Due to the legacy of apartheid segregation South Africa remains a divided society where most voters live in politically homogenous social environments. This paper argues that political discussion within one’s social context plays a primary role in shaping political attitudes and vote choice. Using data from the Comparative National Elections Project 2004 and 2009 South African post-election sur...

Abstract This review surveys the literature on vote choice in Canada. It highlights key findings regarding a variety of factors that influence Canadians’ choice, while also suggesting future avenues research. The focus is studies conducted at federal level, with an emphasis have been published since 2000.

Avenerable supposition of American survey research is that the vast majority of voters have incoherent and unstable preferences about political issues, which in turn have little impact on vote choice. We demonstrate that these findings are manifestations of measurement error associated with individual survey items. First, we show that averaging a large number of survey items on the same broadly...

0022-1031/$ see front matter 2009 Published by doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2009.11.001 * Corresponding author. Fax: +1 (919) 962 2537. E-mail address: [email protected] (B.K. Payne). The 2008 US presidential election was an unprecedented opportunity to study the role of racial prejudice in political decision making. Although explicitly expressed prejudice has declined dramatically during the last four decad...

Ranked-choice voting has come to mean a range of electoral systems. Broadly, they can facilitate (a) majority winners in single-seat districts, (b) rule with minority representation multi-seat or (c) sweeps districts. Further, such systems combine rules encourage/discourage slate voting. This article describes five major versions used, abandoned, and/or proposed for US public elections: alterna...

Lau and Redlawsk (1997) proposed that the quality of voter decision making can be evaluated by measuring what they called correct voting—the extent to which people vote in accordance with their own values and priorities—but in so doing provided little guidance about what actually determines whether voters can make such high-quality decisions. This article develops a framework for analyzing the ...

Results in social choice theory such as the Arrow and GibbardSatterthwaite theorems constrain the existence of rational collective decision making procedures in groups of agents. The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem says that no voting procedure is strategy-proof. That is, there will always be situations in which it is in a voter’s interest to misrepresent its true preferences i.e., vote strategic...

This study applies social cognitive theory to the study of voter turnout, examining the effects of self-efficacy on citizens’ decisions of whether or not to vote. Consistent with recent arguments in cognitive psychology (Fenton-O’Creevy, Nicholson, Soane, & Willman, 2003, 2005), I argue that excessive perceptions of selfefficacy lead some citizens to overestimate their vote’s impact in close el...

Fumiaki Sano and Shintaro Mori Department of Physics, Kitasato University Kitasato 1-15-1, Sagamihara, Kanagawa 252-0373, Japan (Dated: July 25, 2017) Abstract This study discusses choice behavior using a voting model in which voters can obtain information from a finite number r of previous voters. Voters vote for a candidate with a probability proportional to the previous vote ratio, which is ...