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ZusammenfassungDie Frage nach der Auswirkung von Zustimmungsquoren auf die politische Partizipation gewinnt mit jedem Volksentscheid an Bedeutung, ist gleichzeitig aber noch weitgehend unerforscht. Obwohl das Zustimmungsquorum Volksentscheide in den Ländern der Bundesrepublik Deutschland beschränkt und auch in anderen Ländern weit verbreitet ist, konzentrierte sich die Forschung bislang auf die Analyse des Beteiligungsquorums. Wir argumentieren, dass auch ein Zustimmungsquorum Anreize für Bürgerinnen und Bürger sowie kollektive Akteure setzt, die Abstimmung zu boykottieren. Dieser Aufsatz versucht daher, den Einfluss von Zustimmungsquoren auf die Abstimmungsbeteiligung und Mehrheitsbilder in allen auf Basis eines Volksbegehrens initiierten Volksentscheide auf Ebene der deutschen Bundesländer zu erfassen. Neben einer Gegenüberstellung von Entscheiden mit und ohne Zustimmungsquorum wird mittels Regressionsanalysen die Korrelation zwischen der Quorenhöhe, der Salienz der Abstimmungsfrage und der Abstimmungsbeteiligung berechnet. Übereinstimmend mit unseren theoretischen Erwartungen zeigen unsere Ergebnisse einen robusten, jedoch nur selten signifikanten, negativen Zusammenhang zwischen der Höhe von Zustimmungsquoren und der Abstimmungsbeteiligung, welcher sich insbesondere bei Entscheiden von geringer gesellschaftlicher Salienz zeigt.

How does losing one’s right to vote again after having been eligible to vote before affect political fundamentals such as political efficacy? We draw attention to the hitherto neglected phenomenon “temporary disenfranchisement,” which, for instance, occurs regularly in states that extended the franchise to underage citizens in some but not all elections. If an election with voting age 16 is closely followed by an election with voting age 18, underage voters who are eligible for the former will have no right to vote in the latter. Using original panel data on young citizens in Germany and a differences-in-differences design, we find that temporary disenfranchisement results in a decrease in external efficacy, which remains even after regaining eligibility. Our findings highlight an important side effect of selective voting rights extensions and bear insights that are relevant to other cases of temporary disenfranchisement due to residential mobility, citizenship, or felony disenfranchisement.

Polarisation over cultural issues and the emergence of radical, often populist, challenger parties indicate a fundamental restructuring of political conflict in Western Europe. The emerging divide crosscuts and, in part, reshapes older cleavages. This special issue introduction highlights how the transformation of cleavage structures relates to the dynamics of polarisation and political participation. The contributions to the special issue innovate in two ways. First, they adapt concepts and measures of ideological and affective polarisation to the context of Europe’s multi-party and multi-dimensional party competition. Second, they emphasise electoral and protest politics, examining how ideological and affective polarisation shape electoral and non-electoral participation. Apart from introducing the contributions, the introduction combines different datasets – the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the European Social Survey – to sketch an empirical picture of differentiated polarisation with types of polarisation only weakly associated cross-arena, cross-nationally and over time.

Contains fulltext : 225256pre.pdf (Author’s version preprint ) (Open Access) While some consider populist parties to be a threat to liberal democracy, others have argued that populist parties may positively affect the quality of democracy by increasing political participation of citizens. This supposition, however, has hitherto not been subjected to rigorous empirical tests. The voter turnout literature, moreover, has primarily focused on stable institutional and party system characteristics – ignoring more dynamic determinants of voter turnout related to party competition. To fill this double gap in the literature, we examine the effect of populist parties, both left and right, on aggregate-level turnout in Western and Eastern European parliamentary elections. Based on a dataset on 315 elections in 31 European democracies since 1970s, we find that turnout is higher when populist parties are represented in parliament prior to an election in Eastern Europe, but not in Western Europe. These findings further our understanding of the relationship between populism, political participation and democracy. 17 juni 2020 21 p.

Does the populist radical right benefit from increased electoral mobilization? Integrating theories of political grievances with accounts of party competition in Western Europe, we contend that the populist right gains advantage from increased electoral mobilization, but that this effect is conditional on political disaffection. We draw on a novel panel dataset (2009–2019) of more than 10,000 German municipalities and city districts to study the implications of turnout surges as a function of pre-existing levels of political disaffection in a difference-in-differences design. The results demonstrate that turnout surges benefit the populist right “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD) in contexts of widespread political distrust. In contrast, increased mobilization acts to depress its electoral fortunes in communities marked by low baseline levels of political disaffection. In shedding light on the interplay between political disaffection and electoral mobilization, this study has important implications for understanding the surge of the populist right in established democracies.

Concurrent elections are widely used to increase turnout. We theorize and show empirically how concurrency affects electoral outcomes. First, concurrency increases turnout and thereby the participation of peripheral voters. Second, in combined elections, one electoral arena affects the other. In our case of majoritarian executive elections concurrent to proportional representation (PR) legislative elections, the centripetal tendency of majoritarian elections colors off to the concurrent PR race. Third, concurrency also entails spillovers of the incumbency advantage of executive officeholders to the concurrent legislative race. Drawing on quasi-random variation in local election timing in Germany, we show that concurrency increases turnout as well as council votes for the incumbent mayor's party and centrist parties more generally, with slightly more pronounced gains for the political left. As a consequence, concurrent elections consolidate party systems and political power by leading to less fragmented municipal councils and more unified local governments.

This paper addresses instrumentalist attitudes to democracy – attitudes according to which democracy is not valued for itself, but accepted only as a means to specific policy goals. Pippa Norris ha...

https://zparl.de/aktuelle-ausgabe/abstracts-akt-ausg-deutsch/

This opinion piece provides a researcher's view on the role of predatory journals for scientists.It is a reaction to an inverstigation, publishedby German public television stations WDR and NDR as well as the newspaperSüddeutsche Zeitunge about "fake science" that is described in these publications as a scandal. &nbsp

Direct democracy allows citizens to reverse decisions made by legislatures and even initiate new laws which parliaments are unwilling to pass, thereby, as its proponents argue, leading to more representative policies than would have obtained under a purely representative democracy. Yet, turnout in referendums is usually lower than in parliamentary elections and tends to be skewed towards citizens of high socio-economic status. Consequently, critics of direct democracy argue that referendum outcomes may not be representative of the preferences of the population at large. We test this assertion using a compilation of post-referendum surveys encompassing 148 national referendums held in Switzerland between 1981 and 1999. Uniquely, these surveys also asked non-voters about their opinion on the referendum's subject. Comparing opinion majorities in the surveys against actual referendum outcomes we show that representativeness increases slightly in turnout as well as over time. However, we find only few cases where the outcome would have been more representative even under full turnout vis-a-vis a counterfactual representative outcome. Thus, our results are in line with research on the turnout effect in elections: Higher turnout would not radically change the outcome of votes. On balance we find more cases where referendums provided more representative outcomes than cases where the outcome was unrepresentative vis-a-vis representative democracy. Hence, we conclude that, overall, direct democracy seems to improve representation in Switzerland.

In Germany, eleven of sixteen states have lowered the voting age for municipal elections or state and municipal elections from 18 to 16. This chapter describes the German case and provides evidence on the political consequences of these reforms. Using the so-called representative electoral statistics, the authors show that turnout among 16- to 20-year olds is higher than among citizens up to ten years older. Even though comparisons of turnout among 16- and 17-year olds with that among 18- and 19-year-olds remain inconclusive, the authors support a lowering of the voting age, because it would imply that more citizens experience their first election when 20 years or younger, which should be beneficial for higher turnout rates in the long run. As vote choices are concerned, there seems to be a slight tendency for younger voters to vote for left parties, in particular, the Greens, as well as smaller parties more generally, while the Christian Democratic CDU does worse. Germany’s political parties seem to be aware of this: Center-left governing coalitions passed almost all reforms in states where the voting age was regulated by state law rather than states where state constitutions had to be changed.

Wenn der Wahltermin noch in weiter Ferne liegt, stellen Umfragen keine guten Prognosen dar. Zu wenige Wähler interessieren sich zu einem so frühen Zeitpunkt schon für die Wahl und zu viele Umstände können sich bis dahin noch ändern. Zwar eignen sich sogenannte strukturelle Modelle dazu, grundlegende Erwartungswerte aufzustellen, jedoch sind diese aufgrund kleiner Stichproben sehr unsicher und ungenau. Um diesen Mängeln zu begegnen, beruht unsere frühzeitige Prognose der Bundestagswahlergebnisse 2017 sowohl auf politischen und wirtschaftlichen Daten als auch auf Resultaten vorangegangener Landtagswahlen. Ein Mehrebenenmodell liefert dabei die Schätzwerte. Landtagswahlen finden zu unterschiedlichen Terminen statt und bringen den Vorzug mit sich, nicht nur tatsächliche Wählerpräferenzen, sondern auch neue politische Themen zu erfassen. Wir argumentieren, dass dieser Ansatz deshalb eine vielversprechende Methode für frühzeitige Prognosen darstellt, wenn Umfragen noch nicht aussagekräftig sind. When elections are distant, polls are poor predictors. Too few voters are paying attention and too much can change before election day. Structural models can establish baseline expectations but suffer from high uncertainty and underspecification imposed by small samples. We present an early forecast of the 2017 Bundestag election results for individual parties that leverages economic and political data as well as state parliament (Landtag) election results in the German states (Länder) to sidestep these shortcomings. A linear random effectst model provides our estimates. Länder elections are dispersed over the calendar and offer the advantage of capturing both actual voter preferences and new political issues. We argue that this approach offers a promising method for early forecasts when polls are not informative.

Bargaining and coalition building are a central part of modern politics. We argue that majoritarian bargaining is important for the formation of coalitions and that group-identity preferences have an impact on partner selection. We tested the effect of gender, race, and ideological distance in a majority-rule bargaining experiment and found that ideological distance significantly affected the likelihood and amount offered to potential partners. We concluded that formateurs are not necessarily purely rational actors pursuing policy goals and/or the benefits of office. Rather, they also care about the identity of their partners, preferring others who are like themselves.

Referendums provide citizens with more control over policy. At the same time, they often entail choices over highly complex policies and are politicised along partisan lines, suggesting that partisan rather than policy considerations will guide voters’ choices. I look to the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum, which was particularly complex and polarised, as an opportunity to test for mechanisms of government accountability in a referendum. Using a national survey of voters, I show that the more negative a respondent’s evaluation of the state of the economy, the lower their likelihood to vote ‘yes’ on the government’s reform proposal. This relationship is remarkably strong: an average respondent with a very positive evaluation of the state of the economy has an 88% probability of supporting the government’s reform proposal compared to only 12% for a respondent with a very negative evaluation. The fact that economic evaluations are a strong determinant of vote choice provides evidence for the existence of an economic vote in a referendum. This further suggests that voters may treat referendums as a sort of second-order election.

Do voters judge their national economy relative to economic performance abroad? In 2013 we took advantage of the German Bundestag election to test this hypothesis predictively. Nearly two months prior to the election, we published an election forecast relying on a theory-driven empirical model of election outcomes that draws on previous election outcomes; characteristics of the government and of voters; and, most originally, the relative economic performance of Germany ('benchmarked' growth) in comparison to the three other most important economies in Europe - France, the UK and Italy. Our forecast put the outgoing coalition government of CDU/CSU and FDP at 47.05 per cent of the popular vote deviating from the actual outcome of 46.3 by 0.75 points. This makes our forecast one of the most accurate in this election cycle. Despite one-and-a-half months of lead time, our forecast performed on par or slightly better than the last poll results issued only two days before the election.

Voter turnout in second-order elections is on a dramatic decline in many modern democracies. This article investigates how electoral participation can be substantially increased by holding multiple of these less important elections simultaneously. Leading to a relative decrease in voting costs, concurrent elections theoretically have economies of scale to the individual voter and thus should see turnout levels larger than those obtained in any stand-alone election. Leveraging as-if-random variation of local election timing in Germany, we estimate the causal effect of concurrent mayoral elections on European election turnout at around 10 percentage points. Exploiting variation in treatment intensity, we show that the magnitude of the concurrency effect is contingent upon district size and the competitiveness of the local race.

When elections are distant, polls are poor predictors. Too few voters are paying attention and too much can change before election day. Structural models can establish baseline expectations but suffer from high uncertainty and underspecification imposed by small samples. We present an early forecast of the 2017 Bundestag election results for individual parties that leverages economic and political data as well as state parliament (Landtag) election results in the German states (Länder) to sidestep these shortcomings. A linear random effectst model provides our estimates. Länder elections are dispersed over the calendar and offer the advantage of capturing both actual voter preferences and new political issues. We argue that this approach offers a promising method for early forecasts when polls are not informative.

Diagnoses of a democratic recession or ‘hollowing out’ of democracy are numerous and varied but usually encompass the following symptoms: a decline in turnout and other forms of political participation; policy making that is increasingly detached from ordinary citizens and their preferences; and an erosion of trust in government and satisfaction with democracy among citizens – all of which ultimately challenge the legitimacy of democratic institutions. Direct democracy is one of the most prominent, far-reaching and popular remedies proposed in response to such diagnoses. It, by allowing citizens to directly vote on questions usually decided by representatives, seems intuitively appealing as an obvious extension and deepening of democracy. In this article I survey the potentials but also pitfalls of an increased institutionalization of direct democracy and use thereof in the countries of the EU focusing on the three key aspects identified above: representation, turnout and citizens’ political support.

Economic performance is a key component of most election forecasts. When fitting models, however, most forecasters unwittingly assume that the actual state of the economy, a state best estimated by the multiple periodic revisions to official macroeconomic statistics, drives voter behavior. The difference in macroeconomic estimates between revised and original data vintages can be substantial, commonly over 100% (two-fold) for economic growth estimates, making the choice of which data release to use important for the predictive validity of a model. We systematically compare the predictions of four forecasting models for numerous US presidential elections using real-time and vintage data. We find that newer data are not better data for election forecasting: forecasting error increases with data revisions. This result suggests that voter perceptions of economic growth are influenced more by media reports about the economy, which are based on initial economic estimates, than by the actual state of the economy.