In this paper, we explore the electoral consequences of the opioid epidemic in the United States, particularly its relationship with the Republican vote share in US presidential elections. We argue that the worsening opioid crisis is associated with a shift toward the Republican Party, and that these gains result from a decline in both Democratic support and voter abstention. We test these expectations using county-level presidential election results and individual-level data. The findings show that increasing overdose death rates are associated with an increase in Republican votes and a decline in Democratic votes and voter abstention. Additionally, the survey analyses reveal that this relationship is strongest among independents. Independents are also more likely to support stricter border security and higher spending on law enforcement as drug death rates increase. Our study contributes to the growing literature on the political consequences of the drug crisis in the US by demonstrating how overdose death rates are associated with voting behavior, and identifying which voters are most likely to change their vote in response to this worsening situation.

Debates about the nature of a deepening educational divide in politics tend to focus on education as an individual-level characteristic, whether as a marker of skill endowment, an experience instilling certain values, or the consequence of self-selection based on earlier socialization. We instead look at how education (both level and field) relates to political outcome variables as a feature of social networks. We take cleavage-theoretical perspectives on the educational divide one step further by treating individuals not as atomistic entities but as embedded in social structure. Using original surveys from Germany, the UK, and Switzerland, we show that educational divides are diminished in the presence of countervailing networks. Looking at vote preference and indicators of social closure like group identity, this study suggests that segregated social networks contribute to stabilizing contemporary cleavage structures, even as the mass social and political organizations that shaped twentieth century cleavage politics have declined.

In the United States, Latinos are often treated as a monolithic voting bloc, but this approach overlooks significant variation in political behavior across sub-groups from different countries of origin. This paper explores the role of country of origin (CoO) in shaping the partisanship and electoral choices of U.S. Latinos, arguing that national origin influences party identification and voting behavior. Using data from the Collaborative Multi-Racial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), spanning elections from 2008 to 2020, we examine how Latino voters from different countries differ in their partisanship and support for Republican and Democratic candidates. Our findings reveal substantial variation in vote choice and partisan identification based on CoO. We employ genetic matching to control for key covariates, revealing that aggregate country-of-origin differences show up repeatedly in elections over time. These results suggest that aggregating Latinos into a single voting bloc obscures meaningful political diversity and that a country-of-origin approach offers valuable insights into Latino electoral behavior.

This research note introduces the Canadian Vote Intention Dataset, a new, integrated, publicly available database of nearly eight decades of public opinion surveys from Gallup, Environics, Pollara, the Canadian Election Study and the Consortium on Electoral Democracy. The dataset contains 1,019,639 responses on Canadians’ federal vote intention as well as a suite of demographic and geographic variables, including age, gender, religion, language, education, union membership, occupation, community size, province and region. We describe the dataset and custom survey weights, as well as the R package and interactive online application we developed to accompany the dataset. We then demonstrate the dataset’s utility through new analyses of the long-term evolution of gender, education and community size gaps in Canadian party support from 1945 to 2022.

Both gender and ethnicity have received increasing scholarly attention in British elections. But surprisingly little is published on whether there is a gender gap among ethnic minority voters, although intersectional perspectives suggest that this matters a great deal. We analyse data from Understanding Society to test whether there is such a gender gap among the five main ethnic minority groups with high levels of electoral eligibility and participation. We show that there is a positive gender gap with women in Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnic groups more likely to support Labour than the Conservatives, but that there is not a gender gap among other ethnic minority groups. We further show that these gender gaps do not change in magnitude when socio-economic characteristics or political attitudes are taken into account. Our results suggest that further work is needed to explain gender gaps in vote choice among ethnic minority voters in Britain.

Atheists can expect discrimination when running for office. We know less about political appraisal of other types of nonreligious candidates or how the influence of nonreligion compares to other factors. Using a conjoint experiment, I examine how the impact of nonreligion on vote choice depends on (1) the label describing nonreligion; (2) the electoral scenario in which voters face the candidate; and (3) voters' partisanship and religiosity. I find that atheists and nonbelievers are at a substantial disadvantage but secular candidates suffer a smaller penalty. While nonreligion reduces political support, it is not the most important influence, plays a smaller role in lower than in higher level elections, and is generally not a factor for Democratic and nonreligious voters. In contrast, it is a major liability for Republican, Independent, and religious voters, especially when Republicans vote in nominating contests and when they face atheists or nonbelievers as opposed to secular candidates.

Is populism electorally effective and, if so, why? Scholars agree that populism is a set of people-centric, anti-pluralist, and anti-elitist ideas that can be combined with various ideological positions. It is difficult, yet important, to disentangle populism from its hosting ideology in evaluating populism's effectiveness and its potential conditional effects on the hosting ideology. We conduct a novel US conjoint experiment asking respondents to evaluate pairs of realistic campaign messages with varying populism-related messages and hosting policy positions given by hypothetical primary candidates. Although party-congruent policy positions are expectedly much more popular, we find that none of the populist features have an independent or combined effect on candidate choice.

When a party selects an out lesbian as its leader, do women and LGBT people evaluate that leader more positively? And do they become more likely to vote for that party? We answer these questions using the case of Kathleen Wynne, premier of Ontario, Canada, from 2013 to 2018. We draw on four large-sample surveys conducted by Ipsos before and after the 2011 and 2014 Ontario elections. We compare shifts in best premier choice and vote choice among non-LGBT men, non-LGBT women, LGBT men, and LGBT women from 2011 to 2014. We find gender and LGBT affinity in leader evaluations. However, we find that only non-LGBT women and LGBT men were more likely to vote Liberal after Wynne became leader. This article contributes to research on affinity by examining LGBT affinity in a real-world election and the intersection of gender and LGBT affinity.

Voters often face a complex information environment with many options when they vote in elections. Research on democratic representation has traditionally been skeptical about voters’ ability to navigate this complexity. However, voting advice applications (VAAs) offer voters a shortcut to compare their own preferences across numerous issues with those of a large number of political candidates. As VAAs become more prevalent, it is critical to understand whether and how voters use them when they vote. We analyze how VAA users process and use VAA information about their district candidates with original survey data from the 2019 Danish parliamentary election in collaboration with the administrators of one of the most widely used Danish VAAs. The results demonstrate that VAAs have substantively large effects on their users’ choices between parties and between candidates within parties.

Observational studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that party unity improves a party's electoral performance. Yet, due to a lack of experimental evidence, the causal standing of these findings remains unclear. Moreover, party unity manifests in various ways and we do not know how much different types of party unity affect the vote. Relying on a conjoint experiment implemented in a probability-based survey of the German population, our study unveils the distinct causal effect of different forms of party unity on vote choice. We further establish that appearing united can compensate for substantive policy distances between parties and voters. These findings have important implications for our understanding of how citizens vote and how intra-party politics affects the political representation of citizens in democracies.

This review surveys the literature on vote choice in Canada. It highlights key findings regarding a variety of factors that influence Canadians’ vote choice, while also suggesting future avenues of research. The focus is on studies conducted on vote choice at the federal level, with an emphasis on studies that have been published since 2000.

Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) won another landslide victory in the 2020 general election. Although there was widespread dissatisfaction with the government's poor management of the economy and ethnic conflicts, as well as with the pre-electoral coordination of ethnic parties in several states, opposition and ethnic-based parties had failed to gain more seats. Previous explanations had focused on the economy, electoral system bias, weak party institutionalization, and vote splitting among ethnic parties; however, they underestimated the significance of two contextual factors: military dominance of politics and ethnic conflict. This article argues that military dominance hindered normal political development in Myanmar. The anti-military sentiment favored the NLD, which made most Bamar voters disregard the party's poor economic performance. Despite the electoral system's bias, prolonged ethnic conflicts made ethnic parties that had fought for their community's causes more likely to maintain support. These arguments are verified by survey and electoral data sets. The military nullified the 2020 election claiming that electoral fraud was to blame, but the findings indicate that it was the political environment the military created that led to the victory of the NLD and some ethnic parties in the first place.