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This article suggests that voters rely more strongly on "substantial" criteria, such as issues and ideology, when elections are competitive. In such contexts, voters should attach more importance to their own choice and rely less on "heuristics." Three aspects of election competitiveness are considered: the fragmentation and polarization of the party system and the proportionality of the electoral system. Elections are more competitive when there are many parties in competition, when they differ strongly from one another in ideological terms, and when the threshold of representation is lower. These hypotheses are tested with data from the 2007 Swiss federal elections. The electoral districts differ markedly from one another as far as electoral competitiveness is concerned while being similar in many other respects. The results show that competitiveness strengthens issue voting and reduces the impact of party identification. Adapted from the source document.

Electoral competitiveness is a key explanatory construct across a broad swath of phenomena, finding application in diverse areas related to political incentives and behavior. Despite its frequent theoretical use, no valid measure of electoral competitiveness exists that applies across different electoral and party systems. We argue that one particular type of electoral competitiveness'electoral risk'can be estimated across institutional contexts and matters most for incumbent behavior. We propose, estimate, and make available a cross-nationally applicable measure for elections in 22 developed democracies between 1960 and 2011. Unlike extant alternatives, our measure captures vote volatility and is constructed at the party (not system) level, exogenous to most policy predictors, and congruent with the perceptions and incentives of policy-makers.

Elections in competitive authoritarian regimes have become a major focus of comparative research. However, existing research mostly focuses on large-N comparative studies with older cases and data. Therefore, the conclusions of these studies typically only have a fairly limited explanatory potential. A number of authors thus suggest turning our attention to studies with small and middle-N, which -thanks to closer interaction with data- can help improve the explanatory ability. The aim of this study is to react to this situation and offer an explanation of the varying degree of electoral competitiveness in competitive authoritarianism in Latin America. For that purpose, this study compares 41 cases of elections that were carried out between 1990 and 2014, using regression analysis and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). This study uses the data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM) project and tries to either provide more accurate conclusions than some of the previous researches or to disprove these conclusions altogether. The results highlight the importance of economic growth, concurrent elections, opposition party ban, cohesion of the opposition and media censorship. These findings are in discrepancy with previous research which rather put structural factors in the back seat and considered actors' behaviour to be the key factors. What is even more interesting, though, is the fact that the two most influential structural explanations usually mentioned with respect to competitive authoritarianism, i.e. natural resources rent and economic statism, are proved as rather irrelevant in Latin America's context.

Analyzing the British Election Study from 1964 to 2010, we examine the influence of electoral context on turnout, focusing on the closeness of elections in terms of lagged seat and constituency-level winning margins. Using cross-classified multilevel models to account for individual and contextual factors and disentangle life cycle, cohort- and election-specific effects, we find that closeness strongly affects voting behavior, particularly among new electors. Widening seat margins in British elections over the last decades have had a persistent impact on turnout. Respondents who faced less competitive environments when young are more likely to abstain in subsequent elections than those reaching voting age after close-fought races. We conclude that variations in competitiveness have had both short- and long-term effects on turnout.

ABSTRACT
Considerable media attention was given to the so-called "pivot counties" in the U.S. and in Michigan that flipped from supporting Barack Obama twice to voting for Donald Trump in 2016. We first summarize theories of voting behavior and speculate about why Michigan has been consistently competitive over the years. We explore 40 years' worth of county-level presidential and gubernatorial election results in Michigan to determine how frequently counties have flipped across a large number of elections. We find that a number of Michigan counties frequently flip between elections, but the number of competitive Michigan counties has substantially declined in recent decades. Turnout in larger counties can affect election outcomes, and large counties that swing have been key bellwethers in past elections, and should be a major focus of research on future elections in Michigan.

We consider alternative methods of measuring the competitiveness of a majoritarian electoral system in the context of an analysis of Indian State elections. Our analysis highlights a number of weaknesses in the construction and interpretation of commonly used measures such as the effective number of parties, the first versus second place vote margin and safe seats, while presenting these and their proposed alternatives for 14 major Indian states from 1952 to 2009. The alternative indexes we present are based in part on ideas that are longstanding in the literature but have not been fully adopted within the Indian context. These indexes incorporate vote volatility, allow for multi-party competition at the constituency level, and adjust for asymmetry among parties of safe seats in the legislature. We argue that these newly computed indexes capture distinct but related dimensions of electoral competition better than do the extant commonly used measures. The analysis of these indexes is then extended to consider the role of caste, class, regionalism and level of development to reveal interesting patterns of commonality and difference in electoral competition across the states.

Several studies have reported a relationship between governments' behaviour in the EU Council and public opinion. However, doubts remain about which mechanisms drive this relationship. We argue that governments align their behaviour with public opinion to forestall future electoral sanctions (rational anticipation). To test this, we deduce hitherto untested observable implications of rational anticipation which suggest that governments' responsiveness to public opinion depends on national-level electoral competitiveness. Using DEU modules I-III and an original empirical measure of electoral competitiveness, we ascertain whether governments adjust their responsiveness as: (1) the expected time period to upcoming elections decreases, and (2) the probability of losing their position in the party system in the next election changes. Our results provide evidence that government parties rationally anticipate risks related to their position in the party system but not to early elections. These findings have implications for our understanding of representation in the Council.

We consider alternative methods of measuring the competitiveness of a majoritarian electoral system in the context of an analysis of Indian State elections. Our analysis highlights a number of weaknesses in the construction and interpretation of commonly used measures such as the effective number of parties, the first versus second place vote margin and safe seats, while presenting these and their proposed alternatives for 14 major Indian states from 1952 to 2009. The alternative indexes we present are based in part on ideas that are longstanding in the literature but have not been fully adopted within the Indian context. These indexes incorporate vote volatility, allow for multi-party competition at the constituency level, and adjust for asymmetry among parties of safe seats in the legislature. We argue that these newly computed indexes capture distinct but related dimensions of electoral competition better than do the extant commonly used measures. The analysis of these indexes is then extended to consider the role of caste, class, regionalism and level of development to reveal interesting patterns of commonality and difference in electoral competition across the states.