Following the outcome of the 2001 and 2005 General Elections, when the numbers of abstainers outweighed the numbers of Labour voters on both occasions, much attention has focused upon the state of British democracy and how to enthuse the electorate, especially young people. While the government is exploring ways to make the whole process of voting easier, it may be failing to tackle the real pr...

A body of accumulating evidence appears to support the finding that collectivist economic concerns and assessments of government economic performance directly influence voting behavior independent of other predispositions and cleavages. This seems reasonable and is well documented across both cultures and time periods. What remains more inconclusive is how to explain fluctuations in the elector...

No other group is as disengaged from elections as youth. Voter turnout in the United States trails that of other industrialized societies, and is particularly anemic among youth between the ages of 18 and 24. The under-representation of youth voters has been observed ever since eighteen year olds were enfranchised in 1972 (for evidence, see Levine and Lopez, 2002; Bennett, 1997). In the 1976 el...

and Bradford?five of them marginal, and all with large immigrant settlements. Through the eyes of six contributors it studies the way in which each candidate conducted his campaign. It also concerns itself with the political involvement of the immigrants and with the effect of their presence on the voting of the native population and on the tactics of the political parties. Because of the polit...

The Besley-Coate model of representative democracy has the problem of multiple equilibria (Besley-Coate, 1997). We show that requiring the Besley-Coate political equilibria to be iteratively undominated at the voting stage re nes the set of (pure strategy) political equilibrium outcomes only for those cases where at least four candidates stand for election. This note complements the results of ...

How do measures to increase turnout affect election outcomes? I use a novel approach to analyze how these measures influence both voter turnout and the candidates’ political positions. Generally, lowering the net expense of voting reduces political polarization. If the net expense of voting is made very low, then candidates no longer have an incentive to take partisan positions to motivate turn...

This article examines the relative size of gaps in knowledge and participation between the more and less educated as they vary by the quantity and type of news media use. We predicted that the gap between high and low education groups would be smaller among heavy television news users than among light users, whereas the gap between high and low education groups would be larger among heavy newsp...

Understanding the political consequences of digitalization is among key challenges for modern societies. A pressing issue question whether online activities make individuals more close-minded and less willing to consider alternative arguments. We examine this using a peculiarity Swiss electoral system – possibility split votes as behavioral outcome measure. argue that might either likely (“echo...

We analyze a geographic natural experiment during the 2010 Colorado primary election, when counties in Colorado had the option to have an all-mail election or could retain traditional in-person voting on election day. We found that the town of Basalt, in the southwestern part of the state, was split in half by two counties that chose different modes of voting, and exploit this natural experimen...