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Despite recent periods of unified party control of government in Washington, DC, divided government has been the norm in recent decades. Scholars agree that when both presidential and congressional candidates are on the ballot the driving force behind divided government at the national level is split-ticket voting. In this study, I present a new psychological model of split-ticket voting. I posit that ticket splitting is motivated by ambivalence over the two major political parties. I test this partisan ambivalence explanation on split-ticket votes between president and Congress nationally between 1988 and 2004 and voting for state executive offices in Ohio in 1998.1 find that partisan ambivalence predicts ticket splitting at both the national and state levels and does so about as well as some other explanations. The results of this study suggest that divided government occurs, in part, because voters are divided within themselves.

While European elections are often seen as remote from EU issues, considerations specifically linked to the EU came to the forefront in the wake of the 2014 European elections: the economic and financial crisis, the new process of designation of the European Commission President, and the alleged increase of Eurosceptic votes. This increased salience of political debates about the EU asks for a reconsideration of the ‘second-order nature’ of European elections. In this context, as in 2009, the Belgian electorate voted for the regional and European levels on the very same day. Belgian voters were thus offered the opportunity to split their ticket between both levels. This allows comparing the occurrence and determinants of these ‘immediate switching’ behaviours in 2014 with those of the presumably less politicized EP elections in 2009. We do that by employing the 2009 and 2014 PartiRep Election Study data. On the one hand, the article shows that split-ticket voting cannot be explained by economic voting, European identity, and attitudes towards integration in 2014. On the other hand, the unique configuration of the Belgian elections enables us to observe that the introduction of Spitzenkandidaten did enhance split-ticket voting for voters who could directly vote for this candidate (in Flanders), while this did not increase split-ticket voting among voters who could only indirectly support the candidate (in Wallonia).

Ecological inference refers to the study of individuals using aggregate data and it is used in an impressive number of studies; it is well known, however, that the study of individuals using group data suffers from an ecological fallacy problem (Robinson in Am Sociol Rev 15:351–357, 1950). This paper evaluates the accuracy of two recent methods, the Rosen et al. (Stat Neerl 55:134–156, 2001) and the Greiner and Quinn (J R Stat Soc Ser A (Statistics in Society) 172:67–81, 2009) and the long-standing Goodman’s (Am Sociol Rev 18:663–664, 1953; Am J Sociol 64:610–625, 1959) method designed to estimate all cells of R × C tables simultaneously by employing exclusively aggregate data. To conduct these tests we leverage on extensive electoral data for which the true quantities of interest are known. In particular, we focus on examining the extent to which the confidence intervals provided by the three methods contain the true values. The paper also provides important guidelines regarding the appropriate contexts for employing these models.

On the night of the 2000 presidential election, Americans sat riveted in front of their televisions as polling results divided the nation’s map into red and blue states. Since then the color divide has become a symbol of a culture war that thrives on stereotypes--pickup-driving red-state Republicans who vote based on God, guns, and gays; and elitist, latte-sipping blue-state Democrats who are woefully out of touch with heartland values. Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State debunks these and other political myths.

Tests of theories of the electoral origins of divided government hinge on the proper measurement of voter preferences for divided government. Deriving preferences for divided government from voters’ ideological positions or responses to the standard American National Election Studies question inflates estimates of the proportion of people who prefer divided government. We present two alternative survey measures of preferences for divided government and evaluate the measures across multiple surveys. We find that the percentage of voters who prefer divided government is smaller than previous studies suggest. Voters who prefer divided government according to the new measures are significantly more likely than other voters to vote in ways that create divided government in both presidential year and midterm congressional elections.

This paper aims to explain why the Korean electoral reform to a partial compensatory electoral system failed to produce a fairer representation in the 2020 National Assembly election. It focuses on the collective split-voting strategy with which major parties can manipulate an electoral loophole inherent in an MMP system to rationally maximize their number of seats in the Assembly.

How do voters react to electoral incentives for strategic voting when presidential and parliamentary elections are held concurrently and under different systems? Previous research has concluded that different systems can shape the preferences of voters and create different incentives to vote strategically, yet the effect of the concurrent presidential and parliamentary elections is still unclear. This study analyzes the incentives in such a setting in a case study of Turkey. By employing King’s ecological inference solution and using ballot-box level data, this article shows that 9 percent of total voters cast a strategic vote in the 2018 elections. Moreover, if supporters of the two main parties are excluded from the analysis, as they had no reason to vote strategically because their most preferred candidate was perceived to be one of the top two contenders, the percentage of strategic voters increases to 25 percent.

In developing democracies with fledgling institutions, the provision of basic public services is often deeply political. In this paper, we investigate the effect of one political driver of basic service delivery: the degree of partisan affinities among voters. We argue that strong partisanship undermines public service delivery in at least two ways: first, it reduces public officials’ incentive to exert effort in providing quality basic services to citizens; second, it weakens accountability of frontline service providers. Data from a UNICEF project in Ghana provide strong support for this argument. We find that the quantity and quality of basic public services is significantly lower in strongly partisan districts. Initiatives like the UNICEF project that gather and publicize information about governments’ service delivery performance could potentially enhance basic service provision in these contexts. Public awareness is likely to pressure poor performers to improve; awareness among citizens may also spur collective action to demand better services from their governments.

Divided government is known to correlate with limited government, but less is understood about the empirical conditions that lead to divided government. This paper estimates the determinants of continuous and categorical measures of divided government in an empirical macro political economy model using 30 years of data from the American states. Voters support more divided government after increased government spending per dollar of tax revenues, but more unified government after worsening incomes and unemployment rates. Only conditional support is found for the strategic-moderating theory (Alesina and Rosenthal in Econometrica 64(6): 1311-1341, 1996) that focuses purely on midterm cycles and split-ticket voting absent economic conditions.

The linkages between partisanship, split-ticket voting, and divided government have long been treated as trivial, even deterministic. Independents, it has been consistently shown, are more likely to split their tickets than are partisans, to the point that this behavior has sometimes been considered the truest indicator of independence. Similarly, the relationship between split-ticket voting and divided government has gone unquestioned, with several scholars asserting that universal straight-ticket voting inevitably leads to unified government. This dissertation argues that more nuance is needed, and that both relationships can, under certain circumstances, be inverted. The first two chapters focus on the relationship between partisanship and ticket splitting. Using a simple formal model, I predict that when the same party runs stronger candidates in two races, partisans of the disadvantaged party will be more likely than independents to split their tickets. In the first and second chapters, respectively, the theory is confirmed using ANES data from 1952 to 2016 and an experiment using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. In the third chapter, I show that, rather than promoting divided government, ticket-splitting is sometimes a necessary condition for unified government. In 2012, Barack Obama won the presidency while losing the majority of congressional districts, meaning that government would have been divided even if no voters split their tickets. As a way of examining whether or not this was a unique occurrence, I re-examine the five presidential elections from 1876 to 1892. Previous scholars have claimed that the rarity of divided government during this period was due to the lack of split-ticket voting. However, using a novel dataset of presidential election results in congressional districts, I demonstrate that in two of these five elections, divided government would have resulted had voters split their tickets. The chapter argues for a more sophisticated understanding of the ways in which electoral bias in presidential and House elections, as well as candidate quality, shaped political outcomes in the late nineteenth century.