The Passive-Aggressive Voter

Abstract

Invalid votes are often considered as simple failure to cast a valid vote. In fact, they might be a rational expression of discontent with party policy offerings. By employing individual and party system-level data on eighteen European party systems, this article focuses on voter discontent and voter apathy as two major determinants of casting an invalid vote and seeks to answer why some voters intentionally waste their votes despite paying the costs of voting. I find that higher distinct policy offerings decrease the probability of casting an invalid vote. However, voting behaviors of politically sophisticated and unsophisticated voters vary conditionally on the diversity of policy offerings and the cost of information. On one hand, when a party system offers a larger set of policy offerings, politically sophisticated voters become less likely to cast an invalid vote and more likely to support niche parties. On the other hand, sophisticated voters cannot deal with increasing cost of information, and are more likely to cast an invalid vote, especially in party systems with compulsory voting where the cost of nonvoting is higher.

Public policy and elections in authoritarian regimes: evidence from the policy on native languages in Russia

“…While some ethnic minorities may have expressed their dissatisfaction by voting for the regime’s opposition in lieu of Putin as anticipated in H2, others may have decided not to vote altogether. Existing research substantiates the use of abstention as a method of electoral protest and argues that it “constitute[s] a significant political act rather than passivity” (Karklins 1986, 449; see also Alvarez et al 2018; Uggla 2008; Moral 2016; Runciman 2016). Moreover, the policy changes may have also affected the ability of the local elites to mobilise voters to turn out.…”

On the relationship between party polarization and citizen polarization

“…For our measure of political sophistication, we divided citizens into three equally sized groups based on their political information about parties’ ideological stands. Following previous literature (e.g., Gordon and Segura, 1997; Moral, 2016), we calculate the absolute distance between the mean (respondent) placement of each party and each respondent’s placement of the party to measure her level of information about the party’s ideological stand. 11 We then use those scores for each of the parties asked in a given survey to created an additive scale, and divided the resulting continuous scale into three equally sized groups to determine the respondents with low, medium, and high levels of sophistication.…”

“…The data employed in our empirical analyses in the next section are composed of 174 election surveys in 19 established democracies (Australia 1996-2019, Austria 1995-2017, Denmark 1988, Finland 1991-2019, France 1988-2017, Germany 1976-2017, Greece 1993, Ireland 1989-2016, Italy 1987-2018, Luxembourg 1989-2018, the Netherlands 1971-2017, New Zealand 1990-2017, Norway 1973-2017, Portugal 1987, Spain 1986-2019, Sweden 1979-2018, Switzerland 1995, United Kingdom 1983-2017, and United States 1972-2016. In compiling our data, we merged all five modules of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), the European Voter dataset, and the European Election (voter) Studies (EES) 3 asking respondents about their self-placements and their placements of political parties, that contest national legislative elections, on the leftright scale .…”

“…In order to account for such unbalanced nature of our timeseries cross-sectional data, we report Prais-Winsten regressions correcting for unbalanced-panel specific first-order autocorrelation, and random-effects generalized least-square regressions, which aim to account for possible cross-national non-equivalence (Stegmueller, 2011), in Supplemental Appendix K. 7. Party and self-placement questions in survey studies from Austria (2006), Finland (1991), Germany(1976, 1983, 1990), New Zealand (1990, 1993), Netherlands (1971, 1972, 1981, 1982), Norway (1973-1993), Spain (1989, 2016, United Kingdom (1983), United States (1972-2016, and the European Election Study voter studies were transformed using a linear extension rule (also see: Powell and Vanberg, 2000; Supplemental Appendix I) as follows: 10 × (X À a)/(b À a) where a is the minimum and b is the maximum values, and X is the mean perceived stand of a given party on the transformed scale. 8.…”

The Impact of the Electoral Laws on Electoral Participation in Bosnia and Herzegovina

“…It is a form of expressing dissatisfaction with the democratic process. There can be various reasons for this, one of them being that the political demands of political minorities are disregarded or are perceived to be (Moral, 2016).…”