This article focuses on the electoral strategies of state-wide parties (SWPs) with regard to centre–periphery issues in regional elections. It applies Meguid’s Position–Salience–Ownership (PSO) theory to regional electoral competition in Spain and the United Kingdom. We anticipate that SWPs will seek to vary their strategies, especially in regional elections where they face fierce competition from regionalist parties. We also expect their strategies to be influenced by the SWPs' strategy in state-wide elections. The analysis reveals that the key assumptions of the PSO stack up quite well when applied to regional elections. It also reveals the influence of the multi-layered institutional context in which SWPs compete: at the regional level, said parties do not necessarily adopt the most logical strategy according to the PSO theory if this runs counter to the prevailing SWP strategy at the state-wide level.

Segnalazione bibliografica. Autrice: Yanna Krupnikov American Journal of Political Science, Volume 55, Number 4, 1 October 2011 , pp. 797-813(17) Abstract Do negative campaign advertisements affect voter turnout? Existing literature on this topic has produced conflicting empirical results. Some scholars show that negativity is demobilizing. Others show that negativity is mobilizing. Still others show that negativity has no effect on turnout. Relying on the psychology of decision making, this research argues and shows that this empirical stalemate is due to the fact that existing work ignores a crucial...

Segnalazione bibliografica. National Bureau of Economic Research (2009), working paper n. 15365 Autori: Alan S. Gerber, Gregory A. Huber, Ebonya Washington Abstract Political partisanship is strongly correlated with attitudes and behavior, but it is unclear from this pattern whether partisan identity has a causal effect on political behavior and attitudes. We report the results of a field experiment designed to investigate the causal effect of party identification. Prior to the February 2008 Connecticut presidential primary, researchers sent a mailing to a random sample of unaffiliated registered voters informing them of the need to register in order to participate in the upcoming primary. Comparing post-treatment survey...

In theory, flexible list systems are a compromise between closed-list and open-list proportional representation. A party's list of candidates can be reordered by voters if the number of votes cast for an individual candidate exceeds some quota. Because these barriers to reordering are rarely overcome, these systems are often characterized as basically closed-list systems. Paradoxically, in many cases, candidates are increasingly earning individual-level preference votes. Using data from Slovakia, we show that incumbents cultivate personal reputations because parties reward preference vote earning candidates with better pre-election list positions in the future. Ironically, the party's vote-earning strategy comes at a price, as incumbents use voting against the party on the chamber floor to generate the reputations that garner preference votes.