Political Behavior

Although the ability of voters to locate and distinguish the policy positions of political parties plays a vital role in both the theory of representative democracy and how it works in practice, the question of how voters translate the information that parties transmit about their policies into perceptions of party positions by voters remains unanswered in existing scholarship. This paper proposes a three step Salience-Attention-Cognition model of how voters perceive party positions. 1) The salience of a political dimension controls how much information is available for voters to process: the more information that parties make available about their policies, the more likely it is to be processed by voters. 2) The amount of this information that is available for processing is determined by the degree voters pay attention to politics, which is particularly important for low salience issues. 3) Drawing on dual-process theories of cognition the model proposes that how this information is processed is determined by a voter’s cognitive resources and perceptual biases. ‘Cold’ cognitive factors such as general and political cognitive sophistication increase the effect of party signals on voter perceptions. ‘Hot’ cognitive factors such as partisanship provide both pre-existing perceptions of party positions and the motivation to maintain them, decreasing the effect of party signals. This model is tested using voter perceptions of party left-right and European integration positions from the 2009 European Election Study, and support is found for the model outlined here. 

This paper examines the effect of sexuality at the 2010 and 2013 Australian federal elections. This is the first study to investigate the impact of sexuality on the vote in Australia. It demonstrates that gay and lesbian communities have distinct voting patterns when controlling for socioeconomic status, life cycles, religion, age and gender. It presents four findings. First, sexuality has an effect on voting behaviour. Second, lesbians affect neighbourhood voting behaviours to a greater extent than gay men. Third, there is a difference in the direction of partisan support between gay and lesbian communities. Lesbian communities tend to support Labor and the Greens, while the relationship between gay men and the vote is less clear. At the 2013 election, lesbians were positively correlated with the vote for the Greens while gay men where negatively correlated. Fourth, there was a change in the structure of the lesbian vote between the 2010 and 2013 elections. This study uses factor analysis and multiple linear regression techniques to analyse aggregate data from the ABS 2011 census and AEC data from the 2010 and 2013 elections. The argument that gay and lesbians affected neighbourhood votes in 2013 conflicts with previous literature of LGBT voting, namely Hertzog (1996) and Schaffner & Senic (2006). The motivational factors for LGBT voting for Schaffner and Senic were material. I propose that the Australian context in 2013 suggests that different voting behaviours are the result of gay men being more materialist and lesbians having greater post-materialist concerns. De facto LGBT relationships by the 2010 election had the same material benefits as heterosexual relationships, meaning that the politics of marriage at the 2013 election were purely post-materialist in kind. The split between gay and lesbian Greens voting behaviour, therefore, could be a result of different motivational factors behind the vote for each.

This study examines sexuality’s effect at the 2010 and 2013 Australian federal elections. It demonstrates that gay and lesbian communities have distinct voting patterns when controlling for socioeconomic status, life cycles, religion, age and gender. It presents four findings. First, sexuality has an effect on voting behaviour. Second, lesbians affect neighbourhood voting behaviours greater than gay men. Third, there is a different partisan direction of support between sexual minority groups. Lesbian communities tend to support
Labor and the Greens. The relationship between gay men and the vote is less clear. Fourth, there was a change in the structure of the lesbian vote between the elections. This study uses factor analysis and multiple linear regression to analyse ABS and AEC aggregate data. The results conflict with materialist theories of Hertzog (1996) and Schaffner & Senic (2006). I propose the different behaviours could be the result of different values held by different sexualities.

Η αιτιώδης σχέση οικονομίας και πολιτικής έχει απασχολήσει αρκετά την πολιτική επιστήμη τα τελευταία χρόνια, ενώ ειδικά η επίδραση των οικονομικών δεικτών στην ψήφο έχει αποκτήσει ιδιαίτερη σημασία, με την πλούσια παραγωγή αντίστοιχων επιστημονικών μελετών. Η σχέση αυτή αποκτά σημαντική ορατότητα σε περιόδους ύφεσης, όπως η σημερινή, καθώς θεωρείται ότι συμβάλλει στη μεταστροφή των εκλογικών προτιμήσεων των ψηφοφόρων και στην αύξηση της διαμαρτυρίας. Με αφορμή την οικονομική ύφεση των τελευταίων ετών, ο συλλογικός τόμος που πρόσφατα κυκλοφόρησε – με αφορμή το συνέδριο που διοργανώθηκε τον Ιούνιο του 2011 στο πανεπιστήμιο της Οξφόρδης με τίτλο: Popular Reactions to the Great Recession – εξετάζει την επίδραση της οικονομικής κρίσης στις διαφορετικές όψεις της πολιτικής συμπεριφοράς τόσο σε συγκριτικό πλαίσιο όσο και σε μεμονωμένες περιπτώσεις χωρών. Το βασικό ερευνητικό ερώτημα είναι αν υπάρχει ταυτόσημη αντίδραση στην κρίση, σε επίπεδο πολιτικής συμπεριφοράς, σε  Ευρώπη και Αμερική και ποια μορφή έχει αυτή η αντίδραση· τιμωρία των κυβερνητικών κομμάτων, άνοδος του εξτρεμισμού και της ξενοφοβίας, όξυνση της συλλογικής διαμαρτυρίας; Οι μελέτες του συγκεκριμένου τόμου συνοψίζονται σε τρεις θεματικούς άξονες προκειμένου να απαντηθούν τα παραπάνω ερωτήματα.
Ειδικότερα, στο εισαγωγικό τους σημείωμα, οι επιμελητές του τόμου Nancy Bermeo & Larry Bartels, διακρίνουν τα κείμενα που αναφέρονται στην επίδραση της κρίσης στη μεταστροφή των πολιτικών προτιμήσεων, κυρίως σε επίπεδο δημόσιων πολιτικών, τα κείμενα στη θεματική της οικονομικής ψήφου και συγκεκριμένα της αξιολόγησης των επιδόσεων των κομμάτων στην οικονομία, της απόδοσης ευθύνης και της ‘τιμωρίας’ των κομμάτων στις εκλογές και τέλος τα κείμενα που μελετούν τους τρόπους και το μέγεθος της συλλογικής διαμαρτυρίας κατά τη διάρκεια της οικονομικής ύφεσης.

In October 2014, Dr. Edzia Carvalho (Dundee) won a University’s Public Engagement Project grant funded by the Carnegie Foundation for her research project 'From Polls to the Personal.'

This YouTube video series is a research diary for the project, and a resource those running a qualitative research project for the first time. We record our planning meetings throughout the project.

Online social media are changing the face of politics in the United States. Beginning with a strong theoretical foundation grounded in political, communications and psychology literature, Tweeting to Power examines the effect of online social media on how people come to learn, understand and engage in politics. Gainous and Wagner propose that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter offer the opportunity for a new information flow that is no longer being structured and limited by the popular media. Television and newspapers, which were traditionally the sole or primary gatekeeper, can no longer limit or govern what information is exchanged. By lowering the cost of both supplying the information and obtaining it, social networking applications have recreated how, when and where people are informed.
To establish this premise, Gainous and Wagner analyze multiple datasets, quantitative and qualitative, exploring and measuring the use of social media by voters and citizens as well as the strategies and approaches adopted by politicians and elected officials. They illustrate how these new and growing online communities are new forums for the exchange of information that is governed by relationships formed and maintained outside traditional media. Using empirical measures, they prove both how candidates utilize Twitter to shape the information voters rely upon and how effective this effort was at garnering votes in the 2010 congressional elections. With both theory and data, Gainous and Wagner show how the social media revolution is creating a new paradigm for political communication and shifting the very foundation of the political process.

There is a growing literature that examines the effects of the Internet on political
participation. We seek to contribute to this literature by exploring how online social
networking may stimulate online political participation. Using survey data from the Pew
Internet & American Life Project, we confirm a strong positive relationship and show that
this effect is driven by the level of political exchange within networks. Further, we explore
the potential for the Internet to dissipate traditional cleavages in participation that tend to
mirror the inequalities in the availability and use of technology. The findings suggest that
while many of the “have-nots” do engage in online networking at higher rates than their
counterparts, they are less likely to be exposed to political exchanges within their networks.
As a result, the effect of online networking on participation is more pronounced for the
“haves.” We discuss the implications of these findings.

Online social networking sites are rapidly becoming a central component of the modern
political campaign. We build a theoretical framework to explain how and why state party organizations are incorporating social networking sites-Facebook in particular-into their strategy to support their candidates. After offering some descriptive evidence documenting this outreach effort, we estimate a series of models to explain both some factors that contributed to the effectiveness of state parties' efforts to reach the public through Facebook in the 2010 state elections and how well the
efforts complemented their larger effort to gain seats in their respective state legislatures. The results indicate, first, that
Republicans seemed to do a better job of reaching the public through Facebook, that active use of Facebook by both
parties attracted potential voters to their profiles, and that increased party expenditures also attracted people. Second,
the results indicate that a growing Facebook following across the course of the election provided a larger electoral
benefit for Democrats than Republicans. We offer some theoretical speculation to account for this inherent paradox.

This research probes and proposes an answer to the question of how a political
institution’s authority can change or grow without any systematic change in the design of
the underlying government structure. The focus of this research is on how society and
government engage and change each other. This process is driven by the interaction of
the institutional structure of the government with stimuli it receives from the larger
society in general. This study expands the inquiry of institutional action beyond studies
of individual-level decisions and explores the larger temporal implications of the social
and institutional context in which government institutions must operate.

The trend towards the personalization and presidentialisation of politics seems to have become (in Italy, Europe and Advanced Western democracies) a response to the decline of party identification and party mobilization, with increasing consequences of partisan dealignment. After all, at the level of party politics, we are in the era of parties without partisans (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000; Scarrow 2000).
However, examining the triumph of the "Renzi's Party" at the 2014 European elections only through the lens of the personalization of politics is not enough. In fact, ideological factors such as the left-right ideological dimension still matter in the Italian electoral context (Itanes 2013; Salvati 2014). Moreover, any dealignment is often followed by a subsequent realignment between parties and voters in any democratic context (Wenzel and Inglehart 2011).
All this lead us to conceptualize leaders not simply as a synthesis of personal traits and characteristics, but also as cognitive shortcuts that encourage political judgements and decisions (Sniderman, Brody and Tetlock 1991). Within such interpretative framework, this paper is aimed at investigating how Italian voters were differentiated in adopting specific representations of the political competition in the last European elections. Reliability ratings of the leaders by the voters will be crucial under this point of view. Once established that voters use their ratings towards leaders as a kind of heuristic, we will test the extent to which such information is able to work as a summary measure of different representations of the political debate. Moreover, we will make use of survey data in order to understand whether and how such element was related to voting behavior in the context of the last European elections. Ultimately, we expect from the analysis the confirmation of the existence of different rating patterns within the electorate, of which we will try to reconstruct the general features and mechanisms of development

Since May 2011, the Spanish 15-M Movement (commonly referred as los indignados) has become a major player in the domestic political scenario. Public opinion data reveal that there is a cross-sectional support for the 15-M among the general population in Spain, affecting people of different ages, genders, employment situations and levels of urbanization. The data present a “movement of dissent” and confirm the crisis of the consensual culture of the Spanish political transition from Franco's regime to democracy. The 15-M challenges previous consensus and expresses the need to reform or to overcome the close-knitted institutional map designed by the elites driving the transition. The outraged movement advances and leads a new political culture based on widespread social dissent. Our data suggest an imbalance between the cultural and the political impact of the 15-M, and how this tension will be a central element of cultural and civic life in the next decades in Spain.

This paper makes a revision of the abstention in Spain during the last general elections (2000-2011) and the changing meaning of the phenomena during that period. The analisys are based in the citizen profiles critics and disaffected (Della Porta, 2009; Montero et al, 2013).