Tag "voter turnout" – News

Andrea Matozzi introduced a model of turnout where social norms, strategically chosen by competing political parties, determine voters' turnout. Social norms must be enforced through costly peer monitoring and punishment. When the cost of enforcement of social norms is low, the larger party is always advantaged.

Anastasia Burkovskaya introduced a model of electoral choice that allows for derivation of joint distribution of turnout and voter share from unobservable joint distribution of costs of voting and preferences over candidates. Under a set of mild assumptions, she showed non-parametric identification of joint distribution of costs of voting and preferences over candidates from observable data on single elections/referendum.

Considerable research on developed countries shows the economic factors matter for voters. But for transitional democracies there has been uncertain evidences of the economics and elections connection using microdata. This view fits the Russian case well, where research on aggregate data supports economic voting but the conclusion can be limited due to institutional restrictions on access to elections and self-selection of voters. We consider modelling economic voting as a two step process, where the voters first decide to turn out and then choose the party at the polls. Given the subjective question this analyse uses, particularly in the context of likely endogeneity, an instrumental variable method is called for. We observed that negative egotropic perceptions does not decrease the probability to vote for the incumbent.

Due to the ability to influence people’s sentiments, mass media is often called the fourth power. Because of this, government usually tries to establish some sort of censure in order to control information provided to the population. However, what is the effect of mass media in political sphere without such control? Particularly, how does it affect turnout? In course of experiments it was revealed that in Russia the presence of independent TV in a region increases turnout in it. The professor of NRU HSE Michael Rochlitz spoke about this and other results on the presentation of an article «Does Independent Media Matter in a Non-Democratic Election? Experimental Evidence from Russia».