A Statistical Model of Abstention under Compulsory Voting

Invalid voting and electoral absenteeism are two important sources of abstention in compulsory voting systems. Previous studies in this area have not considered the correlation between both variables and ignored the compositional nature of the data, potentially leading to unfeasible results and discarding helpful information from an inferential standpoint. In order to overcome these problems, this paper develops a statistical model that accounts for the compositional and hierarchical structure of the data and addresses robustness concerns raised by the use of small samples that are typical in the literature. The model is applied to analyze invalid voting and electoral absenteeism in Brazilian legislative elections between 1945 and 2006 via MCMC simulations. The results show considerable differences in the determinants of both forms of non-voting; while invalid voting was strongly positively related both to political protest and to the existence of important informational barriers to voting, the influence of these variables on absenteeism is less evident. Comparisons based on posterior simulations indicate that the model developed in this paper fits the dataset better than several alternative modeling approaches and leads to different substantive conclusions regarding the effect of different predictors on the both sources of abstention

Budget Institutions and Fiscal Performance in Latin America

In this paper detailed information on the budget institutions of Latin American countries is collected. These institutions are classified on a hierarchical/collegial scale, as a function of the existence of constraints on the deficit and voting rules.

Application of Statistical Physics to Politics

The concept and technics of real space renormalization group are applied to study majority rule voting in hierarchical structures. It is found that democratic voting can lead to totalitarianism by keeping in power a small minority. Conditions of this paradox are analyzed and singled out. Indeed majority rule produces critical thresholds to absolute power. Values of these thresholds can vary from 50% up to at least 77%. The associated underlying mechanism could provide an explanation for both former apparent eternity of communist leaderships as well as their sudden collapse.Comment: Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop, Budapest (May 1999) Eds: A. Gadomski et a

Does the factor theory of satisfaction explain political voting behaviour?

Purpose – The validity of the three factor theory of satisfaction in explaining consumer decision making for products and services is well established. This paper explains voter perceptions and voting behaviour in the 2010 UK General Election on the basis of this theory, by evaluating the differential impact of government performance on key political issues defined as hierarchical voter satisfaction factor types. Design/methodology/approach – British Election Survey (2010) data is used to test the relative influence of hierarchical voter satisfaction factor types in predicting: (1) the perceived overall performance of the former Labour government; (2) actual voting behaviour. Sequential and multinomial logistic regression models are used in (1) and (2), respectively. Findings – ‘Basic’ factors explain more of the variance in perceived overall government performance and voting behaviour than ‘performance’ factors. There are significant positive main and interaction effects on Conservative and Liberal Democrat party votes from Labour’s under performance on the ‘basic’ factors. The results have important implications for political marketing and voting behaviour research. Originality/value – The study establishes the relevance of the three factor theory of satisfaction within a political marketing context. It demonstrates that, controlling for party loyalty, perceived government performance on the hierarchical voter satisfaction factors explains voter perceptions and voting behaviour to a significant degree. In particular, it highlights the criticality for voting behaviour of both the direct and indirect impacts of ‘basic’ factor under performance. Keywords - political marketing, three factor theory, voting behaviour</p

Evidence of bias in the Eurovision song contest: modelling the votes using Bayesian hierarchical models

The Eurovision Song Contest is an annual musical competition held among active members of the European Broadcasting Union since 1956. The event is televised live across Europe. Each participating country presents a song and receive a vote based on a combination of tele-voting and jury. Over the years, this has led to speculations of tactical voting, discriminating against some participants and thus inducing bias in the final results. In this paper we investigate the presence of positive or negative bias (which may roughly indicate favouritisms or discrimination) in the votes based on geographical proximity, migration and cultural characteristics of the participating countries through a Bayesian hierarchical model. Our analysis found no evidence of negative bias, although mild positive bias does seem to emerge systematically, linking voters to performers.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figure

Hierarchical Bayes prediction for the 2008 US Presidential election

In this paper a procedure is developed to derive the predictive density function of a future observation for prediction in a multiple regression model under hierarchical priors for the vector parameter. The derived predictive density function is applied for prediction in a multiple regression model given in Fair (2002) to study the effect of fluctuations in economic variables on voting behavior in U.S. presidential election. Numerical illustrations suggest that the predictive performance of Fair’s model is good under hierarchical Bayes setup, except for the 1992 election. Fair’s model under hierarchical Bayes setup indicates that the forthcoming 2008 US presidential election is likely to be a very close election slightly tilted towards Republicans. It is likely that republicans will get 50.90% vote with probability for win 0.550 in the 2008 US Presidential Election.

Connectivity-Enforcing Hough Transform for the Robust Extraction of Line Segments

Global voting schemes based on the Hough transform (HT) have been widely used to robustly detect lines in images. However, since the votes do not take line connectivity into account, these methods do not deal well with cluttered images. In opposition, the so-called local methods enforce connectivity but lack robustness to deal with challenging situations that occur in many realistic scenarios, e.g., when line segments cross or when long segments are corrupted. In this paper, we address the critical limitations of the HT as a line segment extractor by incorporating connectivity in the voting process. This is done by only accounting for the contributions of edge points lying in increasingly larger neighborhoods and whose position and directional content agree with potential line segments. As a result, our method, which we call STRAIGHT (Segment exTRAction by connectivity-enforcInG HT), extracts the longest connected segments in each location of the image, thus also integrating into the HT voting process the usually separate step of individual segment extraction. The usage of the Hough space mapping and a corresponding hierarchical implementation make our approach computationally feasible. We present experiments that illustrate, with synthetic and real images, how STRAIGHT succeeds in extracting complete segments in several situations where current methods fail.Comment: Submitted for publicatio

A Bayesian Spatial Individual Effects Probit Model of the 2010 U.K. General Election

The Conservative Party emerged from the 2010 United Kingdom General Election as the largest single party, but their support was not geographically uniform. In this paper, we estimate a hierarchical Bayesian spatial probit model that tests for the presence of regional voting effects. This model allows for the estimation of individual region-specific effects on the probability of Conservative Party success, incorporating information on the spatial relationships between the regions of the mainland United Kingdom. After controlling for a range of important covariates, we find that these spatial relationships are significant and that our individual region-specific effects estimates provide additional evidence of North-South variations in Conservative Party support.United Kingdom General Election, Bayesian hierarchical modelling, spatial econometrics