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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.

How does the threat of becoming a victim of terrorism affect voting behavior? Localities in southern Israel have been exposed to rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip since 2001. Relying on variation across time and space in the range of rockets, we identify the effect of this threat on voting in Israeli elections. We first show that the evolution of the rockets’ range leads to exogenous variation in the threat of terrorism. We then compare voting in national elections within and outside the rockets’ range. Our results suggest that the right-wing vote share is 2 to 6 percentage points higher in localities that are within the range—a substantively significant effect. Unlike previous studies that explore the role of actual exposure to terrorism on political preferences and behavior, we show that the mere threat of an attack affects voting.

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have facilitated an explosion of interest in Bayesian methods. MCMC is an incredibly useful and important tool but can face difficulties when used to estimate complex posteriors or models applied to large data sets. In this paper, we show how a recently developed tool in computer science for fitting Bayesian models, variational approximations, can be used to facilitate the application of Bayesian models to political science data. Variational approximations are often much faster than MCMC for fully Bayesian inference and in some instances facilitate the estimation of models that would be otherwise impossible to estimate. As a deterministic posterior approximation method, variational approximations are guaranteed to converge and convergence is easily assessed. But variational approximations do have some limitations, which we detail below. Therefore, variational approximations are best suited to problems when fully Bayesian inference would otherwise be impossible. Through a series of examples, we demonstrate how variational approximations are useful for a variety of political science research. This includes models to describe legislative voting blocs and statistical models for political texts. The code that implements the models in this paper is available in the supplementary material.

The diversity of the Asian American population presents challenges for theories of bloc voting, partisan voting, and descriptive representation. What cues (if any) do Asian American voters rely on? How informative are racial and partisan cues to Asian American voters. This article looks at the candidate preferences of Asian American voters in the 2018 election. I look at elections where an Asian American candidate was on the ballot and compare outcomes within district to the gubernatorial race (a race with no minorities on the ballot). I use surname-coded voter registration records and precinct-level vote returns to estimate Asian American candidate preferences as a racial group and by national-origin. I find strong evidence of national-origin preferences (i.e. Vietnamese for a Vietnamese candidate) among Asian American voters. In instances where the national-origin of the candidate and the national-origin of the voter did not align, voters seem to rely on partisan cues. National-origin preferences are sufficient enough that in one instance voters switched parties within the same election to vote for a candidate of the same national-origin. These findings have implications for theories of minority vote choice and challenges the existing literature on the strength of partisan cues (replication data can be found at: https://sites.google.com/view/vivienleung/research).

This article relies on the variation of terror attacks across time and space as an instrument to identify the causal effects of terrorism on the preferences of the Israeli electorate. We find that the occurrence of a terror attack in a given locality within three months of the elections causes an increase of 1.35 percentage points on that locality's support for the right bloc of political parties out of the two blocs vote. This effect is of a significant political magnitude because of the high level of terrorism in Israel and the fact that its electorate is closely split between the right and left blocs. Moreover, a terror fatality has important electoral effects beyond the locality where the attack is perpetrated, and its electoral impact is stronger the closer to the elections it occurs. Interestingly, in left-leaning localities, local terror fatalities cause an increase in the support for the right bloc, whereas terror fatalities outside the locality increase the support for the left bloc of parties. Given that a relatively small number of localities suffer terror attacks, we demonstrate that terrorism does cause the ideological polarization of the electorate. Overall, our analysis provides strong empirical support for the hypothesis that the electorate shows a highly sensitive reaction to terrorism.

This Research Note is concerned with the relationship between party politics and the political behavior of insiders and outsiders in the labor market. Insiders have stable and protected employment whereas 'outsiders' have insecure jobs or no jobs at all. Recent work in comparative political economy has identified the increasing political and economic relevance of this distinction. So far, however, most studies of labor market 'dualization' have been concerned with macro-level factors such as political institutions, public policies, and structural economic change, not with individual political behavior. By contrast, we use both macro-level and micro-level evidence in order to examine how party strategies influence individual behavior and vice versa.

Gay neighborhoods, like the legendary Castro District in San Francisco and New York's Greenwich Village, have long provided sexual minorities with safe havens in an often unsafe world. But as our society increasingly accepts gays and lesbians into the mainstream, are \"gayborhoods\" destined to disappear? Amin Ghaziani provides an incisive look at the origins of these unique cultural enclaves, the reasons why they are changing today, and their prospects for the future. Drawing on a wealth of evidence--including census data, opinion polls, hundreds of newspaper reports from across the United States, and more than one hundred original interviews with residents in Chicago, one of the most paradigmatic cities in America--There Goes the Gayborhood?argues that political gains and societal acceptance are allowing gays and lesbians to imagine expansive possibilities for a life beyond the gayborhood. The dawn of a new post-gay era is altering the character and composition of existing enclaves across the country, but the spirit of integration can coexist alongside the celebration of differences in subtle and sometimes surprising ways. Exploring the intimate relationship between sexuality and the city, this cutting-edge book reveals how gayborhoods, like the cities that surround them, are organic and continually evolving places. Gayborhoods have nurtured sexual minorities throughout the twentieth century and, despite the unstoppable forces of flux, will remain resonant and revelatory features of urban life.

The authors contribute to the existing literature on the determinants of legislative voting by offering a social network-based theory about the ways that legislators’ social relationships affect floor voting behaviour. It is argued that legislators establish contacts with both political friends and enemies, and that they use the information they receive from these contacts to increase their confidence in their own policy positions. Social contacts between political allies have greater value the more the two allies agree on policy issues, while social contacts between political adversaries have greater value the more the two adversaries disagree on policy issues. To test these propositions, we use social network analysis tools and demonstrate how to account for network dependence using a multilevel modelling approach.

Nigeria has continued to grapple with divisive effects of ethnicity on the country’s political process. Apart from the 12 June 1993 presidential election, all post-independent electoral processes have reflected discernible patterns of ethnic bloc voting, which indicate a dip in the country’s political culture. The 28 March 2015 presidential election, won by Muhammadu Buhari, also buttresses the ethnic bloc voting theory, with grave implications for national integration in Nigeria. This paper probes the persistence of ethnic politics in Nigeria after close to six decades of self-rule, and suggests ways of overcoming the divisive and destructive impact of ethnicity in Nigeria’s political process.

Studies of ballots have traditionally focused on roll-off, candidate order, and partisan advantage. This study is among the first to assess the impact of ballots on individual-level voter errors. We develop new hypotheses by bringing together theoretical insights from usability research and political science about the effects of ballots with and without a straight-party voting option. By comparing voters' intentions to the votes they cast, we are able to create two measures of voter errors: votes unintentionally cast for the wrong candidate and unintentional undervotes. Voters generally make fewer errors of both types when using a standard office-bloc ballot than when using an office-bloc ballot with a straight-party option, with the number of wrong-candidate errors substantially exceeding the number of unintentional undervotes. Voters' background characteristics have a significant impact on their ability to vote without error. Our results offer a new perspective for evaluating the use of the straight-party option.