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Electoral Fortunes (electoral + fortune)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Subnational political opportunity structures and the success of the radical right: Evidence from the March 2004 regional elections in France

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 6 2007
ELINA KESTILÄ
The concept of ,political opportunity structure' refers to the degree of openness of a particular political system and the external institutional or socio-economic constraints and opportunities that it sets for political parties. Comparative analysis across subnational units is conducted where the 94 departments of mainland France are the units of analysis. The significance of electoral institutions (district magnitude), party competition (effective number of parties), electoral behaviour (turnout) and socioeconomic conditions (immigration and unemployment) on the ability of the FN to gather votes across the departments is assessed by means of multiple regression. The empirical results show that the subnational political opportunity structures have been of great importance for the FN. Some four out of the five independent variables are statistically significant and explain a great deal of the variance in the two dependent variables (electoral support for FN list and index of electoral success). Turnout and district magnitude are negatively correlated with the electoral fortunes of the FN, while unemployment and the effective number of party lists are positively correlated with the success of the FN in the regional elections. The variable that indicates the share of non-European immigrants does not provide additional explanatory power in a statistically significant way. [source]

The Effects of the George W. Bush Presidency on Partisan Attitudes

PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2009
GARY C. JACOBSON
Evidence from the eight years of the George W. Bush administration confirms that the public standing of the president's party rises and falls in concert with popular evaluations of his job performance. Reactions to the president affect the favorability ratings of his party, party identification measured individually and at the aggregate level,particularly among younger voters,as well as the party's electoral performance. Bush's second term, which provoked the longest period of low and downward-trending approval ratings on record, thus inflicted considerable damage on the Republican Party's image, popular support, and electoral fortunes. [source]

The Electoral Costs of Party Loyalty in Congress

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 3 2010
Jamie L. Carson
To what extent is party loyalty a liability for incumbent legislators? Past research on legislative voting and elections suggests that voters punish members who are ideologically "out of step" with their districts. In seeking to move beyond the emphasis in the literature on the effects of ideological extremity on legislative vote share, we examine how partisan loyalty can adversely affect legislators' electoral fortunes. Specifically, we estimate the effects of each legislator's party unity,the tendency of a member to vote with his or her party on salient issues that divide the two major parties,on vote margin when running for reelection. Our results suggest that party loyalty on divisive votes can indeed be a liability for incumbent House members. In fact, we find that voters are not punishing elected representatives for being too ideological; they are punishing them for being too partisan. [source]

Partisan Waves: International Business Cycles and Electoral Choice

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 4 2009
Mark Andreas Kayser
Pundits have often claimed, but scholars have never found, that partisan swings in the vote abroad predict electoral fortunes at home. Employing semiannual Eurobarometer data on vote intention in eight European countries, this article provides statistical evidence of international comovement in partisan vote intention and its provenance in international business cycles. Electoral support for "luxury parties," those parties associated with higher spending and taxation, covaries across countries together with the business cycle. Both the domestic and international components of at least one economic aggregate,unemployment,prove a strong predictor of shifts in domestic vote intention. Globalization, by driving business cycle integration, is also synchronizing partisan cycles. [source]

Capital and the Lagos Presidency: Business as Usual?

BULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 3 2002
Eduardo Silva
Business-state relations in Chile's new democracy had been relatively tension-free for the first two governments of the centre-left Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia. However, during the first two years of the third Concertación administration, under the presidency of Ricardo Lagos, the relationship soured dramatically. At first glance, an ideological shift in the ruling coalition's centre of gravity would seem to explain the change in business-state relations. During the first two governments more conservative factions of the centrist Christian Democratic party had controlled the Concertación. Lagos, on the other hand, represented the left pole of the coalition and his socialist credentials brought the long shadow of the past on his presidency. This, however is an insufficient cause, three additional conditions must also be taken into account. The first one considers changes in the institutional and economic context that eroded the private sector's confidence in the Concertación's commitment to maintain the free-market socioeconomic model imposed under military rule. The second and third conditions are a decline in the electoral fortunes of the Concertación in favour of conservative parties and a shift in power relations among employers' associations towards more confrontational factions. [source]