The Act of Voting

Identities, Institutions and Locale

Johan A. Elkink, David M. Farrell, Johan A. Elkink, David M. Farrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317533344
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Electoral behaviour is one of the most dynamic areas of study in the field of comparative politics today. A strongly emerging theme in recent years has been the need to set the study of voting behaviour in its wider context, that is to understand how the behaviour of the individual (non)voter is conditioned by the environment in which the election is occurring. The main motivation for this book is to respond to this need.

The Act of Voting examines voting – both the question of whether to vote (ie. electoral turnout) and who to vote for – in context from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. In addition to other topics and themes, chapters explore the national or social identities of individuals and how these contribute to complex social dynamics, discuss the institutions that determine who is able to vote and over what, and analyse the impact of the locale on the voting act.

Offering chapters by up-and-coming scholars in the field of electoral behaviour, as well as reflections on how the act of voting should be viewed in the broadest context – normatively, institutionally and socially, this book will be of interest to students and scholars researching political behaviour, public opinion and politics more generally.

1 The act of voting

Identities, institutions and locale

Johan A. Elkink and David M. Farrell

DOI: 10.4324/9781315725222-1

Electoral behaviour is one of the most dynamic areas of study in the field of comparative politics today, and, indeed ‘represents one of the largest fields of political behavior research’ (Dalton and Klingemann 2007: 12). A strongly emerging theme in recent years has been the need to set the study of voting behaviour in its wider context, that is to understand that the actions and behaviour of the individual (non)voter are conditioned by the wider environment in which the election is occurring. The main motivation for this volume is to respond to this need.

Often the best way to move forward is to start by looking back, and in this instance it is to the origins of the field of electoral behaviour research, the Michigan School, that we look. The classic study The American Voter developed the notion of the ‘funnel of causality’, which saw voting behaviour as stemming ‘from a multitude of prior factors’ (Campbell et al. 1960: 24). Thus the Michigan tradition sought to explain the stability (or otherwise) of the vote with particular attention to the stabilizing role of long-term partisan loyalties (located at the mouth of the funnel). Moving on down, it explored the potential for short-term factors to influence the voting decision, culminating in the act of voting as both the remote and approximate influences converge in the stem of the funnel. We share with Campbell and his colleagues the view that the act of voting – both the question of whether to vote (i.e. electoral turnout) and who to vote for – is the culmination of a series of linked stages, three of which are addressed in this volume: identities, institutions and locale.

Elections start and finish with citizens. The lead-up to the voting act starts with the question of identity – the theme of Part I of this book. As far as national or regional identities go, this should be straightforward enough: we are either born or naturalized into identification with a particular regime and therefore we recognize, work within and are (to varying degrees) attentive to its institutions, including its electoral institutions. Social change, dealignment, declining social capital and other trends may raise question marks over the stability of this arrangement (Mair 2013), but for the most part the pattern remains that as citizens we recognize the electoral process as a core feature of identity and democratic linkage (Dalton et al. 2011). Beyond such regional identification is the identification with specific social groups, which impact in a multitude of ways on the voting act, both with regard to the decision of whether or not to vote, but also the vote choice when voting.

The focus of Part I is on those regimes in which identity is contested, or as in the ongoing but incomplete process of European integration whose representative institutions fail to pass muster with most citizens (Farrell and Scully 2007). European efforts to establish a cross-national polis are constrained by the lack of an emergent European identity (Sanders et al. 2012). This is the subject matter of Chapter 2 in which Heath and Spreckelsen use cross-national data to assess the multi-level nature of identities across an integrating Europe, seeking in particular to understand what may drive a growing sense of European-ness, and assessing the impact of the 2008 Great Recession on these trends. Their study suggests that we might over time expect a gradual increase in European identification especially among younger citizens, the more educated and migrants. A key factor in the treatment of European elections as ‘second-order’ (van der Eijk and Franklin 1996) is the fact that voters still tend to attach greater importance to elections at the national level. In a context in which European identities start coming to the fore we might expect some impact on the attention paid to European elections – an issue we return to later in the volume.

Divided societies present a different set of challenges to citizen engagement in the electoral process. In Chapter 3 John Coakley examines the status of the Catholic population in Northern Ireland, a group traditionally in the minority and historically favouring unification with the South. As his analysis shows the province is fast reaching a point where the former may no longer apply, but just at a time when the latter also might no longer apply, suggesting that the Catholic citizenry are showing signs of engagement with the regime they live in.

Separate from the issue of whether citizens are identifying with the electoral process, there is the equally important question of whether and how citizens who might want to engage are permitted to; how this is facilitated; and the choice sets available to them. This brings us to the question of institutions. Old and somewhat artificial divides between behaviouralism and institutionalism have started to break down as an increasing number of behaviouralists devote attention to the interplay between institutions and electoral behaviour (e.g. Adams et al. 2005; Jackman and Sniderman 2002; Sniderman and Levendusky 2007). Indeed, this is at the heart of the ambitious international Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project, which seeks to ground the study of voting behaviour in a cross-national institutional setting. As one of the key movers behind the CSES initiative puts it: ‘one aspect of political institutions [that] has been persistently overlooked [is] the comparative study of the impact of institutions on individual voting behavior’ (Klingemann 2009: 3).

The chapters in Part II of this volume stem from the same perspective. Chapter 4 addresses the voter registration rights of Europe’s migrant populations. More and more countries are adapting to the phenomenon of citizen emigration by extending voting rights to their diaspora (e.g. Massicotte et al. 2004). But less attention tends to be paid to the immigrant populations in their adopted countries. This matter is compounded in the European Union, where freedom of movement to work and live is a recognised right among all the member states; indeed, the right of free movement of labour is at the heart of the EU enterprise. However, it is a right that is increasingly being called into question in a number of the more established EU member states, not least the UK. Furthermore, it is a right that has not tended to be accompanied by the extension of suffrage rights to the migrant populations.

In Chapter 4 Honohan and Hutcheson examine the various ways in which states allocate voting rights on the basis of citizenship and residence status, which is of particular relevance to the role the EU can play in furthering ballot access rights for its migrating citizens. It can be argued that the move to offer ballot access rights to EU migrants provides an important counterweight to the question of whether citizens are engaged in Europe (Blondel et al. 1998; van der Eijk and Franklin 1996); this suggests an intent by some in the EU to engage with the question of enfranchising its citizens across national boundaries. Honohan and Hutcheson’s study provides important normative arguments in favour of further moves in this direction, arguing that under different normative grounds for voting rights, these rights should be extended to non-resident citizens and/or resident non-citizens.

The institution of interest in Chapter 5 is the presidency. The academic literature is replete with studies assessing the pros and cons of presidential versus parliamentary systems, for the most part relating to the issue of systemic stability (e.g. Linz 1990; Mainwaring and Shugart 1997; Przeworski et al. 2000). In Chapter 5 Blondel carries out a wide sweep of all the world’s presidential republics to delve more deeply into a specific feature that might impact more generally on the longer-term stability of presidential systems, namely the electoral process. He examines the interface between the nature of the presidential system (its origins, design and regional context), the details of its electoral institutions (and their electoral integrity; on this more generally, see Norris 2014) and electoral behaviour trends.

Elections are not the only institutions designed to give citizens voice in democracies. In a large and growing number of countries, referendums provide a useful supplement (Altman 2011; LeDuc 2003), particularly so in those EU member states where referendums are regularly used to ratify treaty reforms (Hobolt 2009). Chapters 6 and 7 zero in on the use of referendums in the process of deepening European integration. In Chapter 6 Svensson seeks to explain why in Denmark and Ireland, the two EU member states that tend to make the most use of the referendum route in determining whether to sign up to new EU treaty provisions, the latter is more prone to use this device than the former, and this despite the fact that both countries seem to have broadly similar constitutional arrangements regarding the freedom of manoeuvre of their respective governments. Svensson’s analysis suggests that the explanation for this is found in variations in the interpretation of constitutional provisions in the two countries: in other words Irish governments attach greater weight to the force of the constitutional restrictions they work within, the consequence being that, after Switzerland and Italy, Ireland is among the most frequent users of the referendum device (LeDuc 2003).

How the Irish political elite engages with a European Treaty referendum is the subject of Laffan’s chapter, which explores the variations in the referendum campaigns of the pro-side of the argument for the two Lisbon Treaty referendums in 2008 and 2009. Laffan’s analysis is not solely academic; it is also from the perspective of a prominent campaigner for the ‘Yes’ side. Her study reveals that the factors that made the difference in the second Lisbon campaign were an improved information campaign and the onset of the Great Recession, whose impact was particularly acute in Ireland.

After identity and institutions comes the issue of mobilization, the question of how party actors, and others, variously cajole, encourage and enthuse voters to the polling booth – viewed by Verba and his colleagues (1995) as one of the core factors affecting levels of participation in politics (Dalton et al. 2011). Mobilization efforts occur in a range of ways, and increasingly so at the national level (Farrell and Schmitt-Beck 2002); but the local get-out-the-vote efforts on the doorstep continue apace (Gerber and Green 2004) and it is the latter that is the focus of Part III of this volume – the locale of electoral operations and events. The late US House Speaker Tip O’Neil’s injunction that ‘all politics is local’ still applies, and perhaps nowhere more distinctly among the world’s established democracies than Ireland (Marsh et al. 2008; Sinnott 1995). Chapters 8–10 provide new evidence on the extent to which the locale still predominates in determining Irish electoral outcomes.

We start this section with an aggregate data study. A notable feature of the single transferable vote (STV) electoral system used in both parts of Ireland is the amount of aggregate electoral data that can be garnered from the vote transfers (Bowler and Farrell 1991; Laver 2004). In Chapter 8, O’Kelly uses the detailed count statistics from elections to the Irish Dáil and the Northern Ireland Assembly – both elected by STV – to provide new evidence of the strong impact of local candidate effects on lower preference votes. This study shows that while locality matters anyway in the Irish context, there is evidence that the application of STV can strengthen its impact.

In Chapter 9, Thomsen and Suiter deploy Irish National Election Study (INES) data to assess the extent to which the efforts of parliamentary candidates are the main determinants of election outcomes. Their principal finding is that while the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 The act of voting: identities, institutions and locale
• PART I Identity and the act of voting
• PART II Institutions and the act of voting
• PART III Locale and the act of voting
• PART IV Turnout and vote choice
• Index