Modelling electoral second choices: thwarted voters in the United States, France, and Russia

Electoral Studies 22 (2003) 265–285 www.elsevier.com/locate/electstud

Modelling electoral second choices: thwarted voters in the United States, France, and Russia Roy Pierce ∗ Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan, 4265 ISR Ann Arbor, MI 48106, USA

Abstract Thwarted voters are voters who are prevented by the play of the electoral process from casting their vote for their preferred candidates at the decisive ballot, whether this involves primary elections for party nominations, as in the United States, or a two-ballot electoral system, as in France and Russia. When thwarted voters are anchored in basic political orientations, such as party identification or left–right ideological positioning, they must choose among three alternatives: loyalty to their basic orientation even in the absence of their preferred candidate, abstention, or defection to the candidate of a different orientation. Despite the distinct constitutional, political, and cultural characteristics of France, Russia, and the United States, a single decision-theoretic model deriving from the basic elements of electoral behavior is more than tolerably successful in accounting for the choices made by the thwarted voters in all three countries.  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Electoral behavior; Presidential elections; Primary elections; Candidate evaluations; Turnout; Partisanship

1. Introduction The world is full of thwarted voters. These are people who cannot vote at the decisive ballot for the candidate they would prefer because that person is not standing as a candidate. These voters must make a second choice. In many instances, they will already have cast a ballot for their preferred candidate. This situation can come about either because of a preliminary nomination process or the actual electoral process. When the field of potential candidates is winnowed down to the few who ∗

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are formally anointed with a party’s nomination, there are always large numbers of voters who are disappointed with the choices presented to them. The electoral system may provide for a run-off ballot that inevitably leaves many, if not most, supporters of the eliminated candidates discontented with the remaining alternatives. The phenomenon can occur at any electoral level1, but here we discuss it exclusively with regard to presidential candidates. We do not include in the category of thwarted voters those people who experience electoral frustration in an abstract sense. Many voters may be enthusiastic about a popular potential candidate who eventually decides not to enter the lists, such as Jacques Delors in the 1995 presidential election in France or Colin Powell in the United States in 1996. One cannot properly speak of those voters being forced by the nomination process or the electoral system to make a second choice. Neither they, nor anyone else, ever had an opportunity to choose those candidates in the first place. There are, however, two common situations in which numerous voters are constrained to make a second choice. Where there are run-off elections, as in France and Russia, voters may be thwarted because they voted at the first ballot for a candidate who does not qualify for the runoff ballot. Where there is only a single ballot, but primary elections are critical to the nomination of the major candidates, as in the United States, voters may be thwarted because they voted in primary elections for a candidate who did not win their party’s nomination. In the US, primary elections are not held for both of the major parties in every state, and those that are held are not necessarily uniform in the array of competing candidates. But campaigns for the presidential nomination can be long and are heavily reported. Thus, US voters may become thwarted even without participating in a primary election, simply because the primaries generate preferences for a contender who is unsuccessful in winning the party’s nomination. Thwarted voters, therefore, constitute a large, although not precisely calculable, proportion of many electorates. However, ballpark estimates can be made of the incidence of each of the types of thwarted voters designated for the three countries discussed in this article. These inevitably fall short of the true, but unknown, total at any given time.

2. Why examine thwarted voters? Thwarted voters merit attention for two main reasons. First, they pose the problem of how, in an electoral context, people make second choices. Toilers in the field of electoral behavior, of whom Warren E. Miller was among the greatest, have produced a rich harvest of knowledge about how people make their first choices, but we rarely address the question of how people, in two-ballot systems or analogous situations, adjust at the runoff ballot to disappointment at the first ballot. In part, this is because

1

See Converse and Pierce (1986, Chs. 11–12) for the legislative level in France.

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the peculiarities of the US system of primary elections make it virtually impossible to link a national sample of primary election voters directly to the national samples of the entire electorate on which electoral researchers regularly rely. But even for France, whose two-ballot elections do not pose similar analytic difficulties, electoral research seldom focuses on the motivational connection between first-ballot and second-ballot electoral choices. We seem implicitly to assume that there is a single acceptable theory of electoral behavior that is applicable to both first and second choices, overlooking the possibility that second choices are conditional on the outcome of prior choices. The second reason for investigating thwarted voters is that how they divide at the runoff ballot can have an important impact, even decisive in some cases, on the final outcome of the election. In the 1995 presidential election in France, more than half the voters in the second ballot had not voted for either of the runoff candidates in the first ballot. Jacques Chirac became President of France by receiving more votes at the runoff ballot from voters who had not cast their ballots for him at the first ballot than he did from people who had initially supported him. Given the incidence of thwarted voters, particularly in France and Russia, but on occasion in the US as well, it is apparent that we need to understand the forces that move them. These reasons for examining thwarted voters are linked to the fact that they do not behave in the same way as their satisfied brethren do. When voters are anchored in basic political orientations, such as party identification in the US or left–right ideological positioning in France, but cannot vote for their preferred candidate at the decisive ballot, they are faced with a choice among three alternatives: remaining loyal to their basic orientation by supporting the surviving candidate who represents that orientation; abstaining from the decisive ballot; or defecting to a candidate of a different, even opposing, orientation. The argument here is that thwarted voters distribute their choices among these alternatives quite differently from the way ‘satisfied’ voters (those who can vote for their preferred candidate) do. The problem is to identify and measure the forces that account for the choices they make.

3. Identifying thwarted voters The distribution of votes in the first round of the presidential elections in France and Russia are reported in Table 1. For France, the data go back to 1965, when direct popular election of the president was first introduced. For Russia, which operates under the same basic electoral system as that employed in France, the data are for 1996, the year of the only post-perestroika presidential election that required two ballots. The data cover the front runner, the runner-up, and the candidates eliminated after the first-round ballot.2 The mean proportion of French thwarted voters is almost 40 per cent; for the 1995 election it approached 60 per cent. For the one Russian presidential election, the

2

See Appendix A for details of the data sources used in the analysis.

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Table 1 Distribution of first ballot votes by category of candidate, France 1965–1995 and Russia 1996

France 1965 1969 1974 1981 1988 1995 Russia 1996

Front runner (%)

Runner-up (%)

Also ran (%)

43.7a 43.9a 43.3 28.0 34.0a 23.3

32.2 23.4 32.9a 26.1a 19.8 20.5a

24.1 32.7 23.8 45.9 46.2 56.2

35.3a

32.0

32.7

Source: See Appendix A. a Candidate won at runoff ballot.

corresponding figure was almost one-third of the first-ballot voters. There is no simple statistical record for the US, however, that one can use to identify thwarted voters which is comparable to the first ballot votes cast in France or Russia for candidates who do not survive into the runoff ballot. For a variety of reasons, including incompleteness and lack of uniformity, primary election returns in the USA are not an adequate source. To overcome this problem, we consulted the remarkable series of US National Election Studies (NES) pioneered by Warren Miller, and housed in the indispensable ICPSR data archive, for the seven presidential elections held from 1972 through 1996. The NES surveys usually contain pre-election thermometer ratings for the nominees of the major parties, as well as for the most prominent of the other presidential hopefuls for those parties. Using these data, the sample electorate was divided by partisanship, on the basis of self-reported party identification (including leaners), and then ‘thwarted voters’ were identified as those partisans who assigned to some contender for their party’s nomination a higher pre-election thermometer rating than they assigned to the candidate who actually received their party’s nomination.3On this basis, more than one-quarter of Republican Party identifiers and well over onethird of Democratic Party identifiers, on average, over the 1972–1996 period, counted as thwarted voters (excluding, of course, cases where an incumbent president was unopposed for the nomination). Applying those proportions to the proportions of the electorate represented by Republican and Democratic Party identifiers (including leaners) across our span of time indicates that some 25 per cent of US voters, on average, were thwarted voters. 3

This technique makes the US analysis hostage to the extent that the successive NES surveys include all the relevant candidates for the major party presidential nominations. The record in this regard is very good, except for the 1992 study, which includes a thermometer score for Pat Buchanan (and George Bush) among the Republicans but fails to capture the substantial competition for the Democratic nomination. For details of the pre-electoral thermometer scores employed in the analysis, see Appendix B.

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The 25 per cent figure projects to a smaller proportion of the total electorate than the analogous figure---but computed in an entirely different way---reported in Table 1 for France and Russia. It is not far distant, however, from the figure arrived at if the incidence of thwarted voters in France in 1988 and 1995 is computed in the same way as the figure was computed for the United States. Using thermometer scores (instead of first-ballot votes for candidates eliminated from the runoff), we estimate that some 20–22 per cent of the 1988 and 1995 French electorates were thwarted voters in the sense employed here. For the 1996 Russian election, for which we have thermometer scores for all the presidential candidates, the proportion of thwarted voters, when measured by thermometer scores, is virtually the same (31 per cent) as the figure reported in Table 1 (33 per cent) .4 Summary behavioral data for the US over the 1972–1996 period are set out in Table 2. It is immediately evident that partisans who were satisfied with their party’s choice of a candidate were more likely to vote for that candidate, by an average of some 25 percentage points, regardless of party, than were thwarted voters. For France in 1988 and 1995, we estimate the same differential to be 12–14 percentage points. These are non-trivial differences, indicating that the phenomenon of defection among thwarted voters is clearly apparent in both France and the USA, even if their average rates of defection differ. The characteristic behaviour of thwarted voters with regard to abstention, however, Table 2 Electoral behaviour of thwarted and satisfied partisans, US Presidential elections, 1972–1996 (partisan leaners included) Democratsa (%)

Turnout Loyalists Defectors

Republicansb (%)

Thwartedc

Satisfiedd

Thwartedc

Satisfiedd

69 59 41

69 84 16

78 61 39

78 88 12

Source: see Appendix A. a 1992 and 1996 excluded for Democrats. b 1972 and 1984 excluded for Republicans. c Pre-electoral thermometer score for candidate of voter’s party lower than that for a competing candidate from the same party. d Pre-electoral thermometer score for candidate of voter’s party equal to or higher than that of any competing candidate of the same party.

4 The 1988 French data set contains thermometer scores only for the five most prominent of the nine candidates who ran in the presidential election of that year, and we have had to ignore in our analysis the comparatively few voters for the four minor candidates. The thermometer-based estimate of the number of French thwarted voters in 1988 would presumably be somewhat larger if the relevant scores for all the candidates were available. The thermometer ratings used throughout this article for France and Russia are post-electoral, not pre-electoral, as they are for the US data.

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is not the same in the two countries. One would expect, other things being equal, that thwarted voters would be more likely to abstain than satisfied voters. That is what we find for France in 1988 and 1995, where there was a difference of some 9 percentage points in the expected direction between the turnout rates amongst thwarted as opposed to satisfied voters. Looking at the turnout rates in Table 2, we see that the abstention rate for thwarted voters in the USA does not differ at all, on average, from that of satisfied voters. There have been elections when thwarted voters were more likely to turn out than were satisfied voters, and by a wide margin. Reported turnout rates are among the most unreliable of survey data, and that alone may contribute to the anomaly we find. At the same time, the differences between USA and France in the propensity to express dissatisfaction through abstention may be rooted in established electoral habits. Abstention and deliberate ballot spoiling are familiar electoral tactics in France, not infrequently recommended by party leaders as a way of protesting against what they regard as spurious electoral choices. There is no similar electoral tradition in the USA. Our single Russian case suggests that Russian voters may be on the way to adopting French second-ballot habits with a vengeance. At the 1996 Russian presidential election, only some 6 per cent of the voters who supported one or other of the two leading candidates at the first ballot failed to vote for one or other of them at the runoff. Among supporters of the three main drop-out candidates, however, one-third either abstained or took advantage of the opportunity that the ballot paper offered to vote against both front runners. In the next section, a simple decision-theoretic expected utility model is proposed to account for the different options selected by thwarted voters when they make their second electoral choice. The objective is to see whether the behavior of voters in three quite distinct political and cultural contexts can be explained by means of a common model.5

4. Structure of the model 4.1. The dependent variable The dependent variable is the electoral choice of the thwarted voter. Recall that such voters have three alternatives. One is loyalty to a basic political orientation, even if it is not represented at the decisive ballot by the voter’s preferred candidate. The second is abstention, or, in France, deliberately casting an invalid ballot, or, in Russia, specifically voting against both the runoff candidates. The third alternative is defection to the candidate of an opposing—or, at least, different—tendency. Thus, inasmuch as the model’s dependent variable contains a triad of outcomes, the appro5 The model has undergone considerable refinement since its original adumbration (Pierce, 1995, Ch. 9), and subsequent development in revised forms, presented at the 1998 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, 3–6 September 1998, and at the Conference on Collective Decision and Policy Making at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, 21–22 June 1999.

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priate analytical method is multinominal regression. Because of that methodological necessity, and because one of the triad of outcomes is abstention, our analysis intersects with two lively and important debates under way in the field of electoral behavior. The analysis of mass electoral behavior has traditionally treated turnout and candidate choice as two distinct issues, which are to be analyzed separately. The analysis of second choices here, however, requires that we account for both abstention and candidate choice within a single model. It is of more than passing interest that an emerging movement holds that the traditional distinction between participation and candidate choice produces misleading results. The proponents of a unified theory argue that electoral behavior requires a single model of electoral choice capable of accounting simultaneously for both participation and candidate choice (Thurner and Eymann, 2000; Sanders, 1998, 2001; Burden and Lacy, 1999; Lacy and Burden, 1999). At the same time, these scholars, along with others (e.g., Alvarez and Nagler, 1998), are also involved in a debate over the proper methodology to employ. All agree that multinomial regression is required, but the issue is whether multinomial logit (MNL) or multinomial probit (MNP) is the proper analytical model. Thurner and Eymann (2000) conclude that MNL is appropriate, as do Burden and Lacy (1999), who discovered that it differs little from the MNP model they employed earlier (Lacy and Burden, 1999). Sanders (1998, 2001), and Alvarez and Nagler (1998), on the other hand, prefer MNP, although the dependent variable in the particular analysis in the latter study includes only partisan choices and not abstention. The main issue in the choice between MNL and MNP concerns the presence or absence of the IIA property: that is, the statistical independence of the alternatives in the dependent variable (Zhang and Hoffman, 1993). If the choice alternatives are not close substitutes for one another, in that they share unmeasured characteristics, the IIA property is not violated, and MNL is an acceptable analytical method. If, however, the IIA condition is not satisfied, MNP is the more appropriate model. The stakes are higher than usual in this particular choice of models as MNL is infinitely easier to use than MNP with comparatively numerous large data sets. There are several ways of testing for the presence or absence of the IIA property. Perhaps the simplest is the Small-Hsiao method reported in Zhang and Hoffman (1993). Applying that method, each of the 11 data sets analyzed in this study was tested for the IIA property.6 Eight appear to satisfy the IIA condition but three are suspect (France in 1988; the USA in 1984 and 1992). This comparatively favourable success ratio undergirds the use of MNL models in this analysis. Further, the fact that there are no systematic differences between the patterns of the results for the clean and suspect data sets generates confidence in the findings for all 11 analyses conducted.

6 I am particularly grateful to Nicholas Winter for writing a program incorporating the Small-Hsiao test into the statistical package which I worked with for the analysis reported here.

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4.2. The independent variables There is no single holistic electoral theory on which to lean for specifying the variables likely to account for the choices of thwarted voters. Even the emerging theories that grapple with the problem of how to account simultaneously for electoral participation and candidate choice do not fit the contours of our specific problem. They deal with entire electorates whereas we are concerned with sub-sets of electors. These sub-sets are of a special kind, particularly with regard to theories of turnout. Thwarted voters in countries with two-ballot electoral systems, such as France and Russia, are unlikely to be vulnerable to the factors that account for chronic abstention. These voters are thwarted precisely because they have already turned out to vote; they chose a losing candidate and they may decide to abstain at the runoff, but they retain all the generic attributes of electoral participants. Even in the USA, for which we have defined thwarted voters differently than for France and Russia, thwarted voters are unlikely to be a random sub-section of the electorate. Insofar as there is an informational component to the factors accounting for turnout, thwarted voters in the USA should be located disproportionately among those most likely to participate. After all, thwarted voters are defined by their assignment of higher thermometer scores to unsuccessful nomination contenders than to the actual standard bearer of their party. Those unsuccessful contenders are often much less familiar to the electorate at large than the actual candidates are, even prior to the election. Henry Jackson, Morris Udall, John Connally, and Howard Baker, to name a few of the unsuccessful presidential aspirants in the distant 1970s and 1980s, were assigned thermometer scores by far fewer voters than the leading contenders were, yet some voters preferred them to the people who became the actual candidates. Whether modelling behavior at the decisive ballot for USA, French, or Russian voters, it appears prudent to retain from existing theories of turnout only those factors that can reasonably apply to the particular conditions of electoral second choices. Fortunately, there are at hand two widely respected theories of candidate choice and electoral participation, and particularly applicable to the behaviour we seek to understand, from which we can borrow. One is the ‘Michigan model’, to which Warren Miller was an original contributor (Campbell et al., 1960) and with which he was associated throughout his entire professional life (e.g., Miller and Shanks (1996). This broad theory of candidate choice distinguishes between the long-term psychological importance of partisanship and the shorter-term forces of candidate evaluations and contemporary issues. The second main theory from which we borrow is the spatial model of participation and choice associated originally with Anthony Downs (l957), developed further by Riker and Ordeshook (1968), and by Davis et al. (1970), and conveniently summarized by Thurner and Eymann (2000). The spatial model, which falls within the rational-choice analytical field, focuses on the distance between voters and candidates, and gave rise to the concepts, widely used in the consideration of turnout, of alienation and indifference. In specifying our independent variables, we borrow freely (and gratefully), if not always literally, from these two basic theories. Electoral second choices are considered here as a function of a limited number of the factors that those theories

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emphasize, plus the additional element represented by the ghostly presence of a preferred but unavailable candidate. There are five principal independent variables in our model. The first is impedance; that is, the extent to which the voters prefer their first choice—according to their basic political orientation—for the nomination over the candidate who actually received that nomination. Impedance is operationalised as the signed value of the thermometer score assigned to the voter’s preferred candidate minus the thermometer score assigned to the actual candidate nominated for the voter’s basic tendency. The assumption here is that the larger the margin of preference for the absent candidate, the more likely is the voter to defect from his or her basic tendency. A second independent variable is candidate preference: the extent to which the voter prefers one of the actual runoff candidates over the other. This variable is computed as the signed value of the thermometer score of the candidate opposing the voter’s basic tendency minus the thermometer score assigned to the candidate representing the voter’s tendency. The assumption here is that a marked preference for one of the runoff candidates will contribute to a vote for that candidate, while indifference will lead to abstention. A third variable is alienation. This variable serves as a qualifier to capture situations in which the candidate of the voter’s tendency at the decisive ballot is assigned an abnormally low thermometer score, even though it may be higher than the score assigned to the opposing candidate—possibly enough to register fairly decisively on the candidate preference variable. A thwarted voter might assign a score of 0 to the candidate of the opposing tendency, but a score of only, say, 30 (on a standard 0– 100 thermometer scale) to the candidate of his or her own tendency. To capture and measure that phenomenon, alienation is defined as 100 minus the thermometer score assigned to the candidate among the two finalists to whom the voter assigns the higher score. Hence, in our example, the alienation score would be 100⫺30, or 70. High alienation scores signify a ‘plague on both your houses’ phenomenon, while low scores suggest comparative satisfaction, at least with the finalist candidate whom the voter prefers. The fourth variable is strength of tendency: the degree of attachment of voters to their basic political orientation. Here, the presumption is that the more strongly voters are attached to their political polestar, the more likely they are to remain loyal to it, regardless of candidate. For the USA, strength of tendency is taken to be the voter’s strength of party identification, in three degrees: strong, not very strong, and leaning. For France, it is expressed as the voter’s self-assigned location to the left side or the right side of a seven-point left-right scale. The French measure also results in three categories of left or right voter: extreme left or extreme right, left or right, and center-left or center-right. Giving clear expression to the strength of tendency variable is easy enough for the USA and France, but operationalising it for Russia in 1996 is a different story. It is almost as natural as breathing to think of basic political orientations in terms of partisanship for the USA and in terms of left–right perceptions for France. Not so for Russia, where partisanship is ill-defined, infrequent, weak, and unstable, and where a hypothetical left–right dimension has no common operational meaning. In

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point of fact, in 1996, Russian voters were divided by a clear, simple, salient, and widespread political cleavage whose potency as a predictor of the decisive vote exceeded that of both partisan divisions in the USA and left–right conflict in France. This was a communist–anti-communist dimension. The crucial indicator of this fundamental cleavage in Russia in 1996 consists of answers to the following survey question: ‘Which political system suits Russia best?’ Respondents were offered three response categories: (1) the pre-perestroika Soviet system; (2) the current system; and (3) Western-style democracy. The valid responses (in total, 73 per cent of the sample respondents who reported their behaviour at the second, decisive ballot) were divided almost equally between the first alternative (851) and the other two alternatives combined (906). Seldom, if ever, in modern times has an electorate been so sharply, deeply, and evenly divided on such a fundamental issue as the Russian electorate was in the summer of 1996.7 The basic political orientations of the Russian electorate, therefore, are classified in terms of the choice between the communist past, on the one hand, and the democratic present or future, on the other hand. To establish the strength of these two tendencies, an ordinal variable was constructed to express the voter’s combined attitudes toward Lenin, Stalin, and the Communist Party, based on where voters placed each of those referents on the standard thermometer scale. Specifically, we divided the scores for each referent into quartiles and summed the quartiles into a scale that originally ran from 3 to 12 but which was revised to run from 1 to 10.8As a predictor of the presidential vote on the second-ballot, the communist---anti-communist scale proved, from among all the attitudinal and demographic variables explored, second only to the basic variable expressing attitudes towards communist and democratic regimes. The principal independent variables also included interest in the election campaign. This was in order to distinguish the impact of this obvious and chronic indicator of turnout from the impact of the four other independent variables, particularly the three tied to overall candidate evaluations (impedance, candidate preference, and alienation). It was assumed from the start that for French and Russian thwarted voters, some minimal level of interest was already incorporated in that they had earlier voted in the first ballot. Thwarted voters in the USA were more problematic in this respect because they were identified on the basis only of proffered thermometer scores. However, all the USA thwarted voters were party identifiers to some 7

Indeed, the 1996 Russian presidential election probably rivals in constitutional importance the early elections of the French Third Republic, in which Monarchists and Bonapartists were pitted against Republicans, giving concrete political expression to the hitherto largely theoretical content of the left–right dimension that dominated French political discourse over the next century. 8 This resulted in considerable attrition of cases due to differential response patterns for the three critical sets of thermometer scores. To compensate, a supplementary scale was created based in part on conservatively imputed scores for cases of missing data on any one (and only one) of the three basic scales. Applying the supplementary scale instead of the literal one increased the proportion of eligible voters included in the analysis by 8 percentage points and modestly improved the fit of the model. In the analyses, the results for each of the two versions of the Russian measure for strength of tendency are reported.

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degree, and many of them were also able to assign a thermometer rating to aspirants with less than top-tier name recognition. A further word about the dependent variable, electoral choice. This has three categories: loyalty to one’s basic tendency, abstention, and defection to an opposing tendency. These options were coded 0, 1, and 2, respectively. Thus, US Democrats who voted for the Democratic candidate, French leftists who voted for the left’s runoff candidate, and Russians with a preference for a post-perestroika political regime who voted for Boris Yeltsin at the presidential runoff, were coded 0. So were US Republicans who voted for the Republican candidate, French rightists who voted for the right’s runoff candidate, and Russian proponents of a pre-perestroika regime who voted for Gennadii Zyuganov. US Democrats and Republicans who voted for the presidential candidate of a party other than their own, French leftists and rightists who voted at the runoff ballot for the candidate of the contrary tendency, and Russian first-ballot voters who cast their runoff votes inconsistently with their regime preferences, were coded 2. US respondents who abstained, French first-ballot voters who abstained or reported spoiling their ballots at the runoff, and Russian first-ballot voters who abstained or cast ballots opposing both candidates at the runoff, were coded 1. Finally, as applicable, the five independent variables were keyed for consistency with the dependent variable in an ordinal sense.

5. The results The highlights from the overall analytical strategy followed in the multinomial logistic regressions for each presidential election examined are presented in Table 3. These are for the US elections from 1972 through 1996; the French elections of 1988 and 1995; and the 1996 election in Russia. A basic model was run for each dataset in which candidate preference was the sole independent variable. Candidate preference was selected because it was the most powerful and significant variable in every multivariate regression in which it was included. The log likelihoods of the basic model were then compared with the log likelihoods of the full model, which included all five independent variables, including, of course, candidate preference. The difference in log likelihoods was multiplied by (⫺2) to produce the chi-square of the difference. This proved to be highly significant in every instance. The most striking finding concerning the individual variables in the model is the importance of candidate preference and the weakness of impedance when considered additively as factors in both abstentions and defections. The results are presented in Table 4. The decision to vote, and, if so, for which candidate, is overwhelmingly controlled by subjective evaluations of the competing runoff candidates. The degree of warmth felt for a voter’s preferred candidate relative to the candidate of the same tendency who actually runs at the decisive ballot is almost never significant as a factor in turnout and more often than not actually negative as a factor in candidate choice. The latter finding is quite surprising. The impedance variable is at the root of the

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Table 3 Comparison of basic and full multinomial logistic models, US 1972–1996, France 1988 and 1995, and Russia 1996 Data set

N

Thwarted voters

Log likelihoods

Difference in Significance of log likelihoods c2

(%)

Basic modela

Full modelb

×(⫺2)

(df=4)

1972c 1976 1980 1984c 1988 1992c 1996d

425 398 435 359 328 66 169

71 73 81 80 86 82 91

⫺372.8759 ⫺319.8738 ⫺412.4449 ⫺305.7182 ⫺291.3275 ⫺55.4167 ⫺117.9398

⫺340.3154 ⫺301.1462 ⫺375.6760 ⫺293.2238 ⫺277.3932 ⫺48.6654 ⫺105.6029

65.1209 37.4551 73.5376 24.9888 27.8686 13.5026 24.6736

⬍0.001 ⬍0.001 ⬍0.001 ⬍0.001 ⬍0.001 ⬍0.01 ⬍0.001

France 1988 France 1995

297 1583

97 98

⫺184.1119 ⫺898.7778

⫺147.9120 ⫺826.4619

72.3998 144.6318

⬍0.001 ⬍0.001

Russia 1996 Russia 1996e

276 329

45 53

⫺222.3066 ⫺265.8044

⫺213.7016 ⫺255.9681

17.21008 19.67256

⬍0.01 ⬍0.001

US US US US US US US

a b c d e

Candidate preference is the sole independent variable. Contains five independent variables, including candidate preference. Democrats only. Republicans only. Contains 53 imputed scores.

basic concept of thwarted voters in the first place. It is both conceptually and operationally linked to the two-ballot runoff electoral system, including the US primary system, which promotes differential evaluations of candidates from the same basic tendency. It underlies the question, so frequently raised in the US, of the extent to which pre-electoral candidate rivalries have a destructive potential for partisan unity and consequent electoral success.9 In the event, when considered with other candidate evaluations, the relative degree of approval of the preferred candidate plays a minor role in the voters’ minds at the decisive ballot. In many cases its impact is actually negative; when positive, it is almost never statistically significant. Comparing the impact of impedance with that of candidate preference suggests that the passions aroused by intra-tendency rivalries tend to evaporate in the atmosphere of inter-tendency conflict. The strength of tendency variable is more powerful in France and Russia than in the USA, although, recall, it is measured differently in each of our three countries. It is statistically significant as a factor in turnout in the USA only for Democrats in 1972 and 1984, and for Republicans in 1996. As a force in candidate choice at US elections, it is significant only in 1980 and for Democrats in 1996. Again considering 9

See, in particular, Southwell (1986); Stone (1986); Stone et al. (1992), and Atkeson (1998).

0.00647 (0.267) 0.02526 (0.000)

France 1998

b

a

0.00907 (0.153) 0.00917 (0.113)

0.02105 (0.087) 0.02238 (0.000)

0.01716 (0.070) ⫺0.01125 (0.390) 0.01579 (0.113) 0.01338 (0.215) 0.00986 (0.305) 0.00326 (0.919) 0.01574 (0.533)

Impedance

Taking loyalty as the base category. Contains 53 imputed scores.

Russia 1996b

Russia 1996

France 1995

US 1996

US 1992

US 1988

US 1984

US 1980

0.01767 (0.003) 0.01657 (0.002)

0.01551 (0.004) 0.03346 (0.000) 0.01995 (0.000) 0.02152 (0.000) 0.01646 (0.000) 0.03834 (0.000) 0.05987 (0.000)

US 1972

US 1976

Candidate Preference

Dataset

Predicting abstentiona

0.14058 (0.051) 0.12873 (0.026)

0.39284 (0.164) 0.15964 (0.051)

0.53544 (0.019) 0.33981 (0.112) 0.09113 (0.622) 0.40613 (0.036) 0.19786 (0.226) ⫺0.14890 (0.801) 1.7647 (0.001)

0.00637 (0.469) 0.00980 (0.203)

0.03658 (0.066) 0.01821 (0.000)

⫺0.03986 (0.000) 0.01765 (0.170) 0.01024 (0.291) ⫺0.01831 (0.118) ⫺0.01731 (0.056) ⫺0.00292 (0.934) 0.00926 (0.673)

Strength of Alienation tendency

0.49519 (0.029) 0.33458 (0.104)

0.41794 (0.064) 0.25558 (0.008)

0.50715 (0.000) 0.42370 (0.000) 0.52480 (0.000) 0.35525 (0.000) 0.42339 (0.000) 0.75680 (0.110) 0.69448 (0.011)

Campaign interest

0.02882 (0.000) 0.03750 (0.000)

0.03610 (0.000) 0.06368 (0.000)

0.053350 (0.000) 0.06825 (0.000) 0.04932 (0.000) 0.06027 (0.000) 0.04996 (0.000) 0.05058 (0.000) 0.06382 (0.000)

Candidate preference

Predicitng defectiona

1.2725 (0.000) 0.68626 (0.000) 0.22005 (0.035) 0.17069 (0.040)

⫺0.00176 (0.844) ⫺0.00326 (0.682)

⫺0.04239 (0.848) 0.24970 (0.255) 0.42630 (0.034) 0.12640 (0.633) 0.37685 (0.138) ⫺0.19550 (0.754) 0.82629 (0.033)

Campaign interest

0.34563 (0.080) 0.13150 (0.302) 0.00198 ⫺0.22719 (0.873) (0.560) 0.00222 ⫺0.26034 (0.831) (0.441)

0.01110 (0.528) 0.00099 (0.887)

⫺0.00164 ⫺0.03304 (0.889) (0.751) 0.03968 0.11745 (0.001) (0.293) 0.04064 ⫺0.01357 (0.000) (0.896) ⫺0.02027 0.107640 (0.202) (0.413) 0.00008 0.00962 (0.994) (0.947) 0.03509 ⫺0.06048 (0.285) (0.898) ⫺0.00669 0.25042 (0.720) (0.272)

Strength of Alienation tendency

0.01466 (0.107) 0.00122 (0.802)

⫺0.00539 (0.571) ⫺0.02340 (0.092) ⫺0.00819 (0.430) ⫺0.00584 (0.664) ⫺0.00925 (0.467) ⫺0.03687 (0.298) 0.02642 (0.229)

Impedance

Table 4 Coefficients of full multinomial logistic model, US 1972–1996, France 1988, and Russia, 1996 (significance in parentheses; low probabilities in bold face)

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the power of candidate preference, these results suggest that, whatever it contributes to maintaining electoral solidarity after divisive primary conflicts in the USA, partisanship operates mainly through comparative evaluations of the final candidates. The relative importance of the communist–anti-communist divide in Russia as a factor in both turnout and defections is evident; so is that of self-ascribed left–right positioning in France, except for turnout in 1988. These national cases cannot be compared directly with that of the USA, of course, but they do demonstrate the extent to which a core variable, here strength of tendency, may be expressed by different measures that display common properties. The independent variable alienation, meaning a low thermometer score for the candidate actually running at the decisive ballot whom the voter prefers over the other, plays only a modest and intermittent role across our array of electoral data. It predicts turnout only in France, and it predicts defections in the USA only in 1976 and 1980. Alienation and candidate preference are the variables in our model that derive from the spatial theory of elections, and comparing them enables us to weigh the relative contributions of alienation and indifference to thwarted voters’ choices. The potency of candidate preference and the comparative weakness of alienation as factors in both turnout and candidate choice indicate that indifference, which is captured by candidate preference, plays a more powerful role than alienation. Finally, interest in the campaign performs as we expected: an almost ubiquitous, powerful, and significant factor in predicting turnout, especially in the USA, but almost never significant in predicting the choice of candidate.

6. Predictive power of the model The predictive power of the model was assessed by cross-tabulating the outcomes predicted by the model with the observed outcomes from the actual data sets. This procedure permits computation of the proportion of cases correctly predicted by the model for each of the three categories of the dependent variable: loyalty to the voter’s basic tendency, abstention, and defection to an opposing tendency. Two variants of this assessment are reported in Table 5. The first, displayed on the left-hand side of Table 5, reports the proportion of cases correctly predicted for each of the three possible outcomes, as well as the tau-b’s expressing the degree of association between all three predicted and observed outcomes. The second variant, displayed on the right-hand side of Table 5, which is a tougher test of the model, reports the proportions of cases correctly predicted for each of two pairs of outcomes after ambiguous predictions have been excluded: loyalty and abstention, and loyalty and defection. Perhaps not surprisingly, the model correctly predicts large proportions of the thwarted voters who remain loyal to their basic political orientations, whether the test is three-way or two-way. Loyalty is normally the most frequently observed outcome in real life (with the notable exception of US Democrats in 1972), and it is the base category for our regressions. The model does less well in correctly predicting defections. It correctly predicts more than 50 per cent of the defections in only 11

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Table 5 Predicted outcomes of the full model as percentage of observed outcomes, US 1972–1996, France 1988 and 1955, and Russia 1996 (more successful predictions in bold face) Three-way predictions (%)

Two-way predictions (%)

Dataset

Loyalty

Abstention Defection

Loyalty

Abstention Loyalty

Defection

US US US US US US US

1972 1976 1980 1984 1988 1992b 1996

65 86 72 76 85

81 63 60 59 39

57 83 66 60 57

53 18 48 37 21

63 83 70 85 88

83 43 55 57 26

86

32 (0.537)a 16 (0.512) 44 (0.435) 41 (0.506) 41 (0.441) (0.419) 24 (0.652)

79

82

36

73

62

France 1988 France 1995

97 97

5 (0.466) 46 16 (0.576) 59

92 95

0 21

92 96

19 58

Russia 1996 Russia 1996c

87 89

45 (0.330) 0 30 (0.340) 14

71 73

15 13

89 91

0 3

a Tau-b measure of association between predicted outcomes (loyalty, abstention, defection) and observed outcomes in parentheses. b Too few cases to record percentage. c Contains 53 imputed scores.

of the 20 applicable tests. The results for the US in 1988 are particularly poor. Those for Russia are abysmal, possibly partly explained by the fact that few Russian thwarted voters actually defected from their basic orientation at the election. Our model had the difficult task of making its selection among a very small pool of voters. Nevertheless, to the extent that the model captures the polar outcomes of loyalty and defection through the powerful candidate preference variable, this variable is more trustworthy for loyalty than for defection. The most troublesome outcome category is abstention. Overall, predictions of abstentions reach 50 per cent of the actual number only once, in the two-way test of the Democrats in 1972, although they also approach respectability for the twoway US test in 1980. Moreover, one cannot argue that the weak showing of the model in predicting turnout by thwarted voters in the USA basically reflects the fact, noted earlier, that abstention is not a characteristic electoral tactic for US thwarted voters. The model is no more successful in predicting turnout in France or Russia, where abstention is a familiar practice. The two-way tests for turnout in those countries are less accurate than they are for the USA. In particular, not one of the 23 sample abstentions in France in 1988 was predicted. The weakness of the overall model in predicting turnout constitutes a paradox in the light of the comparative importance in accounting for turnout displayed by most of our independent variables individually. Candidate preference and campaign interest are consistently and significantly associated with abstention. Strength of tendency

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is closely related to abstention in Russia and, intermittently, in the USA. And alienation is associated with abstention in France. So we have to wonder: are unmeasured variables accounting to some extent for the results on turnout? We consider what these might be in the next section.

7. Mobilization, ideology, and issues 7.1. Mobilization Factors accounting for involuntary abstentions surely account in part for the weaker capacity of our model to predict abstentions, but we can do nothing to take them into account. Another possibility, that we are in a position to test, is that decisions by thwarted voters over whether or not to vote at the decisive ballot are affected by efforts to mobilize support for the runoff candidates. Candidates defeated in the party primaries in the USA, or at the first ballot in France and Russia, may try to influence the final outcome in various ways: they may urge abstention, or they may try to persuade their backers to shift their support to another candidate. Even in the absence of specific endorsements by the defeated contenders, the parties or other organized backers of the runoff candidates may make different degrees of effort to get out the vote. We know that in French two-ballot legislative elections, thwarted voters are more likely to behave at the second ballot in the way recommended by their first-ballot choice if they are aware that such a recommendation has been made than they are if they are not aware (Converse and Pierce, 1986, pp. 407–409). In the 1969 French presidential election, 77 per cent of thwarted voters who were aware of their preferred candidate’s recommendation for the second ballot (whether support for another candidate or abstention) followed that recommendation; only 34 per cent of those who were unaware of the recommendation behaved accordingly. Ironically, in view of the French data record, we do not have a mobilization measure for France in 1988 or 1995. We can construct one, however, for each of the US elections after 1972, and (after a fashion) for Russia. The NES surveys contain questions that typically take the form: ‘Did anyone from one of the political parties call you up or come around and talk to you about the campaign this year?’ If the reply is ‘Yes’, the respondent is then asked which candidate the voter was asked to support. Beginning in 1980, an additional follow-up question has been asked to learn whether the respondent was also approached by someone other than a representative of the two major parties. The two types of follow-up questions, one asking for the partisan source of the initial contact, the other tapping whether there was an additional contact, regardless of the source, have contrary effects on the number of usable cases. Case numbers normally drop when the follow-up question relating to partisan sources is taken into account, but they increase when one combines affirmative answers to the two questions asking, first, whether the respondent was approached by a party representative and, second, whether he or she was also approached by someone else. Accordingly,

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within the limits of the available data, we constructed a mobilization variable for the USA for the years from 1980 through 1996 to capture two forms of contact and ignoring their partisan sources. The assumption here is that reminders to vote may be important stimuli regardless of the candidate being endorsed (Burden and Lacy, 1999). When it could be employed without seriously reducing the number of cases (1980, 1984, 1988, and 1996), the mobilization variable was added to the five original independent variables of our US model. The addition slightly improved the model’s overall fit (data not shown here). In every year tested, the coefficients of the mobilization variable were highly significant as a factor in abstentions (although never for defection, for which it was actually negative in 1984). Most importantly, adding mobilization to the model had the effect of dramatically improving its accuracy in predicting turnout. There was little difference for 1980, but the proportions of accurate predictions of abstentions in the three-way test rose from 41 per cent to 48 per cent for 1984, from 41 per cent to 50 per cent for 1988, and from 24 per cent to 32 per cent for 1996. Predictive accuracy for turnout increased in the two-way test from 21 per cent to 26 per cent for 1988, and from 36 per cent to 48 per cent for 1996. Thus, in the US, turnout by thwarted voters may, to some extent, be a function of whether or not those voters were jogged into action by a worker from any party, regardless of which one it might be. The Russian survey contained a question asking voters if their first ballot choice recommended any other candidate for the decisive ballot, and, if so, which one. As in the case of the USA, we retained only whether or not the thwarted voter claimed to recall such a recommendation without regard to what the recommendation was. In responding to this question, our sample Russian electorate perceived more order in the campaign for the runoff ballot than there actually was. Almost 70 per cent of the sample thwarted voters claimed that the candidate they had voted for at the first ballot supported either Boris Yeltsin or Gennadii Zyuganov in the runoff. In fact, none of the main drop-out candidates unequivocally recommended either that his supporters should vote or that they should not vote for one or the other of the runoff candidates.10 In these circumstances, it is not particularly surprising that adding the mobilization variable to the model for Russia has no intelligible effect on the outcome. The model’s overall fit is slightly improved, whether we employ only the literal communist– anti-communist scale scores or also include imputed scores. Even so, there is no improvement in the accuracy of the predicted probabilities of abstention; moreover,

10 Between the two ballots, although Alexander Lebed accepted appointments by President Boris Yeltsin (also a runoff candidate) as Secretary of the Russian Security Council and presidential aide for national security, he did not publicly endorse Yeltsin for President. Gregorii Yavlinsky opposed Gennadii Zyuganov and opposed voting against both runoff candidates but did not support Yeltsin! Vladimir Zhirinovsky made impossible demands on both runoff candidates, saying that if the demands were not satisfied he would recommend that his supporters vote against both of them; to my knowledge he did not actually do so. Svyatoslov Federov announced that he would vote for Yeltsin but did not ask his supporters to do so, saying that they should make their own decision.

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the mobilization variable is not statistically significant. The reason for this is almost surely the lack of clarity of the positions taken between the two ballots by the various drop-out candidates. In an earlier study of France, Converse and Pierce (1986, p. 406) found that thwarted voters’ awareness of the recommendations of their preferred legislative candidates varied with the effort made by those candidates to communicate with their supporters. The Russian also-rans were more interested in bargaining with their peers than in communicating with the voters. Their voters, in turn, did not know what their preferred candidates wanted them to do. 7.2. Ideology and issues To a limited extent, ideological considerations and differential issue positions are subsumed indirectly in the strength of tendency variable. More complete and systematic formulations of ideology and issue positions across our data sets are ruled out by the severe limitations of the available data. In this regard, we can do no more than a few simple experiments. With regard to ideology, matching variables measuring ideological difference could be constructed only for France and for the USA in 1980. The variable consists of the distance between the perceived left-right location (France) or the perceived liberal-conservative location (USA) of the voter’s preferred candidate and that of the actual candidate of the voter’s basic orientation. Adding the ideological difference variable to the full model improves it significantly only for France in 1995, when the variable is also highly significant. It has only a modest and non-significant effect for France in 1988. In the USA in 1980, the contribution of the ideological difference variable is actually negative. An analogous summed issue difference variable for France in 1988 was not significant; nor was a differently formulated summed issue difference variable constructed for France in 1995. An issue difference variable for Russia similar to the one used for France in 1995, however, both improved the overall model and was significant as a factor in candidate choice.11

8. Discussion Comparative analysis of voting behaviour within different electoral frameworks uncovers a category of voters common to at least three distinct societies: France, Russia, and the USA. The category consists of thwarted voters: voters who are prevented by the electoral system from voting at the decisive ballot for the candidate 11 Issue positions are worth pursuing further in this context. To do so for the US presidential elections would require adding questions in the pre-electoral wave of the NES surveys that link various issues with at least the leading contenders for major party nominations as well as with the actual partisan candidates. This has been done only once, in 1980. For France and Russia, where there are two-ballot electoral systems, sample surveys are likely to include as much or almost as much information about the also-rans as about the run-off candidates, although the surveys are normally post-electoral.

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they prefer. These voters must make what amounts to a second choice, even if that choice is to abstain from voting for any candidate at all. What factors determine the choices they make? A simple multinomial logistic model, with the independent variables derived from what we know about how voters make their first choice, is tolerably successful in predicting electors’ selection of candidates, provided they actually vote. In the USA, France, and Russia, candidate choice by thwarted voters appears to respond to the imperatives of a small number of similar forces. The model is less successful in predicting whether thwarted electors will, in the decisive ballot, vote for any candidate at all. Abstentions become somewhat more intelligible if we take into account mobilization efforts, but we have been able to do that only for the USA. Even so, of the three possible behavioural outcomes among thwarted voters, abstentions remain the most difficult to predict. It is of some interest in this regard that the rich and detailed treatment of the historical record of electoral turnout in the USA that appears in Warren Miller’s and Merrill Shanks’ magisterial study (1996) begins and ends with a ‘puzzle’. Brody (1978) referred to the ‘puzzle’ of a 16-year decline in turnout at presidential elections in the face of diminishing restrictions on the suffrage and increasing citizen competence in such central domains as education. Miller, first in an article in (1992) and then in Miller and Shanks (1996), transformed Brody’s puzzle into a new one: whilst Miller located a decline in levels of turnout at US presidential elections by successive generations, he could not find direct evidence to account for those intergenerational differences. So one puzzle was replaced by another. Turnout is a sticky issue from more than one angle. Two variables have the greatest effect on turnout among the thwarted. First, what is labelled candidate preference; the difference between the voter’s evaluations of the runoff candidates. Second, the degree of the voter’s interest in the political campaign. That is a clear indication that what thwarted voters need to encourage their participation in the decisive ballot, at the least, is the stimulus of an interesting campaign between distinguishable candidates. Either or both of those factors can be boosted by party activists (see Whiteley and Seyd, this issue). A supplementary test showed that mobilization in the form of contact by party workers increases turnout in the USA, and prior research indicates that that is true for France as well. Surprisingly, thwarted voters do not appear to be directly motivated, either to turn out or to vote for one candidate or another, by differential assessments of their preferred candidate and the candidate who eventually wins their party’s nomination or survives into the runoff. What seems to happen is that once the parties’ nominations are made, or the runoff candidates are otherwise determined, voters’ relative assessments of the contenders in the preliminary intra-party rivalries give way to, or become subsumed by, their comparative assessments of the two finalists. Primary fights in the USA play a less direct role than is suggested by the rancour they sometimes generate. Even the multiple cleavages expressed at the first ballot in France or Russia become subordinated to the intense polarization of the runoff.

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Acknowledgements I am grateful for the help and advice given to me in the preparation of this article by Christopher H. Achen, James F. Adams, Kevin Clarke, Charles H. Franklin, Richard D. Gonzalez, Laura Klem, Paul W. Thurner, Kathleen Welch, and Nicholas Winter, as well as participants at the Panel on Voting and Campaigning in Complex Environments at the 94th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, at Boston, 5 September 1998, and at the Conference on Collective Decision and Policy Making at the University of Groningen, 21–22 June 1999, where less developed versions of this article were presented. Much appreciated technical assistance was provided by David Backer and JungHwa Lee.

Appendix A. Data sources The US data are derived from the following NES: 1972 [ICPSR 7010], 1976 [ICPSR 7381], 1980 [ICPSR 7763], 1984 [ICPSR 8298], 1988 [ICPSR 9196], 1992 [ICPSR 6067], and 1996 [ICPSR 6896]. The data and tabulations utilized in this article were made available by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. The French data are derived from the French Presidential Survey, 1988 [ICPSR 6583], on which I was the principal investigator, and the French National Election Study, 1995 [ICPSR 6806], on which Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Nonna Mayer, and Daniel Boy were the principal investigators. The Russian data are derived from the Russian Panel Election Surveys 1995–96 conducted by Paragon Research International and Demoscope for the Davis Russian Research Center, Harvard University. I am grateful to Timothy J. Colton, Director of the Davis Center, and William Zimmerman IV, Director of the Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan, the directors of the overall Russian study, for taking me on board for the planning of the presidential election survey and authorizing me to use their data. None of the persons (except myself) or institutions referred to above bears any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here.

Appendix B. Pre-election thermometer scores The pre-electoral thermometer scores used in the analysis are as follows: for 1972, only Democrats George McGovern, Shirley Chisholm, Hubert Humphrey, Henry Jackson, Edmund Muskie, and George Wallace. For 1976, Democrats Jimmy Carter, Jerry Brown, Henry Jackson, Morris Udall, and George Wallace; Republicans Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. For 1980, Democrats Jimmy Carter, Jerry Brown, and Edward Kennedy; Republicans Ronald Reagan, Howard Baker, George Bush, John Connally, Gerald Ford, and John Anderson. For 1984, only Democrats Walter Mondale, John Glenn, Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson, and George McGovern. For 1988, Demo-

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crats Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson; Republicans George Bush, Robert Dole, and Pat Robertson. For 1992, only Republicans George Bush and Pat Buchanan. For 1996, only Republicans Robert Dole, Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes, Phil Gramm, and Lamar Alexander.

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