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Administering elections is costly, requiring considerable resourcing. The extent to which election administration is funded can reveal government priorities towards democratic rights and affects every potential voter. Yet, little is known of this crucial aspect of public administration, in any type of democracy. This research innovates by seeking to establish overall levels of variation in public funding of election administration in a national general election, and by applying this to the local level to investigate whether socio-economic, administrative or political factors are more important as drivers of costs. The article deploys a unique dataset which integrates rare government election administration budgeting data, with Census and political data to provide an exploratory analysis from a British general election. It finds that key production costs of voting infrastructure appear to drive funding. While socio-economic and political aspects have less of an impact, levels of ethnic minority voters and regional effects also appear important determinants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to investigate the factors affecting the Election Campaign Finance of parliamentary elections in Iran. The spatial scope of this study was the financial expenses of the candidates for the Islamic Consultative Assembly in the tenth election of Rasht Township in Guilan province. This study was conducted in the period of spring 2020 to the end of spring 2021. The main question that the researcher sought to answer is: What are the factors affecting the financial costs of the parliamentary elections in Iran? The mixed method was used to achieve the research objectives - distributed a questionnaire with a sample size of 379 people and semi-in-depth interviews with ten activists and parliamentary candidates. The results of the study showed that the most important factors influencing the methods of financing parliamentary elections in Iran are. This factors are historical contexts and political culture, political knowledge of voters, MP-citizen linkage, citizens' attitudes toward the electoral system, number and variety of sponsors and their motives, the type of political system, social and political divisions, and the economic situation of society. Among the mentioned factors, the MP-citizen linkage and the type of political system have the most impact on how the parliamentary elections are financed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have argued that becoming a parent affects political behavior, including turnout. In this article, we identify the effect on turnout of having an additional child conditional on the decision to become a parent. When parents have a child, nature sometimes assigns additional children through twinning. We argue that conditional on age of parents and birth cohort this as-if randomly assigns an extra child to some parents. With a large data set of family composition and validated turnout for Danish voters, we find, consistent with additional children taking up parents' time and indirectly increasing the cost of voting, that having an additional child at the same time as another depresses turnout for both parents. Mothers who had twins in their first parity are 1.6 to 3.0 percentage points less likely to vote across three elections. For fathers, turnout is only depressed by 0.7 to 1.4 percentage points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Election equipment in the United States is exclusively purchased from private-sector vendors. When a jurisdiction purchases voting equipment, it is actually purchasing the hardware and software along with a variety of services for the initial implementation and long-term maintenance and support of the system. Election services constitute roughly one third of county-level election expenditures. The results of logistic regression analyses estimating the likelihoods of county purchases of different election services from election services vendors suggest a relationship between purchasing decisions and county demographics, namely the size of the minority population. Localities in states with centralized contracting systems were also substantially more likely to purchase all forms of vendor services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young voters make up the largest portion of the electorate but vote at the lowest rates of any age group. While scholars have studied how culture affects youth political participation, few studies have analyzed how institutional barriers affect youth voting—even though these laws have been found to affect turnout of other disadvantaged groups. Considering younger citizens are more likely to be non-habitual voters with less political knowledge, efficacy, and resources, it is possible that these laws have magnified effects for youths. This could explain why new voters, facing new restrictions to voting, are participating at lower percentages than youths of earlier cohorts. Using the 2004–2016 Current Population Survey (N = 360,000) and the Cost of Voting Index to test the effects of restrictive electoral environments on youth turnout, we find that restrictive environments disproportionately hurt young voters by decreasing the probability they turn out by 16 percentage points, compared with older voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a well-established empirical finding that governments on average lose votes during their time in office. This exploratory analysis examines whether all members of coalition governments suffer the electoral cost of governing equally. Using electoral data from 20 parliamentary systems from 1961 to 2015, I compare the electoral performance of junior coalition members, the prime minister of a coalition, and single-party governments. Furthermore, I examine the conditioning effects of economic performance, legislative institutions as well as party ideology and size. I find that there are substantial differences in the electoral cost of governing for different types of coalition participation. The evidence suggests that the prime minister in a coalition is partially insulated from the penalties of government and thus should try to attract junior coalition members whenever possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article evaluates the internet voting's effect on voter turnout and electoral reforms aim to reduce voting costs by increasing convenience and electoral rules have been shown to account for variations in turnout across advanced democracies.

Managing the electoral process requires considerable administrative and organizational capacity. Poor performance can lead to voters being disenfranchised and the integrity and legitimacy of elections undermined. Providing sufficient capacity to manage a national electoral process is expensive. Little research assesses how much electoral democracy costs, and what drives those costs. These are crucial questions for democracies, political science and public administration. Using rare comprehensive data from Britain, this article's major contribution is to begin identifying some of the drivers impacting on the cost of electoral administration in advanced democracies. It presents an overview of influences on spending on electoral administration, before developing a multivariate model utilizing socio-economic, organizational and administrative data on election spending. It finds that costs in an important advanced democracy have been driven in a major national election by the need to provide capacity, notably on the ground close to electors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study replicates and extends the research of Soley and Reid (1982) and Siomkos and Ghosh (1986). The findings suggest that incumbency and promotional expenditures are important determinants of the votes received by congressional candidates. The study also found evidence of the "coat-tail" effect, but no evidence that spending and voter turnout are related. Finally, this research demonstrates that Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions have a significant and positive effect on the number of votes that candidates receive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do prime ministers pay an electoral penalty for using procedural force to pass laws? Influential theories of parliamentary governance and legislative bargaining assume that the use of the confidence vote procedure – parliamentary governments’ most powerful legislative weapon – entails an electoral cost, but evidence on this important claim has been scarce. This article provides the first estimates of how prime ministers’ public approval responds to their use of the confidence vote. Analysing time series data from France 1979–2008, it is found that prime ministers experience a considerable drop in approval after their use of the confidence vote that is not accounted for by standard economic and political covariates. The effect size is similar to a 1 per cent decline in economic growth. The findings help explain French prime ministers’ selective use of the confidence vote procedure. They also suggest that political costs constrain the bargaining power conferred by the confidence vote. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Parties are not unitary actors, and legislators within the same party may have divergent interests, which complicates the understanding of parties’ motivations and behaviour. This article argues that holding a ministerial portfolio confers an electoral advantage, and so, in contrast to their co-partisans, politicians who are ministers simultaneously maximize policy, office and votes. New data on Irish elections over a thirty-year period show that ministers are insulated from the electoral cost of governing compared with their co-partisans. Differentiating between ministers and their co-partisans helps to resolve the puzzle of political parties’ choosing to enter government despite the evident electoral costs they will encounter. Moreover, previously overlooked electoral benefits of ministerial office help explain their desirability, and thus their ability to incentivize legislative behaviour in parliamentary regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While party primaries for candidate selection gain gradual popularity in established European democracies, they remain rare in Eastern Europe. This article focuses on the Romanian Social Democrats and investigates the reasons why primaries were abandoned after one use. The central argument is that this short lifespan was determined by the absence of relevant short-term benefits. A few pathologies of the primaries led to their failure: contest administration, primary regulations and high costs. The key findings are that party primaries did not produce the intended consequences when implementation was accompanied by centralised decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral institutions should systematically affect the propensity of a country to rely and spend on distributive measures. Supporting evidence is however still rare because of the difficulty in finding comparable cross-national data, the employment of dummy variables to account for the electoral systems, and the failure to recognise the interacting effects of different electoral rules on policy outcomes. Employing national data on state aid expenditure and a number of measures across European Union countries, the article provides evidence that legislators elected in higher magnitude districts spend less. More interestingly, it shows the interlocking policy effects of electoral institutions. Where high district magnitude is combined with ballot control, party-based voting and pooling, these rules conjunctly dampen politicians’ incentives to cultivate a personal vote and lead to lower spending on, and use of, distributive measures. Where high district magnitude is not combined with these rules, results are inconclusive. With one exception though, if leaders do not have control over the ballot rank, higher magnitude increases reliance on distributive measures. Results are robust to several alternative political-economy explanations of fiscal policy outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We study a model of elections in non-majoritarian systems that captures the link between competition in policies and competition in campaign spending. We argue that the overall competitiveness of the political arena depends on both the endogenous number of parties contesting the election and the endogenous level of campaign spending. These two dimensions are linked together through their combined effect on the total equilibrium level of political rents. We illustrate the key insights of the model with an analysis of the competitive effects of campaign spending limits. We show that under some conditions spending caps can be pro-competitive, leading to an increase in the number of parties contesting the elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, competitive elections are often concentrated in particular places. These places attract disproportionate attention from news media and election campaigns.Yet many voting studies only test stimuli in uncompetitive environments, or only test for average effects, and simply assume the results are relevant to competitive contexts. This article questions that assumption by utilizing Election Day inclement weather as an exogenous and random cost imposed on voters. We test how voters in competitive and uncompetitive environments respond to this random cost and find that while rain decreases turnout on average, it does not do so in competitive elections. If voters in different electoral contexts do not react the same way even to rain, then serious doubt should meet claims that voters will react the same way to campaign appeals, economic factors, or other treatments tested in the literature. Careful consideration of effects that are heterogeneous with respect to electoral context can make the difference between a result that calls democracy into question and one that is politically irrelevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes sequential voting in binary elections when voters are motivated by a desire both to elect their preferred candidate and to avoid a long and costly election. I find a unique equilibrium in which a voter's action depends both on the intensity of the voter's preferences as well as how well the candidates have done in earlier voting rounds. This equilibrium results in momentum in which voters are more likely to vote for the candidate currently in the lead. Furthermore, the probability a voter votes for a candidate is increasing in the size of the candidate's lead. As a consequence, a candidate is more likely to win the election if the candidate's stronger supporters vote earlier in the election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes during the last decade have significantly altered the nature of election administration and driven up its costs. Interviews with practitioner representatives from the elections community reveal a number of issues that continue to influence this field. Expense data from two counties illustrate how policy changes affect election costs. Scheduled ending of federal funding threatens a 'perfect storm' in election finance that may undermine hard-won advances from 2000 to 2010. Possible cost reduction measures as well as critical challenges facing election administration are forecast for 2010 and the years ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent is party loyalty a liability for incumbent legislators? Past research on legislative voting and elections suggests that voters punish members who are ideologically “out of step” with their districts. In seeking to move beyond the emphasis in the literature on the effects of ideological extremity on legislative vote share, we examine how partisan loyalty can adversely affect legislators' electoral fortunes. Specifically, we estimate the effects of each legislator's party unity—the tendency of a member to vote with his or her party on salient issues that divide the two major parties—on vote margin when running for reelection. Our results suggest that party loyalty on divisive votes can indeed be a liability for incumbent House members. In fact, we find that voters are not punishing elected representatives for being too ideological; they are punishing them for being too partisan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002, federal guidelines established the need for more coordination between states and local election administrators. We examine the implementation of HAVA in rural election districts, where a lack of resources increases the district’s cost of becoming compliant with the federal law. Using case studies of Maryland, Virginia, and New York, we analyze how centralization of state election authority can affect the inequality of implementation costs between rural and urban districts. We find that the centralization of election administration is important, but it alone cannot account for the experience of rural districts implementing HAVA. These findings have implications for policymaking in the area of election reform; particularly that federal data collection should measure the cost of HAVA implementation, rather than just compliance, in the localities so that states could use the data to develop funding formulas that would reduce strain on rural election districts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most studies of the impact of local campaign expenditure on British election results have found that expenditure by incumbents has less of an effect on the outcome than does that by challengers. Some argue that this, in part, reflects an underestimate of how much is spent by incumbents because it excludes their expenditure under various parliamentary allowances which facilitates contacts between MPs and their constituents. Data on spending under those allowances are now available and are used here to evaluate its impact at the 2005 general election in England. The analyses show that only expenditure by Conservative MPs had any impact on their re-election chances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Help America Vote Act that Congress passed in 2002 required election boards to update their punch card voting systems with new voting technologies by 2006. This change greatly increases the operational and logistical complexities of administering elections in many areas. Because of security concerns and the large physical size of some types of new voting machines, they must be delivered to each polling location during a specified day and time window. Therefore, to generate feasible, cost-effective delivery routes, election boards must solve a difficult vehicle-routing problem. Routes designed by our solution methods have been successfully implemented in Hamilton County, Ohio, to deliver voting machines to polling locations for multiple elections since May 2006. We describe our solution methods and analyze the sensitivity of route costs to time-window and delivery-day constraints. Our sensitivity analysis identified cost-savings strategies that the Hamilton County Board of Elections used to negotiate a new scheduling protocol with poll workers; this protocol reflects a compromise between accommodating poll workers' schedules and reducing the cost of delivering the voting machines. The Board of Elections successfully implemented this new method of specifying delivery time windows, which allowed greater routing flexibility, for the November 2006 midterm election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from 191 Australian state elections, we test how voters respond to economic conditions. We find that unemployment has a strong impact on election outcomes, with each additional percentage point of unemployment reducing the incumbent's re-election probability by 3–5 per cent. However, when we separate luck (unemployment in other states) from competence (unemployment in that state relative to the rest of Australia), we find that both luck and competence are equally important. This is consistent with a psychological theory of the ‘fundamental attribution error’, in which observers consistently underestimate the importance of situational constraints. We also find evidence that unemployment driven by a clearly exogenous source – the US economy – has a non-trivial impact on the re-election probability of Australian state governments. Our results suggest that Australian voters either retain too many state governments in economic booms, vote out too many state governments in recessions, or perhaps both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates when a runoff election is desirable and when a plurality result is good enough. A runoff election increases the likelihood that the Condorcet winner will be elected but also entails additional costs. The metric for determining whether a runoff election is desirable will be the probability that the winner of the plurality election would win an ensuing runoff. Statistical models of voter behavior are developed that estimate this probability, which are verified with runoff-election data from United States elections. The models allow governments to make more informed choices in creating rules to decide when to hold runoff elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence from both sample surveys and the marked electoral registers is used to compare the participation of individual electors at the 2001 general election and the 2002 local elections in England. In those cases where conventional electoral procedures have been retained, there is a continuing gap between local and general election turnout. Those who vote at both types of election tend to have a sharper sense of civic duty and/or an incentive to vote based on the benefits perceived to be likely to accrue from the outcome of the local contest. However, in those places where the costs of participation are reduced through the introduction of all-postal voting, the turnout gap disappears as does the distinctive character of those who vote in local elections. In each case the findings support a rational choice model of participation with respondents weighing the benefits and costs of voting in the context of their own sense of duty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties. Our results suggest that primaries, campaign costs and rewards have previously overlooked interactions that should be studied in a unified framework. Surprisingly, increasing the reward may lower the average candidate quality when the campaigning costs are sufficiently high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral bribery is an ancient phenomenon, but its manifestations and pathologies can only be understood in the context of particular electoral norms and political practices. The spark for electoral bribery in the Westminster tradition was the shift from parliamentary service as a duty to a privilege, whilst its paradigm forms of treating and crude vote-buying are traceable to a shift from buying a seat to buying the voters. The gradual move from cultural acceptance to legislative and ethical condemnation of electoral bribery is attributable to a concern with the rising cost of elections and developing notions of fair electoral competition. This article focuses on the seminal period in the ‘war’ on electoral bribery from 1868 to the early twentieth century, giving a taxonomy of the various forms of bribery and judicial responses to them, as well as an explanation of the role played by statutory developments. The ultimate success of this war on corruption is shown to lie in a confluence of politico-legal techniques – election courts, tighter legislation, the secret ballot and the mass franchise – and institutional developments, in particular the rise of centralised, professional parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Determines credibility factors in elections. Costs and benefits offered in the board elections; Importance of likelihood assessment based on information and attitudes towards risk; Lack of credibility of the challengers.

Argues that democracy assistance for developing countries needs modification, not total change. Reaction to Marina Ottaway and Theresa Chung's concept; Importance of electoral process; Costs of elections; Need for increased international assistance.

Points out need for an alternative paradigm for democracy assistance of less-developed countries (LDC). Economic implications of formal democracy; Limitations of LDC; Importance of elections, consolidation and civil-society organizations; Costs of elections; Evaluation of political party donations; Elements of sustainable democracy.

There are many instances in which even in a democracy, the political preferences held by a minority of the electorate are reflected in political outcomes. It is shown that for a simple two-alternative election environment characterized by costly voting and private information, when the expected population is very large the alternative preferred by more expected "zealous" voters, who have either large stakes in the outcome of the election or small costs of participating, wins with high probability in any equilibrium, even if the expected proportion of the entire electorate that shares that preference is arbitrarily small. This is an undesirable outcome under either of two natural but very different normative criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addresses questions concerning the impact of candidate spending in congressional elections in a new way. Development of a multiequation model of congressional vote choice; Estimation using the individual level survey data; Simultaneity bias present in the single-equation model; Evaluation of hypotheses grounded in persuasive communications theory.

Prior scholarly analysis of Israeli military spending has focused on national security questions. We present a mathematical model incorporating security threats as well as electoral cycles and corporate profits. The parameters are estimated empirically. The results support the idea that in Israel the military budget at the margins is also employed as a political-economic instrument to help manage the economy and to provide a favorable election climate for incumbents. It is suggested that the political-economic dynamic widely attributed to Western industrialized societies may be of increasing importance in other societies throughout the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been noted that the cost of running for a county parliamentary seat in nineteenth-century Britain was about twice the cost of running for a borough seat. Since there were no residency requirements and no difference in political power between the borough and county MPs, this persistent price discrepancy needs explanation. Higher informational costs in the counties may have led to fewer contested elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing costs of political campaigns and the resulting increase in the dependency of candidates on political donors has brought greater attention to the issue of campaign expenditures. This study examines the role of campaign expenditures in elections to the Florida House of Representatives between 1972 and 1980. Expenditures are found to influence electoral outcomes in most of the elections, although there appears to be a decline in effect across the study period. In practical terms campaign expenditures are generally found to be less important than incumbency, party, and party strength in determining the outcome of any particular election. The data also suggest that the placement of an election in the reapportionment cycle affects not only candidates' decisions concerning running but also the influence that various factors have on the election outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an empirical analysis on political campaign expenditures in the U.S. Senatorial elections from 1978 to 1984. Impact of incumbent expenditures on re-election campaigns; Comparison between challenger and incumbent spending; Empirical results for elections in the House of Representatives.

The article presents a reprint of the article "Rigged to Re-Elect," by James Huffman. The author discusses public disclosure of political contributions which he believes only benefit the incumbents and discourage challengers. He talks on his campaign for the U.S. Senate position in Oregon in 2010. He mentions the case Buckley v. Valeo wherein the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public disclosure requirements are lawful if they provide relevant data to voters to impose election restrictions.

The article reports on the presidential election in Rwanda to be held on August 9, 2010. It features President Paul Kagame who achieved a landslide victory in the 2003 elections and will be running for another seven-year term in the 2010 election. It states that Kagame was confident that the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) will win in the presidential poll. It notes that the 2010 election will cost 11 million U.S. dollars, which is more than half compared to around 4 million U.S. dollars in 2003.