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Election Day (election + day)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences75%

Selected Abstracts

Election Day: The Construction of Democracy through Technique

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 4 2004
Kimberley A. Coles
An ethnographic analysis of the international community's efforts to democratize postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina argues for greater acknowledgement of the social within the technical aspects of politics. Rather than viewing elections as a ritual symbolically reflecting or producing meaning, the insights of Bruno Latour and other scholars of science are applied to elections as a site that creates democratic knowledge and authority. Technical practices and objects construct elections as an apolitical and acultural event. However, the forms of authority and social relations created through this apparently neutral techne are tremendously social and political. Democracy and elections are firmly embedded in social practices, knowledges, and artifacts. [source]

Labor Council Outreach and Union Member Voter Turnout: A Microanalysis from the 2000 Election

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Issue 2 2004
Article first published online: 25 MAR 200, Roland Zullo
A resource-mobilization theoretical framework is used to model voter turnout as a function of contacts performed by a politically active labor council. Results indicate that the probability of voting in the 2000 national election was 27 to 17 percentage points higher for grocery workers that received a get-out-the-vote telephone contact just before the election or on Election Day. Workers contacted 2 months prior to the election were associated with an 8 to 11 percentage point gain in voter turnout. The results imply that by pooling resources organized labor can serve as a positive social institution for increasing the political participation of working-class citizens. [source]

Don't Forget to Vote: Text Message Reminders as a Mobilization Tool

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 4 2009
Allison Dale
Current explanations of effective voter mobilization strategies maintain that turnout increases only when a potential voter is persuaded to participate through increased social connectedness. The connectedness explanation does not take into account, however, that registered voters, by registering, have already signaled their interest in voting. The theory presented in this article predicts that impersonal, noticeable,messages can succeed in increasing the likelihood that a registered voter will turn out by reminding the recipient that Election Day is approaching. Text messaging is examined as an example of an impersonal, noticeable communication to potential voters. A nationwide field experiment (n = 8,053) in the 2006 election finds that text message reminders produce a statistically significant 3.0 percentage point increase in the likelihood of voting. While increasing social connectedness has been shown to positively affect voter turnout, the results of this study, in combination with empirical evidence from prior studies, suggest that connectedness is not a necessary condition for a successful mobilization campaign. For certain voters, a noticeable reminder is sufficient to drive them to the polls. [source]

The Voting Propensity of Hong Kong Christians: Individual Disposition, Church Influence, and the China Factor

JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION, Issue 3 2000
Che-po Chan
Considering China's history of unfavorable treatment of mainland Chinese Christians, the authors hypothesize that Christians in Hong Kong reflected their concern over the future protection of religious freedom during the 1995 Legislative Council election, the last election before the handover of the British colony to Chinese sovereignty. We have looked at the relative contributions of individual disposition, the China factor and church influence on the presence of Hong Kong Christians at the polling booth on election day. Our analysis found that Hong Kong Christians are subjected more to the influenceof the latter two factors. The influence of socio-economic status is relatively unimportant in determining the voting propensity of Hong Kong Christians. While both Catholics and Protestants are influenced by general church teachings, this research found that Catholic voters, are more subject to their church's organizational mobilization than Protestant voters. [source]