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Elections in Australia, Ireland, and Malta under the single transferable vote
The Single Transferable Vote, or STV, is often seen in very positive terms by electoral reformers, yet relatively little is known about its actual workings beyond one or two specific settings. This book gathers leading experts on STV from around the world to discuss the examples they know best, and represents the first systematic cross-national study of STV. Furthermore, the contributors collectively build an understanding of electoral systems as institutions embedded within a wider social and political context, and begins to explain the gap between analytical models and the actual practice of elections in Australia, Ireland, and Malta. Rather than seeing electoral institutions in purely mechanical terms, the collection of essays in this volume shows that the effects of electoral system may be contingent rather than automatic. On the basis of solid empirical evidence, the volume argues that the same political system can, in fact, have quite different effects under different conditions.
Contributors to the volume are Shaun Bowler, David Farrell, Michael Gallagher, Bernard Grofman, Wolfgang Hirczy, Colin Hughes, J. Paul Johnston, Michael Laver, Malcom Mackerras, Michael Maley, Michael Marsh, Ian McAllister, and Ben Reilly.
Shaun Bowler is Professor of Political Science, University of California, Riverside. Bernard Grofman is Professor of Political Science, University of California, Irvine.
eBook
Strategic Opposition and Government Cohesion in Westminster Democracies
Cohesive government-versus-opposition voting is a robust empirical regularity in Westminster democracies. Using new data from the modern Scottish Parliament, we show that this pattern cannot be explained by similarity of preferences within or between the government and opposition ranks. We look at differences in the way that parties operate in Westminster and Holyrood, and use roll call records to show that the observed behavior is unlikely to be determined by preferences on any underlying issue dimension. Using a simple variant of the agenda-setting model—in which members of parliament can commit to their voting strategies—we show that the procedural rules for reaching collective decisions in Westminster systems can explain this phenomenon: in the equilibrium, on some bills, members of the opposition vote against the government irrespective of the proposal. Such strategic opposition can reinforce government cohesiveness and have a moderating effect on policy outcomes. We introduce new data from the House of Lords, the Welsh Assembly, and the Northern Ireland Assembly to distinguish our claims from competing accounts of the data.
Journal Article
Playing to the Gallery: Emotive Rhetoric in Parliaments
Research has shown that emotions matter in politics, but we know less about when and why politicians use emotive rhetoric in the legislative arena. This article argues that emotive rhetoric is one of the tools politicians can use strategically to appeal to voters. Consequently, we expect that legislators are more likely to use emotive rhetoric in debates that have a large general audience. Our analysis covers two million parliamentary speeches held in the UK House of Commons and the Irish Parliament. We use a dictionary-based method to measure emotive rhetoric, combining the Affective Norms for English Words dictionary with word-embedding techniques to create a domain-specific dictionary. We show that emotive rhetoric is more pronounced in high-profile legislative debates, such as Prime Minister’s Questions. These findings contribute to the study of legislative speech and political representation by suggesting that emotive rhetoric is used by legislators to appeal directly to voters.
Journal Article
Top ten endometriosis research priorities in the UK and Ireland
Despite an estimated prevalence in women that mirrors that of diabetes, Crohn's disease, and rheumatoid arthritis, the full socioeconomic impact of endometriosis is considerably underestimated.3 There are currently no accurate non-invasive diagnostic tests or biomarkers for endometriosis. Priority setting was carried out using data from online surveys, online voting, and a facilitated workshop of equal numbers of women with endometriosis and health-care practitioners.
Journal Article
The Attribution of Credit and Blame to Governments and Its Impact on Vote Choice
This article examines how voters attribute credit and blame to governments for policy success and failure, and how this affects their party support. Using panel data from Britain between 1997 and 2001 and Ireland between 2002 and 2007 to model attribution, the interaction between partisanship and evaluation of performance is shown to be crucial. Partisanship resolves incongruities between party support and policy evaluation through selective attribution: favoured parties are not blamed for policy failures and less favoured ones are not credited with policy success. Furthermore, attributions caused defections from Labour over the 1997–2001 election cycle in Britain, and defections from the Fianna Fáil/Progressive Democrat coalition over the 2002–07 election cycle in Ireland. Using models of vote switching and controlling for partisanship to minimize endogeneity problems, it is shown that attributed evaluations affect vote intention much more than unattributed evaluations. This result holds across several policy areas and both political systems.
Journal Article
Political Credit Cycles: The Case of the Eurozone
We study the mechanisms through which the entry into the euro delayed, rather than advanced, key economic reforms in the eurozone periphery and led to the deterioration of important institutions in these countries. We show that the abandonment of the reform process and the institutional deterioration, in turn, not only reduced their growth prospects but also fed back into financial conditions, prolonging the credit boom and delaying the response to the bubble when the speculative nature of the cycle was already evident. We analyze empirically the interrelation between the financial boom and the reform process in Greece, Spain, Ireland, and Portugal and, by way of contrast, in Germany, a country that did experience a reform process after the creation of the euro.
Journal Article
Exploring Voting Blocs Within the Irish Electorate
Irish elections use a voting system called proportional representation by means of a single transferable vote (PR-STV). Under this system, voters express their vote by ranking some (or all) of the candidates in order of preference. Which candidates are elected is determined through a series of counts where candidates are eliminated and surplus votes are distributed.
The electorate in any election forms a heterogeneous population; that is, voters with different political and ideological persuasions would be expected to have different preferences for the candidates. The purpose of this article is to establish the presence of voting blocs in the Irish electorate, to characterize these blocs, and to estimate their size.
A mixture modeling approach is used to explore the heterogeneity of the Irish electorate and to establish the existence of clearly defined voting blocs. The voting blocs are characterized by their voting preferences, which are described using a ranking data model. In addition, the care with which voters choose lower tier preferences is estimated in the model.
The methodology is used to explore data from two Irish elections. Data from eight opinion polls taken during the six weeks prior to the 1997 Irish presidential election are analyzed. These data reveal the evolution of the structure of the electorate during the election campaign. In addition, data that record the votes from the Dublin West constituency of the 2002 Irish general election are analyzed to reveal distinct voting blocs within the electorate; these blocs are characterized by party politics, candidate profile, and political ideology.
Journal Article