Number of Parties, Endogenous Partisan Preferences and Electoral Turnout Rates: A Stochastic Equilibrium Analysis

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian W. Martin ◽  
Thomas Plümper
2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian W. Martin ◽  
Thomas Plümper

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 698-722 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Stockemer

For more than 40 years, studies trying to explain macro-level electoral turnout have been one of the pillars of political behavioural research. From January 2004 to December 2013 alone, more than 130 articles were published in peer-reviewed journals using turnout at the national, regional or local level as the dependent variable. This meta-analysis tries to synthesize the results of these studies. I find there is a strong consensus in the literature that turnout is higher under compulsory voting, if the election is important, and if it is held in a small country. I also find that the influence of most other predictor variables, including the type of electoral system, the number of parties, development, income inequalities and electoral closeness is inconclusive at best. These results hint at the fact that the determinants of turnout might be more complex than the current theory suggests and is rather more context dependent.


1979 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-115
Author(s):  
T. N. Srinivasan

The paper is too long for conveying the message that shadow pricing used as a method of analysis in micro-economic issues of project selection is also useful for analysing macro-economic issues, such as foreign and domestic borrowing by the government, emigration, etc. Much of the methodological discussion in the paper is available in a readily accessible form in several publications of each of the coauthors; In contrast, the specific application of the methodology to Pakistani problems is much too cavalier. While it is hard to disagree with the authors' claim that shadow pricing "constitutes a relatively informal attempt to capture general equilibrium effects" (p. 89, emphasis added), their depiction of traditional analysis is a bit of a caricature: essentially it sets up a strawman to knock down. After all in the traditional partial equilibrium analysis, the caveat is always entered that the results are possibly sensitive to violation of the ceteris paribus assumptions of the analysis, though often the analysts will claim that extreme sensitivity is unlikely. Analogously, the shadow pricing method presumes "stationarity" of shadow prices in the sense that they are “independent of policy changes under review" (p. 90). The essential point to be noted is that the validity of this assertion or of the "not too extreme sensitivity" assertion of partial equilibrium analysts can be tested only with a full scale general equilibrium model! At any rate this reviewer would not pose the issue as one of traditional partial equilibrium macro-analysis versus shadow pricing as an approximate general equilibrium analysis, but would prefer a description of project analysis as an approach in which a macro-general equilibrium model of a manageable size (implicit or explicit) is used to derive a set of key shadow prices which are then used in a detailed micro-analysis of projects.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-353
Author(s):  
Rostislav Turovsky ◽  
Marina Sukhova

Abstract This article examines the differences between Russian voting at federal elections and regional legislature elections, both combined and conducted independently. The authors analyse these differences, their character and their dynamics as an important characteristic of the nationalisation of the party system. They also test hypotheses about a higher level of oppositional voting and competitiveness in subnational elections, in accordance with the theory of second-order elections, as well as the strategic nature of voting at federal elections, by contrast with expressive voting during subnational campaigns. The empirical study is based on calculating the differences in votes for leading Russian parties at subnational elections and at federal elections (simultaneous, preceding and following) from 2003, when mandatory voting on party lists was widespread among the regions, to 2019. The level of competitiveness is measured in a similar way, by calculating the effective number of parties. The study indicates a low level of autonomy of regional party systems, in many ways caused by the fact that the law made it impossible to create regional parties, and then also by the 2005 ban on creation of regional blocs. The strong connection between federal and regional elections in Russia clearly underlines the fluid and asynchronic nature of its electoral dynamics, where subnational elections typically predetermine the results of the following federal campaigns. At the same time, the formal success of the nationalisation of the party system, achieved by increasing the homogeneity of voting at the 2016 and 2018 federal elections, is not reflected by the opposing process of desynchronisation between federal and regional elections after Putin’s third-term election. There is also a clear rise in the scale of the differences between the two. At the same time, the study demonstrates the potential presence in Russia of features common to subnational elections in many countries: their greater support for the opposition and presence of affective voting. However, there is a clear exception to this trend during the period of maximum mobilisation of the loyal electorate at the subnational elections immediately following the accession of Crimea in 2014–2015, and such tendencies are generally restrained by the conditions of electoral authoritarianism.


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