AbstractWhile youth suffrage is widely debated, the causal effects of being eligible to vote on adolescents' political attitudes are less well known. To gain insights into this question, we leverage data from a real-life quasi-experiment of voting at 16 in the city of Ghent (Belgium). We compare the attitudes of adolescents that were entitled to vote with their peers that just fell below the age cut-off. We also examine the effects of the enfranchisement at 18-years-old. While we find an effect of youth enfranchisement on attention to politics, there is no evidence for an effect of enfranchisement on political engagement overall.
AbstractEspecially following the 2000 and the 2016 presidential elections, some authors have denounced the legitimacy of the Electoral College as a presidential selection method. It is alleged that the college is not representative of the electorate as a whole and tends to favor one specific political party. In this article, we compare the popular vote with the composition of the Electoral College for every presidential contest since 1876 (n = 37 elections). We confirm that the college is indeed disproportional as it provides a major bonus to the winning candidate. Although this disproportionality has become slightly stronger during the 1876–2020 period, it does not specifically benefit one political party. Measured at the level of the states, there is no substantial increase in bias with regard to geographic representation. However, to the extent that electoral races become tighter, as was the case in the last quarter of the 19th century, the risk that results fall within a margin of statistical error becomes larger. This suggests that the current controversy finds its source less in the electoral rules and more in the situational and highly competitive balance of party competition.Related ArticlesArdoin, Phillip J., and Bryan M. Parsons. 2007. "Partisan Bias in the Electoral College: Cheap States and Wasted Votes."Politics & Policy35(2): 342–64.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2007.00063.x.Crow, Deserai, and Laura Wolton. 2020. "Talking Policy in Congressional Campaigns: Construction of Policy Narratives in Electoral Politics."Politics & Policy48(4): 658–99.https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12369.McKenzie, Mark. 2009. "Attitudes toward Electoral College Reform: Understanding Opinion Formation on Complicated Public Policy Issues."Politics & Policy37(2): 265–88.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2009.00172.x.
AbstractAlthough the theory of retrospective voting receives wide support in the literature on voting behaviour, less agreement exists on voters' time horizon when assessing the government's performance – that is, whether voters are myopic. Previous studies on voter myopia tend to focus on aggregate‐level measures of the economy, or use an experimental approach. Using panel data, this article offers the first investigation into voter myopia that uses individual‐level evaluations of government performance in a representative survey at several points during the electoral cycle. The study focuses on The Netherlands, but it also provide tests of the generalisability and robustness of the findings, and a replication in the American context. The results indicate that voter satisfaction early in the government's term adds to explaining incumbent voting. Thus, rather than the myopic voter, evidence is found of the abiding voter – steady at her or his post, evaluating government performance over a long length of time.
This study explores how researchers' analytical choices affect the reliability of scientific findings. Most discussions of reliability problems in science focus on systematic biases. We broaden the lens to emphasize the idiosyncrasy of conscious and unconscious decisions that researchers make during data analysis. We coordinated 161 researchers in 73 research teams and observed their research decisions as they used the same data to independently test the same prominent social science hypothesis: that greater immigration reduces support for social policies among the public. In this typical case of social science research, research teams reported both widely diverging numerical findings and substantive conclusions despite identical start conditions. Researchers' expertise, prior beliefs, and expectations barely predict the wide variation in research outcomes. More than 95% of the total variance in numerical results remains unexplained even after qualitative coding of all identifiable decisions in each team's workflow. This reveals a universe of uncertainty that remains hidden when considering a single study in isolation. The idiosyncratic nature of how researchers' results and conclusions varied is a previously underappreciated explanation for why many scientific hypotheses remain contested. These results call for greater epistemic humility and clarity in reporting scientific findings.
Das CSES Module 5 (2016-2021) legt den Schwerpunkt auf "the politics of populism", also auf Populismus. Es erforscht länderübergreifend den Zusammenhang zwischen dem Aufstieg von populistischen Parteien und der Verteilung von "populistischen" Einstellungen innerhalb der Bevölkerung. Hauptziel des Moduls ist es, die Auffassungen der BürgerInnen von politischen Eliten, gesellschaftlichen "Out-Groups" und nationaler Identität sowie die sich hieraus ergebenden Implikationen für repräsentative Demokratien zu analysieren. Die Daten erlauben es Forschenden somit, die Variation im Wettbewerb politischer Eliten und "populistischer" Einstellungen über Demokratien hinweg mit einzubeziehen, und zu untersuchen, wie solche Wahrnehmungen das Wahlverhalten von BürgerInnen beeinflussen.
