Special elections in alternative vote electoral systems: Exploring turnout and the vote in Irish by-elections 1923-2019

Most literature on special elections has focused on first-past-the-post contests and on the performance of governments. Turnout, candidates, and how the electoral system impacts the result have received less attention. This contribution fills these voids by exploring special elections in Ireland, elections conducted under the alternative vote system. Taking a multifaceted approach, it investigates the correlates of turnout, the impact of candidates and the decisive effect of lower preferences, while also testing multiple explanations of government performance. I find Irish special elections live up to the by-election truisms of lower turnout and government loss. Government performance is associated with national economic conditions. By-election victory is more likely among candidates with familial lineage and former members of parliament. Where they come into play, one in five candidates owe their victory to lower preferences

The transfers game: A comparative analysis of the mechanical effect of lower preference votes in STV systems

Debates about electoral reform revolve around giving voters more choice. Consequently, reformers often favor adopting the single transferable vote, a candidate-based system that allows voters to rank order candidates. Nonetheless, studies about whether lower preferences (transfers) influence STV election outcomes remain scant. To address this gap, our comparative multivariate approach tests transfers' impact on election results in Ireland, Malta, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. We find that, on average, transfers are pivotal in the election of about one in 10 elected candidates. Hence, their impact is the exception rather than the norm. We show that when lower preferences are decisive at the candidate level, they benefit smaller and moderate parties and non-incumbents and, in Malta and Ireland, female candidates. Our results have implications for understanding the extent to which multiple preferences influence election outcomes and for debates on electoral reform

Leader or party? Quantifying and exploring behavioral personalization 1996-2019

It has become almost a truism that parliamentary elections have become more personalized. However, evidence for this proposition among voters is relatively mixed and we lack a quantification of leader inspired voting. Using data from Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project and consistent measures of leader and party popularity across 86 parliamentary elections in 31 polities between 1996 and 2019, we break new ground in the study of behavioral personalization in several respects. First, we provide a consistent and longitudinal test of leader inclined voting, separate from party evaluations, in the form of a vote-leader/party favorite alignment index. Our results show 6% of voters align their vote with their favorite leader solely, and one in five voters align their vote primarily with their favorite leader. While significant, more voters align their vote with their favorite party. Second, we find that leader motivated voting is most prevalent among non-partisans, older voters, and in elections where ideological polarization is low. Third, we demonstrate that voters solely motivated by leaders are most likely to switch their votes between elections. Our results have implications for our understanding of leaders' impact on elections

A Populist Wave or Metamorphosis of a Chameleon? Populist Attitudes and the Vote in 2016 in the United States and Ireland

In the era of Brexit and President Trump, it is clear that we need to talk about populism. Populist political campaigns feature ever more widely, suggesting the phenomenon of a ‘populist wave’. But do populist sentiments shape vote choice? Using data from Ireland and the United States, incorporating CSES Module 5 questions that focused on populist sentiments and vote choice in 2016, we show that populist sentiments did motivate voters in both countries. We also demonstrate, however, that the old reliables - economic perceptions, partisanship, and left-right ideology - mattered more. Thus, an exclusive focus on populism for the success of Donald Trump in the US or Sinn Féin/AAA in Ireland is unwarranted. Further, populist sentiments motivating vote choice differed between the two countries, raising fresh questions about whether populism can be regarded as an ideology and whether even the "chameleon" metaphor overclaims coherence for the term

Following the coalition? Testing the impact of coalitions on policy preferences in Germany

Ultimately, electoral democracy is about governments doing what citizens want. However, considerable evidence shows that parties influence citizens' preferences. Most studies on party influence rely on experimental designs that present participants with parties' positions. The disadvantage of experiments is that many citizens are already aware of those positions, thus underestimating party influence. Very few studies assess reactions to real changes in party positions, which avoids this limitation. We break new ground by assessing the impact of changes in coalition governments, which lead parties to express different positions for reasons that are partly exogenous to elite and mass preferences, on partisans' attitudes. Using panel data from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), we leverage a major coalition change by Angela Merkel in Germany in 2013. We find that this change influenced the preferences of partisans of the coalition parties. Our findings have significant implications for how we think about democratic representation in multi-party contexts

Citizenship education should give young people the skills and knowledge to participate in political debate on social media

Young people engage increasingly interact on social media, including engaging in political debate. Mark Shephard, Stephen Quinlan, Stephen Tagg and Lindsay Paterson have studied this form of discussion, and believe it offers potential to increase political literacy and engagement. However, there are important lessons that need to be learned by users of social media platforms, including about the accuracy of information and dealing with inflammatory statements. This post is part of our series on youth participation

Social media and the Scottish independence referendum 2014 : events and the generation of enthusiasm for yes

We track the social media activity of the two main campaigns in the Scottish independence referendum, Yes Scotland (YS) and Better Together (BT), by monitoring their respective Facebook and Twitter accounts on weekdays from August 2013 until the referendum vote in September 2014. We explore the relationship between key events and online support and find that the Yes Scotland campaign pulled ahead of the Better Together campaign in terms of online enthusiasm (especially following the launch of the White Paper in November 2013), and that it accelerated exponentially in the closing weeks of the campaign as a number of events helped give it an advantage. Although further research is needed, it is interesting to note how this transformation in mobilisation online for Yes preceded big movements in support offline in the closing weeks

Predicting bloc support in Irish general elections 1951–2020: A political history model

Election forecasting is a growing enterprise. Structural models relying on “fundamental” political and economic variables, principally to predict government performance, are popular in political science. Conventional wisdom though is these standard structural models fall short in predicting individual blocs’ performance and their applicability to multiparty systems is restricted. We challenge this by providing a structural forecast of bloc performance in Ireland, a case primarily overlooked in the election forecasting literature. Our model spurns the economic and performance variables conventionally associated with structural forecasting enterprises and instead concentrates on Ireland’s historical party and governance dynamics in the vein of testing whether these patterns alone offer solid predictions of election outcomes. Using Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR), our approach, comprising measures of incumbency, short-term party support, and political and economic shocks, offers reasonable predictions of the vote share performance of four blocs: Ireland's two major parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, Independents, and the Left bloc combined across 20 elections spanning 60 years

A political economy forecast of Ireland’s 2020 general election: government seat losses less than assumed?

Ireland votes in a general election on Saturday, 8 February. Michael S. Lewis-Beck and Stephen Quinlan explain how a new forecast model suggests that Leo Varadkar’s Fine Gael will lose seats, but perhaps fewer than opinion polls currently suggest

'Show me the money and the party!' - variation in Facebook and Twitter adoption by politicians

Our study explores the adoption of Facebook and Twitter by candidates in the 2013 German Federal elections. Utilizing data from the German Longitudinal Election Study candidate survey fused with data gathered on the Twitter and Facebook use of candidates, we draw a clear distinction between Facebook and Twitter. We show that adoption of both channels is primarily driven by two factors: party and money. But the impact of each plays out differently for Facebook and Twitter. While the influence of money is homogenous for Facebook and Twitter with the more resources candidates have, the more likely they are to adopt, the effect is stronger for Facebook. Conversely, a party's impact on adoption is heterogeneous across channels, a pattern we suggest is driven by the different audiences Facebook and Twitter attract. We also find candidates' personality traits only correlate with Twitter adoption, but their impact is minimal. Our findings demonstrate that social media adoption by politicians is far from homogenous, and that there is a need to differentiate social media channels from one another when exploring motivations for their use