Abstract:The political participation of immigrants has received increased scholarly attention over the last decades. However, comparisons between the electoral behavior of immigrants in their countries of origin and of residence are still limited. This article addresses this gap in the literature and seeks to identify the determinants of Romanian immigrants' electoral participation in the local elections of four West European countries (Germany, France, Italy, and Spain) as compared to their turnout in their home country's legislative elections. Looking through the lenses of exposure theory, we hypothesize that contact with institutions, people and values from countries of residence are likely to have different effects in the two types of elections. We test the explanatory power of five main variables -time spent in the host country, social networks, degree of involvement in local community, and the type of relationship with citizens of their host countries -to which we add a series of individual-level controls such as age, education, gender, and media exposure. To assess our claim, we employ binary logistic regression to analyze an original web survey data collected in the summer of 2013. The result supports the empirical implications of exposure theory.

No abstract

The electoral competitiveness among candidates vying for single elected positions (e.g. president, members of parliament single member districts, or candidates for the party leadership) lacks an appropriate measurement. This study reevaluates previous measurements and proposes a new indicator that accounts for the interaction between the number of candidates and the distribution of votes. The resulting indicator overcomes the oversensitivity problem associated with earlier speci cation and provides better competitiveness estimate for various electoral settings. Its applicability is universal and allows for cross-cases and longitudinal comparisons for a wide variety of single-winner elections.