{"title":"Do Wealthier Support Bases Constrain the Ability of Progressive Parties to Achieve Socio-Economic Equality? A Research Agenda","authors":"Thomas Prosser","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3743600","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3743600","url":null,"abstract":"Scholars debate whether the wealthier profile of support for progressive parties limits ability to achieve socio-economic equality (Engler and Zohlnhöfer, 2019; Gingrich and Häusermann, 2015). Given the rise of these concerns, I develop five hypotheses which researchers might test; (H1) party programmes and output will become less redistributive; (H2) effects will be pronounced in proportional systems, particularly among parties with narrow support groups; (H3) cross-class policies will become more prominent; (H4) path-dependent feedback effects will promote resilience; (H5) discursive commitment to justice will promote resilience.","PeriodicalId":365899,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121631172","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Trust in Government and Social Media Competence as Primary Drivers: Examining CitizensʼIntentions to Adopt Digital Government Applications for Risk Management","authors":"Taejun Lee","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3710408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3710408","url":null,"abstract":"Building upon a framework of the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT), this study explores the determinants of citizens’ intentions to use the government’s mobile application for risk communication. An online survey was conducted with a quota sample of 700 Korean citizens. The results from structural equation modeling suggest that social media competence and trust in government information are primary determinants of willingness to accept the new application and intention to use it. Trust in government information appeared to influence the acceptance of the application both directly and indirectly through performance expectancy and effort expectancy. More confidence in the use of social media led to higher levels of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and facilitating conditions, all of which subsequently contributed to willingness to accept the application. The acceptance of the application further influenced intention to use the application and the likelihood of positive recommendations. The findings suggest that while developing applications that meet public expectations for informational benefits and time efficiency is important, it is also necessary for the government to build trust and improve citizens’ ability to use new tools in order for new information technology initiatives to fully benefit citizens.<br>","PeriodicalId":365899,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131357771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Competitive Gerrymandering and the Popular Vote","authors":"Felix J. Bierbrauer, Mattias Polborn","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3724069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3724069","url":null,"abstract":"Gerrymandering undermines representative democracy by creating many uncompetitive legislative districts, and generating the very real possibility that a party that wins a clear majority of the popular vote does not win a majority of districts. We present a new approach to the determination of electoral districts, taking a design perspective. Specifically, we develop a redistricting game between two parties who both seek an advantage in upcoming elections, and show that we can achieve two desirable properties: First, the overall election outcome corresponds to the popular vote. Second, most districts are competitive.","PeriodicalId":365899,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126359386","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cheng Liang Tan, Hong Ming, Ummi Hasanah Binti Zaidon, Adina Binti Abdullah, Pei Ying. Chew, Nicole Ann Mathews, D. Ligot, Fairoza Amira Binti Hamzah, A. Dunn
{"title":"Cross-Country Analysis of Public Trust Towards Government Responses during COVID-19 Pandemic","authors":"Cheng Liang Tan, Hong Ming, Ummi Hasanah Binti Zaidon, Adina Binti Abdullah, Pei Ying. Chew, Nicole Ann Mathews, D. Ligot, Fairoza Amira Binti Hamzah, A. Dunn","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3922113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3922113","url":null,"abstract":"Objectives. Public trust is a key determinant of public health policies and risk-reduction strategies during a pandemic. This study aims to assess the public trust towards government responses in different countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to determine the relationship between socio-demographic factors and public trust. Methods. We conducted an online survey using convenience sampling between 25 March 2020 to 31 March 2020 to measure public trust in government response during the COVID-19 pandemic in different countries using a questionnaire adapted from a previous study in 2009 during the H1N1 outbreak. We also investigated the relationship between socio-demographic characteristics and the Trust Score using multivariate analyses, and compared the Trust Scores between countries to distinguish countries with different levels of public trust towards the government. Findings. Responses were collected from 87 countries. Only 7 out of 87 countries surveyed (with at least 30 respondents) were included in further analyses. Among the 7 countries selected for comparison, respondents from India and Malaysia have the highest levels of public trust towards government responses, while public trust is the lowest in the United States. The data collected from 2 countries with at least 350 responses (India and Malaysia) also showed the socio-demographic factors did not predict Trust Scores at a statistically significant level. Conclusion. Respondents in India and Malaysia have high levels of public trust, and the level of public trust is low in the United States. Socio-demographic factors failed to predict public trust at a statistically significant level.","PeriodicalId":365899,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131794410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Does Vote Trading Improve Welfare ?","authors":"A. Casella, Antonin Macé","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3680422","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3680422","url":null,"abstract":"Voters have strong incentives to increase their influence by trading votes, acquiring others’ votes when preferences are strong in exchange for giving votes away when preferences are weak. But is vote trading welfare improving or welfare decreasing? For a practice long believed to be central to collective decisions, the lack of a clear answer is surprising. We review the theoretical literature and, when available, its related experimental tests. We begin with the analysis of logrolling, the exchange of votes for votes. We then focus on vote markets, where votes can be traded against a numeraire. We conclude with procedures allowing voters to shift votes across decisions—that is, allowing one to trade votes with oneself only. We find that vote trading and vote markets are typically inefficient; more encouraging results are obtained by allowing voters to allocate votes across decisions.","PeriodicalId":365899,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121165522","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are about Political News","authors":"Charles Angelucci, A. Prat","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3593002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3593002","url":null,"abstract":"We propose a methodology to measure knowledge of news about recent political events that combines a protocol for identifying stories, a quiz to elicit knowledge, and the estimation of a model of individual knowledge that includes difficulty, partisanship, and memory decay. We focus on news about the Federal Government in a monthly sample of 1,000 US voters repeated 11 times. People in the most informed tercile are 97% more likely than people in the bottom tercile to know the main story of the month. We document large inequalities across socioeconomic groups, with the best-informed group over 14 percentage points more likely to know the typical story compared to the least-informed group. Voters are 10-30% less likely to know stories unfavorable to their political party. Also, each month passing lowers the probability of knowing a story by 3-4 percentage points. We repeat our study on news about the Democratic Party primaries.","PeriodicalId":365899,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal","volume":"61 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117039035","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Do Interactions with Candidates Increase Voter Support and Participation? Experimental Evidence from Italy","authors":"Enrico Cantoni, V. Pons","doi":"10.3386/W27433","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3386/W27433","url":null,"abstract":"We test whether politicians can use direct contact to reconnect with citizens, increase turnout, and win votes. During the 2014 Italian municipal elections, we randomly assigned 26,000 voters to receive visits from city council candidates, canvassers supporting the candidates' list, or to a control group. While canvassers’ visits increased turnout by 1.8 percentage points, candidates’ had no impact on participation. Candidates increased their own vote share in the precincts they canvassed, but only at the expense of other candidates on the list. This suggests that their failure to mobilize nonvoters resulted from focusing on securing the preferences of active voters.","PeriodicalId":365899,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal","volume":"74 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134355349","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Feeling Good or Feeling Better?","authors":"Alberto Prati, Claudia Senik","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3584929","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3584929","url":null,"abstract":"Can people remember correctly their past well-being? We study three national surveys of the British, German and French population, where more than 50,000 European citizens were asked questions about their current and past life satisfaction. We uncover systematic biases in recalled subjective well-being: on average, people tend to overstate the improvement in their well-being over time and to understate their past happiness. But this aggregate figure hides a deep asymmetry: while happy people recall the evolution of their life to be better than it was, unhappy ones tend to exaggerate its worsening. It thus seems that feeling happy today implies feeling better than yesterday. These results offer an explanation of why happy people are more optimistic, perceive risks to be lower and are more open to new experiences.","PeriodicalId":365899,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal","volume":"102 50","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141217329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Effects of Election Festivals on Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment Conducted During the 2017 General Election","authors":"D. Green, Oliver A. McClellan","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3548941","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3548941","url":null,"abstract":"During the final days of the 2017 general election, Civic Nation coordinated a series of non-partisan election festivals designed to encourage voter turnout in targeted precincts across the country. Previous experimental research conducted in low-salience elections (Addonizio, Green and Glaser, 2007) and presidential elections (Green and McClellan, 2017) indicates that festivals held at polling sites significantly increase voter turnout. The present study revisits the effectiveness of festivals as an inducement to voting in low- and medium-salience elections. In 2017, 104 precincts were randomly assigned to treatment or control, making the current study larger than previous experiments. Festivals appear to have had a modest positive effect on turnout in 2017; however, this effect was smaller than estimated in previous research. Heavy rains in 85% of the sites as well as limited community outreach prior to Election Day may explain the weaker treatment effects observed in 2017.","PeriodicalId":365899,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal","volume":"472 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115311818","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Relationship Between Populist Sentiment and Misperceptions in the 2016 Election for U.S. President","authors":"M. Gatz, J. Darling","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3544365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3544365","url":null,"abstract":"Despite widespread recognition of the pervasiveness of populist messages during the 2016 presidential campaign, the populist beliefs of voters are understudied, and what role these attitudes may play in accepting false assertions is unknown. Survey results post-election and one year later indicate that two aspects of populism that characterized voting for Donald Trump — mistrust of experts and national affiliation — persisted one year into the Trump presidency. These attitudes were associated with being misaligned with experts on the accuracy of various campaign and immediate post-election statements, as was reliance on a smaller number of news sources. Populist attitudes were a predictor of candidate vote in the 2016 election, even beyond the white, rural, lower education demographics. A contrasting finding between this study’s results and a prior study’s pre-election populism results suggests that populist feelings of voter disenfranchisement and disempowerment may change when a populist candidate is elected.","PeriodicalId":365899,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125322554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}