Search results for "voting behavior"
showing 10 items of 19 documents
Aesthetic Political Thought: Benjamin and Marker Revisited
2003
The complexity of contemporary political life has challenged traditional political theory in several Western democracies. With the emergence of new approaches to the interpretation of political praxis, we are forced to confront issues such as the New Right, the Christian Right, communitarianism, post-liberalism, post-colonialism, post-Marxism, feminism, globalization, and green thought. Many of these approaches continue to both reflect and critically challenge major ideological movements dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Since alterations to earlier theories are commonly the result of changes in political, cultural, and social conditions, new approaches to understanding…
Explaining Electoral Support for the Radical Right
2018
The literature on the radical right’s electorate offers a plethora of potential explanations as to why people vote for the radical right. This chapter organizes the presumptive causes of right-wing voting along the lines of the familiar micro-meso-macro scheme, focusing both on a number of landmark studies and on some of the latest research. In doing so, it weighs the evidence in favor of and against some prominent hypotheses about the conditions for radical right party success, including the pure-protest hypothesis, the charismatic-leader hypothesis, and the silent-counterrevolution hypothesis. It also discusses the existing knowledge on the effects of a host of meso- and macro-level facto…
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' …
Constitutional Implications of electoral assumptions
2001
International audience
Don't tell us: the demand for secretive bahaviour
2009
International audience
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…
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…
The winner knew it all? Conspiracy beliefs and hindsight perspective after the 2016 US general election
2018
Abstract The political campaigns preceding the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election received worldwide media attention that many people followed with great interest. Before the election, there were rumors of how the outcome of this election might be rigged, there was additional suspicion that individuals who were not eligible to vote were seen at voting booths, and other assumptions that might be connected to a conspiracy mentality. In this contribution, we report the results of one case study (N = 173) regarding inter-individual differences in conspiracy mentality, uncertainty, and hindsight perceptions of inevitability and foreseeability between voters of the major parties' candidates, namely,…
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…
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…