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The 2020 election season brought with it a global public health pandemic and a reenergized racial justice movement. Given the social context of the intertwined pandemics of COVID-19 and racialized violence, do the traditional predictors of voter turnout – race, poverty rates and unemployment rates – remain significant?

Using county-level, publicly available data from twelve Midwest states with similar demographic and cultural characteristics, voter turnout in St. Louis City and St. Louis County were predicted using race, poverty rates and unemployment rates.

Findings demonstrate that despite high concentration of poverty rates and above average percentages of Black residents, voter turnout was significantly higher than predicted. Additionally, findings contradict previous studies that found higher unemployment rates resulted in higher voter participation rates.

This study suggests that the threat of COVID-19 and fear of an increase in police violence may have introduced physical risk as a new theoretical component to rational choice theory for the general election in 2020.

In this part of the book, we investigate the practical characteristics of AGMs in an extensive empirical analysis. For this, we consider the turnout rates of AGMs of seven European Member States between 2010 and 2014 in this chapter. We show that, although there are large differences in total and small shareholder turnout rates among Member States, there is an overall increasing trend in the 2010–2014 period. In contrast to what economic theory predicts, a substantial and increasing part of small shareholders actually participate in AGMs.

In observational data, access to information is associated with lower levels of corruption. This chapter reviews a small but growing body of work that uses field experiments to explore the mechanisms behind this relationship. We present a typology for understanding this research based on the type of corruption being addressed (political vs. bureaucratic), the mechanism for accountability (retrospective vs. prospective), and the nature of the information provided (factual vs. prescriptive). We describe some of the tradeoffs involved in design decisions for such experiments and suggest directions for future research.

This paper aims to provide an overview of recent research on accountability of local and state governments in India.

The Downsian theory of electoral competition is used as a departure point for classifying different sources of government accountability failures. Subsequent sections deal with each of these sources in turn: limited voter participation and awareness; ideology, honesty and competence of political parties and electoral candidates; capture by elites; clientelism and vote-buying. Each section starts by explaining the relevant departure from the Downsian framework and then reviews available empirical evidence in the Indian context for each of these possible “distortions”, besides effects of related policy interventions. The final section summarizes the lessons learnt, and the fresh questions that they raise.

The paper describes a range of possible reasons that limit the effectiveness of elections as a mechanism inducing governments to be accountable to their citizens and reviews the evidence available from the Indian context concerning each of these.

The contribution of the paper is to provide an overview and perspective of recent literature on political economy problems affecting performance of state and local governments in India.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the political attitudes, experiences, and habits of young adults in the USA, with particular focus on their voting habits. Since young adults are just beyond Kindergarten-12 (K-12) schooling they are the voting segment arguably most affected by this experience, and their political habits and attitudes inform educational policy and practice. The concern under focus is that studies have found that this group votes at low rates, especially during mid-term elections (just 22 percent of citizens ages 18-29 voted in the 2014 elections).

Relevant theoretical and empirical research on these topics were reviewed and interviews were conducted with 40 young adults. They were asked to reflect on their childhood, adolescent, and adult familial, social, and academic experiences; their voting habits throughout their lives; and their interpretations of factors that encouraged or discouraged their habits and dispositions toward citizenship.

The majority of participants reported that they did not vote in the 2014 mid-term elections and provided a range of reasons why they did not vote. Many participants also reported a reluctance to discuss politics with family members and friends.

Building on theories regarding the role of voter turnout for democracy and juxtaposing them with competing theories of neoliberalism and individualism, and in light of the struggles for suffrage and against voter suppression in the USA, this paper argues educators can take action to better prepare young adults for participation in electoral politics.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether constituents respond to local government accounting data. Since 2006, New Zealand local authorities (councils) have been required to disclose long-term accounting data relating to forecast operating revenue and expenses.

The authors test whether the difference between the actual operating expenditure as reported in the annual report and as forecasted is associated with electoral outcomes.

The authors find that accounting performance and the sign of accounting performance (i.e. expenditure over-runs) are associated with greater councilor re-election. Furthermore, accounting performance is also associated with greater voter turnout.

The production and disclosure of council planning data is based on the perceived accountability of the council to its constituents. The authors find that accounting, in an electoral context, has both information content and conveys good/bad news about accounting performance to voters.

Purpose – We examine electoral politics in the City of Atlanta, GA, and shed light on the prospect that in 2009 Atlanta elected its “last Black mayor.”  We consider how African American tensions around class and social identity may demobilize key constituents of the Black electoral coalition while an increasing Black out-migration and White in-migration had changed the city’s racial balance of electoral power. Recognizing the margin of victory in the 2009 mayoral election between Kasim Reed (an African American) and Mary Norwood (a White challenger) was small (714 votes), we examine how electoral and demographic characteristics explain this result.Methodology – We utilize (1) the 2009 State of Georgia Board of Elections voter demographic file; (2) 2010 Census data (ACS 5 year estimates), and 2009 Mayoral Election count data. We presented descriptive statistics, comparing community level factors and voter characteristics.Research implications – The limitations of this work is that it is exploratory and thus we do not statistically isolate the effects of class and social identity.Findings – Our findings indicate that Reed and other Black elected officials will have to make concerted efforts if they hope to “retain” the Black poor as well as gay and lesbian citizens within a progressive electoral coalition.

In this paper, we present a critical survey of experiments on political clientelism and vote-buying. We claim that through randomization and control, field experiments represent an important tool for answering causal questions, whereas list experiments provide useful methods that improve the hard task of measuring clientelism. We show that existing experimental research gives answers to the questions of why clientelism is effective for getting votes and winning elections, who relies more on this strategy – incumbents or challengers – how much clientelism takes place, and who tend to be the favorite targets of clientelistic politicians. The relationship between clientelism and other illicit strategies for getting votes, such as electoral violence and fraud, has also been analyzed through experimental interventions. Experiments have also studied mechanisms and policies for overcoming clientelism. Finally, we show that external validity is a major source of concern that affects this burgeoning literature.

In 2010, the National Mediation Board (NMB) decided to base Railway Labor Act representation election outcomes on a simple majority of those voting, rather than on the majority of all eligible voters, as had been required earlier. This was widely expected to make it easier for unions to win rights to recognition in the railway and airline industries. We demonstrate that investors expected that this change would favor unions, just as they earlier had expected rule changes that made voting easier (in 2002 and 2007) to be favorable to unions, affecting stock prices of railway and airline corporations. After the 2010 change in election procedure, between 77% and 91% of all eligible employees returned ballots in NMB elections, demonstrating that a significant portion of nonvoters were not opposed to union representation, but simply were unwilling or were unable to vote. We conclude that the current voting process is fairer than the old one. However, it has not resulted in a tide of union success in these representation elections. Apparently scholars, the parties themselves, and investors all over-estimated the practical consequences of changing NMB representation election procedures.

The purpose of this study was to examine the information needs and sources of electorates in Nigeria and identify challenges electorates faced when obtaining electoral information and news.

The study adopts the description survey design and hypothesized the information needs and sources on demographic variables such as age, sex and academic qualification. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used. A quantitative approach used based on a questionnaire completed by 236 respondents and a snow ball nonprobability sampling technique was used in this study. The research adapted Wilson 1999 theory of information seeking behavior.

The findings identified five information needs that are of interest to the electorates: registration of voter, level of security, right as a voter, manifestoes and candidate profile. It was discovered that WhatsApp, Facebook and friends were sources electorates used most in obtaining election-related news and information. The research went further to streamline the number of times such election-related news and information items were sought in a day and week; it was discovered that the manual system still dominated with the print newspaper rather than Twitter, WhatsApp, friends and colleagues and Facebook. The young person used social media most as source of information compared to aged respondents in Nigeria. Thekre is increasing in women participating in political and electoral information. Formal education does not have significant impact on the usage of election information and news. Language barrier, erratic power supply, expensive network service and no knowledge of where to source for information proved to be challenges electorates faced when seeking election-related news and information.

This research will help to keep abreast of the information electorate needs and how they get such information. This research is limited to small group of electorates.

This paper includes more information about the electorates and political parties information needs.

The finding was drawn from limited respondents that were ready to participate in the research by responding to various questions in the questionnaire. Therefore, there is need for further study to consider a wider population scope on information-related research of electorate in Nigeria.

This research was carried out by Ayinde Lateef; Keriafe D.E. and Fatima Ghayen.