Search results for "Voting behavior"
showing 10 items of 19 documents
Personality Traits, Partisan Attitudes, and Voting Behavior. Evidence from Germany
2007
Political psychology has paid rather little attention to personality traits when explaining political attitudes and political behavior in mass publics. The present paper argues that personality traits contribute to our understanding of political attitude formation and decision making of ordinary citizens. Based on the Five Factor Model of Personality, we state hypotheses regarding the effects of personality traits on partisan attitudes and vote choice in Germany. We test the hypotheses using survey data obtained from a random sample of the Germans eligible to vote. The evidence confirms that personality traits indirectly affect partisan attitudes and voting behavior in Germany in predictabl…
Is Communism to Blame for Political Disenchantment in Post-Communist Countries? Cohort Analysis of Adults' Political Attitudes
2014
In this article, we apply a new, original technique of cohort analysis to test empirically whether political disenchantment in the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe can be linked to the previous political culture. On the basis of International Social Survey Programme 1996 and 2006 data we find a surprisingly similar and unique cohort effect in all analysed post-communist countries, reflecting persistent generational differences in perceived political competence (interest and understanding of political processes). However, the communist legacy does not seem to be important for explaining low self-efficacy or distrust in political authorities and their responsiveness to c…
Decentralization and growth: what if the cross-jurisdiction approach had met a dead end?
2013
International audience; The relationship between decentralization and economic growth is generally studied from a perspective stressing universal or quasi-universal regularities across jurisdictions. That approach has generated many insights but seems to reach its limits. The paper explains why it allows contrasting positions with regard to the benefits of decentralization even among proponents of free and competitive markets. And it seems from the empirical literature that no robust and economically significant cross-jurisdiction relation between decentralization and economic performance or growth, except perhaps their independence, has been found. The absence of a relation valid across ju…
Electoral vulnerability and size of local governments: Evidence from voting on municipal mergers
2014
Abstract We analyze how anticipated changes in the electoral vulnerability of municipal councilors affect their voting behavior over municipal mergers. The electoral vulnerability changes due to a merger because it changes the composition of political competitors and the number of available seats in the next election. We use this variation for identification and find that the smaller the increase in the electoral vulnerability of a councilor, the more likely he is to vote for the merger. The documented effect is not driven by the behavioral response of the voters, or by party-line considerations. The councilors' desire to avoid personal electoral competition may lead to sub-optimally small …
Debating Europe: Effects of the “Eurovision Debate” on EU Attitudes of Young German Voters and the Moderating Role Played by Political Involvement
2016
In the run-up to the elections to the European Parliament in 2014, EU citizens had the unprecedented opportunity to watch televised debates between the candidates running for president of the European Commission. The most important debate was the so-called "Eurovision debate", which was broadcasted in almost all EU member states. In this study we explore the responses of a sample of 110 young German voters, who watched this debate, to the candidates' messages and whether exposure to the debate caused a shift in the respondents' attitudes towards the EU. Combining data from a quasi-experiment, real-time response data, and data from a content analysis of the debate, we find that respondents' …
The assignment of powers in an open-ended European Union
2003
Presented at CESIFO Conference “A Constitution for the EU”, February 2003; International audience; A major characteristic of the European Union is its transitional or evolving nature, in particular with regard to the assignment of powers between the two main levels of government. More precisely, under current constitutional arrangements, this evolving nature takes the form of an integration process which tends to be monotonous, that is, which can only with great difficulty be reversed. The paper is mainly devoted to the explanation of how this comes about and what effects this has on other features of the process. As a concluding remark, however, it suggests that an additional criterion for…
Horizontal competition in multilevel governmental settings
2013
28 pages; Governments situated on the same level of a multi-level governmental system compete with each other as well as with governments placed higher or lower. This paper is concerned with horizontal competition only. It discusses both competition based on the mobility of agents and competition based on comparisons of performance across jurisdictions - i.e., yardstick competition. With regard to the first kind, the focus is on the capacity of governments and voters to decide policies in spite of the mobility of agents. Some attention is also given to non-standard mechanisms in which mobility is manipulated so as to change the structure of the electorate. The paper considers two forms of h…
How significant is yardstick competition among governments? Three reasons to dig deeper
2013
22 pages; The significance of yardstick competition among governments is now confirmed with regard to fiscal variables. This is an important result but the significance of the mechanism must also be sought in a context broader than that of fiscal federalism and without limitation to relations and processes fully observable. Three points are made. Even in the case of governments trying to mimic each other over a single variable, additional variables are involved in an important way. Yardstick competition can be latent without being ineffective. Its major effect, then, is to set bounds to the choices that office-holders could think of making. Finally, the mechanism is a hidden albeit essentia…
Sag, wie hältst Du's mit Grün-Rot? Die grün-rote Landesregierung im Urteil der Wähler 2011 bis 2015
2016
In unserem Beitrag analysieren wir, wie die Burgerinnen und Burger den Regierungswechsel und die Ubernahme der Regierungsgeschafte durch die neue grun-rote Regierung wahrgenommen, wie sich die Regierungs- und Parteienzufriedenheit (ausgedruckt durch die hypothetische Wahlentscheidung) im Zeitverlauf entwickelt haben und was die Determinanten der Zufriedenheit sind. Unsere Analysen basieren dabei auf insgesamt sechs reprasentativen telefonischen Befragungen im Zeitraum von November 2011 bis Oktober 2015. Wir konnen zeigen, dass im Laufe der Legislaturperiode die vor der Wahl stattgefundenen Ereignisse mehr und mehr an Bedeutung fur die Bewertung der Regierungsleistung verlieren. Die Landesre…
Single-Target Implicit Association Tests (ST-IAT) Predict Voting Behavior of Decided and Undecided Voters in Swiss Referendums
2016
Undecided voters represent a major challenge to political pollsters. Recently, political psychologists have proposed the use of implicit association tests (IAT) to measure implicit attitudes toward political parties and candidates and predict voting behavior of undecided voters. A number of studies have shown that both implicit and explicit (i.e., self-reported) attitudes contribute to the prediction of voting behavior. More importantly, recent research suggests that implicit attitudes may be more useful for predicting the vote of undecided voters in the case of specific political issues rather than elections. Due to its direct-democratic political system, Switzerland represents an ideal pl…