Making Votes Count with Internet Voting

This paper reassesses the claim that electronic voting systems help voters to avoid common mistakes that lead to their votes remaining uncounted. While prior studies have come to mixed conclusions, I provide new, more robust evidence based on a case study of extended Internet voting trials in Geneva canton, Switzerland. The trials almost exclusively involved referendum votes. For causal identification I exploit the unique circumstance that federal safety legislation created a near-natural experiment, with some of the canton’s municipalities participating in the trials and others not. Using difference-in-differences estimation, I find that the residual vote rate decreased by an average of 0.3 percentage points if municipalities offered the possibility to vote online in addition to (mostly optically scanned) paper ballots. For cantonal measures, which are located towards the bottom of ballot papers in Geneva, the reduction increases to 0.5 percentage points. These remain relatively modest effects, and I find no evidence for a knock-on effect on electoral outcomes. However, on average only around 20% of votes were cast online where the opportunity existed, and online voting was most popular among voters with high levels of education. Despite the small effect sizes, the results of this study therefore point to the potential of Internet and, more generally, electronic voting technology to reduce avoidable voter mistakes

Pax Populi?:An Analysis of the Conflict Resolution Potential of Referendums on Self-Determination

The international community increasingly promotes referendums as it intervenes in self-determination conflicts around the world. However, the ability of self-determination referendums to bring about peace remains uncertain. This paper develops the argument that the conflict resolution potential of self-determination referendums is conditional, depending on whether or not they are held under the mutual agreement of the relevant minority and majority groups. When mutually agreed, self-determination referendums are likely to generate shared perceptions of fair decision-making and thereby increase chances for peace. By contrast, unilateral self-determination referendums are likely to increase ethnic grievances and, therefore, the risk of separatist violence. I find support for this argument in a global statistical analysis, short case studies, and a survey experiment. Overall, this study suggests that self-determination referendums can make a positive contribution to peace, but only if the conditions for a partial compromise on a referendum, including its terms, are ripe

How internet voting could help to make more votes count

Trials for online voting have been introduced in a handful of countries, and the evidence for whether it can improve access to voting and turnout is still sparse. However, looking at the case of Geneva canton, Micha Germann argues that there is a potential further benefit: online voting platforms can be designed to help voters avoid inadvertent ballot errors, and so reduce ‘lost votes’

Internet voting increases expatriate voter turnout

Cross-border migration has increased rapidly in recent decades. In response, most democracies have extended voting rights to their citizens abroad. Nevertheless, expatriate voter turnout tends to be low. This article investigates a frequently proposed remedy—internet voting—based on a case study of extended internet voting trials in eight Swiss cantons. For causal identification, I exploit an unexpected federal intervention that led to a temporary suspension of internet voting in four of the eight cantons, during which expatriates could vote only by mail. Using difference-in-differences estimation, I find that the temporary suspension of internet voting decreased turnout among registered expatriate voters by 4.1 to 6.4 percentage points. Placebo tests suggest that pre- and post-suspension trends in expatriate voter turnout were close to identical in treated and control cases. Overall, the results of this study suggest that internet voting represents an effective method to increase electoral participation among citizens abroad. Still, expatriate voter turnout remained well-below domestic turnout even with internet voting available, suggesting that high voting costs are not the only reason why citizens abroad tend to vote at lower rates

Getting Out the Vote With Voting Advice Applications

This article investigates the mobilization potential of online voter information tools known as “Voting Advice Applications” (VAAs). We argue that an observational approach utilizing survey data constitutes the best available method for causal inference where VAAs are popular—and we are thus most interested in VAA turnout effects—because randomized experiments are likely to run into double cross-over problems. We suggest that matching offers key improvements over existing methods to tackle self-selection into VAA use in observational studies. To improve confidence in selection on observables, we complement matching estimates with an extensive sensitivity analysis, including a placebo test. Empirically, we study the effect of smartvote, a popular VAA from Switzerland, on turnout in the 2007 Swiss federal election. We find that smartvote usage significantly increased the individual-level probability to vote. Our results suggest that smartvote was, on the aggregate, responsible for about 1.2 % points of the total tally with an estimated cost of nine Swiss Francs (7.5 U.S. dollars or 1.4 “Big Macs”) per additional vote. Promising as well, we find that the mobilization effect was more pronounced among younger voters. Our findings point to the value of VAAs compared to traditional get out the vote tactics

Do Candidates' Policy Positions Matter in Regional Elections? Evidence from the 2021 Elections to the Welsh Senedd

An oft-cited benefit of candidate-based elections is that voters can hold individual candidates accountable for their issue stances. However, voters may not always be aware of candidates’ policy positions, a concern which becomes especially salient in regional elections. Using mass online survey data and a fixed effects approach, we investigate the extent to which voters were influenced by the policy positions of individual candidates when voting in the 2021 elections to the Welsh Senedd. We find that candidates’ policy positions did matter, but that this effect was small, limited to issues voters deemed to be particularly important, and only emerges among voters with high political interest. That said, our findings also suggest that the influence of candidates’ policy positions on voting behaviour was not substantially smaller when compared to national elections in the UK and elsewhere. We discuss options for improving voter responsiveness to candidates’ issue stances

Getting Out the Vote With Voting Advice Applications

This article investigates the mobilization potential of online voter information tools known as “Voting Advice Applications” (VAAs). We argue that an observational approach utilizing survey data constitutes the best available method for causal inference where VAAs are popular—and we are thus most interested in VAA turnout effects—because randomized experiments are likely to run into double cross-over problems. We suggest that matching offers key improvements over existing methods to tackle self-selection into VAA use in observational studies. To improve confidence in selection on observables, we complement matching estimates with an extensive sensitivity analysis, including a placebo test. Empirically, we study the effect of smartvote, a popular VAA from Switzerland, on turnout in the 2007 Swiss federal election. We find that smartvote usage significantly increased the individual-level probability to vote. Our results suggest that smartvote was, on the aggregate, responsible for about 1.2 % points of the total tally with an estimated cost of nine Swiss Francs (7.5 U.S. dollars or 1.4 “Big Macs”) per additional vote. Promising as well, we find that the mobilization effect was more pronounced among younger voters. Our findings point to the value of VAAs compared to traditional get out the vote tactics

Political Exclusion, Lost Autonomy, and Escalating Conflict over Self-Determination

Most civil wars are preceded by nonviolent forms of conflict. While it is oftenassumed that violent and nonviolent conflicts are qualitatively different and havedifferent causes, that assumption is rarely tested empirically. This article uses atwo-step approach to explore whether political exclusion and lost autonomy - two common causes of civil war according to extant literature - are associated with the emergence of nonviolent separatist claims, with the escalation of nonviolent separatist claims to war, or both. Our analysis suggests that different types of grievances matter more at different stages of conflict escalation. We find that political exclusion is a significant correlate of the escalation of nonviolent claims for self-determination to violence, while its association with the emergence of nonviolent separatist claims is weaker. By contrast, lost autonomy is correlated with both the emergence of nonviolent separatist claims and, if autonomy revocations are recent, their escalation to violence. We argue that these results are consistent with both grievance- and opportunity-based theories of conflict

Scaling Up? Unpacking the Effect of Deliberative Mini-Publics on Legitimacy Perceptions

Data de publicació electrònica: 2 de desembre de 2022Deliberative mini-publics are increasingly used to try to tackle public discontent with the functioning of democracy. However, the ability of mini-publics to increase perceptions of legitimate decision-making among citizens at large remains unclear, given especially that existing studies have not considered the potentially damaging effects of mini-public recommendations not being followed. We designed, pre-registered, and ran a survey experiment in Ireland to test the effects of mini-publics on legitimacy perceptions conditional on whether or not their non-binding policy recommendations are honored (N = 1309). We find that mini-publics increase legitimacy perceptions among the broader citizenry; however, these beneficial effects are largely limited to situations in which their recommendations are honored. Additional results suggest that it makes no difference whether mini-public recommendations are overturned by elected representatives or by citizens in a referendum. Finally, we find that the legitimacy-enhancing effects of participatory processes are driven by citizens with low political trust.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 759736) as well as the British Academy (SRG20\200260)