Ines Levin

Making Voting Easier: Convenience Voting in the 2008 Presidential Election

The authors analyze the choice of voting mode in the 2008 presidential election using a large-sample survey with national coverage that allows a new perspective of convenience voting. Most importantly, they make clear distinctions among the major forms of convenience voting and demonstrate that not all “convenience voters” share the same attributes. In addition, the authors find little support for the hypothesis that convenience voting methods have partisan implications, despite the differences among mail, early, and election-day voters. Results like these have important implications for future moves toward convenience voting and the design of new outreach campaigns.

Political Inclusion of Latino Immigrants Becoming a Citizen and Political Participation

Does becoming a citizen represent a major step toward the inclusion of Latino immigrants in the American polity? I study this question by comparing the behavior of immigrants who have acquired citizenship with that of immigrants who are not willing or not eligible to become citizens, focusing on nonelectoral political activities such as contacting government officials and working to solve problems with others informally or through existing groups and organizations. The data analysis is based on recent survey data from the 2006 Latino National Survey. I use matching methods to control for the nonrandom selection of respondents into citizenship status, and perform a sensitivity analysis to evaluate the robustness of findings to hidden bias. Results suggest that granting citizenship to nonnaturalized immigrants is a measure that, by itself, is unlikely to achieve full inclusion of Latino immigrants in the broader democratic process.

Introduction to the Virtual Issue: Election Fraud and Electoral Integrity

Throughout the world, elections are being used in increasing numbers of nations. Conducting elections is seen as providing legitimacy to elected leaders, as long as they are conducted fairly and with integrity. But it also seems that along with the trends toward more elections around the world there are increasing concerns about electoral fraud and the potential manipulation of the electoral process. For example, recent presidential elections in Mexico have been marred by allegations of fraud and vote buying, including claims that PRI supporters in some areas provided gift cards to voters.1 Concerns about electoral fraud, manipulation and anomalous results have swirled around recent elections in Afghanistan (Worden 2010), Angola (Collier and Vicente 2012), Armenia (Hyde 2007), Iran (Mebane 2010), Georgia (Tucker 2007), Kenya (Collier and Vicente 2012), Kyrgyzstan (Tucker 2007), Mexico (Eisenstadt 2007), Moldova (Senyuva 2010), Russia (Myagkov et al. 2009), Serbia (Tucker 2007), Ukraine (Myagkov et al. 2009; Tucker 2007), Venezuela (Levin et al. 2009), and Zimbabwe (Collier and Vicente 2012) — to name a few of the recent prominent examples. Similar concerns have arisen about some anomalies in recent U.S. elections as well, for example a dispute over the Thirteenth Congressional District’s election in 2006.2 Provoked by election controversies in the past decade, political methodologists have been at the forefront of studying both election fraud and election integrity. This Virtual Issue of Political Analysis presents a number of those recent papers, highlighting the contributions that methodologists have made in developing new approaches to analyze elections data to try to detect anomalies that might indicate the existence of deliberate manipulation that could constitute electoral fraud. Other methodologists have taken a different approach, and while not motivated to detect manipulation or fraud, they have developed analytic approaches that help us better understand and predict election results, and which can be used in the future to improve evaluations of election integrity and analyses of the causes and consequences of election fraud.

Voting Advice Applications: How Useful and for Whom?

The use of voting advice applications (VAAs) has increased steadily in recent years. VAAs have been developed for elections taking place in individual countries as well as for region-wide European Union elections. In this article, we study the determinants of the perceived usefulness of VAAs for their users, with data from the EU Profiler—a voting advice application developed by the European Union Democracy Observatory (EUDO) that was first applied to the 2009 European Parliamentary elections. We use a multilevel latent variable approach that allows us to study underlying evaluations based on ratings of multiple features of the EU Profiler, taking into account country-level heterogeneity in evaluations of the system. The results of this study improve our understanding of the benefits of VAAs for different segments of the population, and should be of interest to scholars and policy-makers who are interested in improving the experience of individuals who use VAAs to inform their voting decisions.

From piloting to roll-out: voting experience and trust in the first full e-election in Argentina

Despite the conventional wisdom that e-voting would take place first in established democracies and later in developing countries, the speed of implementation has been higher in the developing world, especially in Latin America, with several countries such as Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina and Ecuador implementing e-voting methods. This paper looks at the experience of Salta, the first Argentine district rolling out e-voting for the entire electorate in 2013. Based on a survey of 1,000 voters in the 2013 provincial elections, the voters experience and confidence in the election process is analyzed. Among the key findings, there is a strong effect of a voters ability to use the voting machine without assistance on the overall support for e-voting and positive perceptions of integrity in the election process. These results have both theoretical and policy implications.

The Four Faces of Political Participation in Argentina: Using Latent Class Analysis to Study Political Behavior

In this paper we use latent class analysis to identify the four faces of political participation. Previous research has generally focused on conventional forms of political participation (for example, voting), with some research looking as well at unconventional forms of political participation, like protesting. Moreover, most research studies these forms of participation separately. However, citizens actually engage in both conventional and unconventional participation simultaneously, and here we present a methodology that can identify citizens who engage in both, neither, or only one form of participation. Using our approach, we examine a series of hypotheses about how social, political, and economic grievances lead citizens to engage in each face of political participation. We apply this methodology to recent survey data from Argentina, which we argue is an excellent case for studying both forms of participation simultaneously. This application demonstrates the utility of the latent class approach for studying the four faces of political participation.

Computational Social Science: Using Machine Learning Algorithms to Detect Election Fraud

For more than a decade, increased scrutiny has been placed on the administration and integrity of democratic elections throughout the world (Levin and Alvarez 2012). The surge of interest in electoral integrity seems to be fueled by a number of different factors: an increase in the number of nations conducting elections, more concerns about election administration and voting technology, the increased use of social media, and a growing number of scholars throughout the world who are interested in the study of integrity and the possible manipulation of elections (Alvarez, Hall, and Hyde 2008). Although there are many ways that the integrity of elections can be assessed – for example, by studying the opinions of voters about their confidence in the conduct of elections (Alvarez, Atkeson, and Hall 2012) or through election monitoring (Bjornlund 2004; Hyde 2007, 2011; Kelley 2013) – many methodologists, statisticians and computer scientists have contributed to the new and growing literature on “election forensics”. This body of research involves the development of a growing suite of tools – some as simple as looking at the distributions of variables, such as turnout in an election, and others that use more complex multivariate statistical models – to sift through observational data from elections to detect anomalies or outliers as potential indicators for election fraud and manipulation (Levin et al. 2009; Alvarez et al. 2014). The literature on election forensics now has advanced a somewhat dizzying array of methods for detecting election anomalies, without providing guidance

Varieties of Political Support in Emerging Democracies: A Cross-National Analysis

Political support is a multidimensional construct encompassing evaluations of political leaders and institutions (specific support) as well as adherence to basic regime principles (diffuse support). Scholars have traditionally assumed that diffuse and specific support are driven by different forces and evolve largely independently. Prior empirical work, however, has struggled to untangle the two support dimensions and focused predominantly on cross-national differences, ignoring their dynamics. This paper develops an analytical and empirical approach to examine the levels and dynamic interplay of both support dimensions and estimate their determinants, applying it to South American democracies between 1996 and 2015. Contrary to received wisdom, we show that both dimensions are quite volatile and closely linked in this region. In particular, negative economic shocks not only undermine support for government actors, but also fuel democratic disenchantment. Nonetheless, while regime support is rather fickle in South America, it can be ultimately resistant to performance fluctuations.