefits that might result from activism. The model performs reasonably well on data derived f...
This paper explores the importance of context in election studies. A distinction is made between global and compositional effects, and those resulting from measurement error. While compositional effects are essentially spatial, global effects may also result from temporal variation. The mechanisms through which such effects come about are outlined...
Elections to the Irish presidency belong to the category of those in which hardly any political power is involved. In elections such as this one, according to second-order election theory, voter behaviour reflects mainly preferences in the first-order political arena, where actual policy is made. This theory fails, however, to explain voter prefere...
Reif and Schmitt argued that elections to the European Parliament should be understood as second-order national elections, and advanced several predictions about the results of such elections. Those concerning the impact of government status, party size, party character and the national election cycle on electoral performance are examined here usin...
This paper focuses on replication in the sense of Herrnson (1995). It re-examines the only study of an Irish popularity function
(Borooah and Borooah, 1990) in the light of recent developments in econometric methodology and in Irish politics. Using error
correction models the analysis provides an alternative account of the relationship between econ...
This paper focuses on replication in the sense of Herrnson (1995). It re- examines the only study of an Irish popularity function (Borooah and Borooah, 1990) in the light of recent developments in econometric methodology and in Irish politics. Using error correction models the analysis provides an alternative account of the relationship between eco...
The political structure of the European Union is experiencing a period of critical change, as leaders seek to address the twin problems of the ‘democratic deficit’ and institutional effectiveness in the Intergovernmental Conference. Problems of governance, already serious, have become more urgent, and will be further compounded by increasing EU pow...
With four sets of European parliamentary elections now behind us, it is appropriate to review the prevailing interpretation of such elections as second-order national elections, a view first put forward by Reif and Schmitt in 1980. While the second-order model has yielded important insights into the way European elections can be understood as manif...
Many party leaders have been held responsible for the electoral fortunes of their parties, with their parties' popularity being deemed dependent upon their own. Reasons for this link suggested in the literature include some global properties of the political system or electorate, party-specific factors, the style of particular leaders, and whether...
How the ballot is structured encourages particular strategies of electoral choice. One philosophy is to de-emphasize party by listing candidates alphabetically. Ireland's single transferable vote ballot takes this form. This encourages voters to express support for candidates of more than one party. Malta and Australia also use the single transfera...
*This is a revised version of a paper prepared for the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April 1993. The authors would like to thank Susan Scarrow, Robert Rorschneidcr, Michael Gallagher and two anonymous referees for helpful comments, Roland Cayrol. Andrew Appleton and Torben Worre for providing opinion poll res...
This paper examines non‐voting through an analysis of survey data on the 1989 general election in Ireland Short and long term non‐voters are distinguished, using answers given by the respondents themselves. These two types are then shown to be very different from one another in terms of political attitudes and social background. Only long term non‐...