Samuel C. Patterson

Getting Out the Vote: Participation in Gubernatorial Elections

Scholarship on electoral turnout has long emphasized two main themes: explanations of nonvoting in terms of individual characteristics and in terms of contextual variables. These investigations have deeply enriched our understanding of electoral participation, but their limitations have also sensitized us to the remaining problems of explanation. Perusal of the work on American politics exposes a rather striking tendency in studies of participation to ignore, or soft pedal, the effects of active political mobilization. In this article we formulate two models of electoral turnout-socioeconomic and political mobilization-and apply them to aggregate data on voting in gubernatorial elections of 1978 and 1980. The socioeconomic model of turnout includes such influences as income, age, and educational attainment. To assess the effects of political mobilization, we have considered campaign spending, partisan competition, electoral margin, and the presence or absence of a simultaneous race for the United States Senate. Both of the models perform quite well individually, producing significant and meaningful coefficients and adequate fits. Yet in the final analysis we demonstrate that quite apart from major sources of variation in gubernatorial turnout-such as region and presidential versus nonpresidential years-the mobilizing influences of campaign activism and competitiveness have a strong impact on electoral participation; electoral law, i.e., closing date of registration, retains a small but significant effect on voting for governor; and socioeconomic characteristics, included in a fully specified model, have little to contribute independently to an explanation of electoral turnout. These findings are very much in the same vein as related cross-national investigations, which emphasize the crucial role of electoral law and political parties and downplay individual characteristics as determinants of electoral participation. On the basis of the research reported here, we argue that scholars need to pay more attention to political mobilization as an explanation of electoral turnout. In the presidential election between Cox and Harding in 1920, only half of the eligible voters participated. This relatively low turnout, together with the historically minimal rates of participation in state and local elections, created deep concern among those who believed that reasonably high levels of political involvement are crucial in maintaining a healthy democratic politics. It was in this atmosphere of worry about low electoral turnout that Charles E. Merriam and Harold F. Gosnell (1924) conducted, in the City of Chicago, the first systematic study of nonvoting. Subsequently, Gosnell (1927) went even further and executed the first experimental study in modern political science, demonstrating conditions that could stimulate electoral turnout. We, too, worry about low participation in elections today at every level of government, and we believe these classic studies

The Mobilization of Voters in Congressional Elections

Why is it that some voters go to the polls on election day, and others do not? Scholars of electoral turnout have too often restricted themselves to a relatively narrow range of independent variables, and have failed to include important political influences in analyses. In this study, grounded in the data of the 1978 National Election Study and augmented by additional contextual variables, we develop five alternative models of electoral turnout--legal restrictions, socioeconomic characteristics, social-psychological attitudes, economic conditions, and political mobilization. We especially emphasize the mobilization of voters via campaign spending, partisan competition, contestation of elections, and the presence of other, more salient races. Political mobilization survives and thrives even when we take into account the more conventional explanations of turnout at the polls. In conclusion, we suggest that accountings for participation which omit political mobilization are partial and suspect.

Party Voting in the United States Congress

By the standard of most European parliaments, levels of party voting in the United States Congress are relatively low. Nevertheless, party voting does occur in the House of Representatives and the Senate. In the American context, a party vote occurs when majorities of the two congressional parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, oppose one another. The authors construct measurements of levels of party voting in Congress in the years after the Second World War. They then develop a model to test the effects of a number of independent variables that influence fluctuations in party voting levels over time. The study models the time series for party voting and demonstrates striking differences between the House and Senate in the correlates of partisan cleavage.

Mailing In the Vote: Correlates and Consequences of Absentee Voting

American state legislatures have enacted absentee registration, absentee voting, and mail voting legislation in recent years as part ofwider efforts to stimulate greater electoral participation. Californias absentee voter law, greatly liberalized in 1978, permitted the large absentee vote in the 1982 gubernatorial contest which turned out to be decisive. This analysis probes absentee voting in recent California elections, and compares the California analysis with parallel research in Iowa. The investigation concerns the correlates of the rate of absentee voting across counties, and the consequences of absentee voting systems for the electoral fate of gubernatorial candidates. Most strikingly, the research displays important changes in the determinants of absentee voting across three elections in California, distinctive patterns for Iowa, and strong evidence that partisan candidates are likely to harvest absentee votes in the very localities where their party is otherwise strong.

Bringing home the votes: Electoral outcomes in state legislative races

This analysis assesses the effects of campaign activity, measured in terms of the campaign expenditures of candidates, on the outcomes of state legislative elections. The research utilizes election results from the 1978 elections for the state houses in California and Iowa. In addition, the investigation specifies the influence of partisan strength and incumbency on election outcomes. Two multiple regression models are estimated, one in which the partisan vote outcome is the dependent variable and one in which the vote of challengers is the dependent variable. Although the results of the inquiry underscore the partisan character of state legislative races, they also show that, akin to congressional contests, a challengers campaign spending can sometimes have a greater effect on the voting outcome than the incumbents spending. But these state legislative elections are largely partisan affairs in which “bringing home the votes” mainly involves support for political parties in the legislative districts and the intensity of campaign efforts represented by campaign expenditures.

The Structure of Public Support for Legislative Institutions

Research on relationships between legislators and their constituents generally has proceeded from the point of view of demand inputs. This paper views legislator-constituent relations from the viewpoint of supportive attitudes toward the legislature, rather than focusing on demands made upon it. Based upon interview data from a household probability sample of adults in Iowa, this study maps the structure of legislative support in major social and political strata of the Iowa population. Likert-type attitudinal items reflecting public support for the legislature are factor analyzed, and respondents factor scored. Analysis of variance is used to assess relationships between legislative support and 1) standard indicators of social strata: occupation, income, education and size of place; and 2) indicators of political stratification: political knowledge and political participation.

Partisan mobilization and electoral participation

Electoral participation typically has been investigated without consideration of the impact of political mobilization. We construct a more complete measure of participation in elections—voting in and for governor, senator, treasurer and state supreme court justices in Ohio in 1986. We seek to demonstrate unmistakably that the efforts of political parties and candidates stimulate voting participation, even when we take into account other standard determinants. We draw our data from the 1986 Ohio Political Survey. And, we show that, ceteris paribus, the contacts of citizens with party or campaign workers, as well as information about the campaign, have a significant impact on the degree of electoral participation.

A democratic legislature in the making: The Historic Hungarian Elections of 1990

Changes in the rules of the electoral game in established political systems normally can bring about marginal shifts in partisan biases, but in the early days of fragile, new democracies, the electoral law carries great significance. The historic March-April 1990 elections in Hungary provide an opportunity to investigate the political effects of a system that merges single-member and proportional selection of parliamentarians. This system led to the impressive electoral victory of the Hungarian (Magyar) Democratic Forum (MDF). The authors analyze the electoral biases that contributed to the MDF victory and, by the same token, to the fate of the other political parties. They evaluate the electoral system in light of its probable consequences for effective democratic government in Hungary.

Perceptions and Expectations of the Legislature and Support for It

In this study, based on a random household probability sample of 1,001 Iowa adults, the basic hypothesis is that congruence between perceptions and expectations about the legislature leads to high support for the legislature, and incongruence between perceptions and expectations leads to low support for the legislature. Data from the Iowa sample provide tentative confirmation of this hypothesis. Congruent and incongruent groups on each of ten factors were compared on their levels of legislative support. For each factor, the congruent group had a higher mean support score than did the incongruent group, although in only five cases was this difference satistically significant. The results do suggest that support for the political system, or some subsystem of it, is dependent to some extent upon congruencies in the mass public between expectations and perceptions of the system.

Fundamentals of Institutional Design: The Functions and Powers of Parliamentary Second Chambers

There is a powerful sense in which, if you have seen one parliamentary body, you have seen them all. Of course, there are many differences in detail – of constitutional form, organisation, rules, influence, habits, standards of appropriate conduct. Nevertheless, on a wide canvas representative assemblies around the world have much in common. They are collective decision-making bodies that follow long-standing, widely shared practices and procedures epitomised in the British Parliament and the United States Congress and replicated, with variations, in many countries. These two famous, even maternal, parliaments have metamorphosed in many ways over the centuries. Still, it seems likely that if Edmund Burke or William Pitt could be resurrected to visit today’s British House of Commons, or if Henry Clay could sit in today’s US House of Representatives, they would be at home. In 1999, parliaments remained in 178 countries, according to the tally kept by the International Parliamentary Union headquartered in Geneva; today (2000) the figure is 177. The family resemblance among these parliamentary entities is very marked. But, of course, there are differences in the institutional design and performance of parliaments, and these lie at the heart of parliamentary analysis. The upper houses of the world’s parliaments, most commonly called senates, have not been given much attention by scholars or commentators. 1