Voters and Politicians: three papers in applied political-economics

McGinn, Eamon Gilbert

Voters and Politicians: three papers in applied political-economics

McGinn, Eamon Gilbert

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Publication Type:: Thesis
Issue Date:: 2020

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Field	Value	Language
dc.contributor.author	McGinn, Eamon Gilbert
dc.date.accessioned	2021-05-27T02:28:23Z
dc.date.available	2021-05-27T02:28:23Z
dc.date.issued	2020
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10453/149253
dc.description	University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Business.	en_US.UTF-8
dc.description.abstract	This thesis consists of three papers unified by a common focus on the behavior of voters and politicians in elections. Chapter 1 considers informal voting in Australian elections. In Australia, there are around 5-6% of voters who submit an informal vote, which doesn’t count towards the total. In this chapter, I make use of a natural experiment, based on exogenous changes in electorate boundaries, to identify what factors influence the number of informal votes. I find that factors that feature in the traditional theory on voter decisions, competitiveness and number of other voters, do not affect the rate of informal voting. Instead I find that more candidates on the ballot results in higher levels of informal voting. Halving the number of options would reduce informal voting by 27%. This effect is present regardless of the level of education, indicating it is likely a decision to abstain rather than an error. Chapter 2, deals with the role of politicians’ personal ideology in determining their voting behaviour. I extend recent empirical findings by applying a text-as-data approach to analyse speeches in parliament following a recent politically charged moment in Australia –- a national survey on same sex marriage (SSM). I estimate opposition to SSM in parliamentary speeches and measure how speech changed following the SSM vote. I find that Opposers of SSM became stronger in their opposition once the results of the national survey were released, regardless of how their electorate voted. No consistent and statistically significant change is seen in the behavior of Supporters of SSM. This result indicates that personal ideology played a more significant role in determining changes in speech than did the position of the electorate. In Chapter 3, I analyze the transition to instant run-off voting (IRV) that is occurring in some jurisdictions in the U.S. There are mixed findings in the literature on the benefits of IRV for voters and politicians, making informed debate around its adoption challenging. Analysis of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metro Area, which has strong natural experiment characteristics, indicates that the introduction of IRV caused a 9.6 percentage point increase in turnout for Mayoral elections. The effect is larger for precincts that have higher poverty rates. Text based sentiment analysis of mayoral debates across the U.S., a new approach in this area, indicates that the introduction of IRV improved the civility of debates with candidates substituting negative or neutral words for positive words.	en_US.UTF-8
dc.format	Thesis (PhD)
dc.language.iso	en	en_US.UTF-8
dc.relation	https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/10453/149253/2/02Whole.pdf
dc.rights	The author owns the copyright in this thesis including all reproduction and reuse rights for the work. The work may not be altered without the permission of the copyright owner. Attribution is essential when quoting or paraphrasing from this thesis.
dc.rights	au.edu.uts.lib/ppc
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.title	Voters and Politicians: three papers in applied political-economics	en_US.UTF-8
dc.type	Thesis
utslib.copyright.status	open_access	*

Abstract:

This thesis consists of three papers unified by a common focus on the behavior of voters and politicians in elections. Chapter 1 considers informal voting in Australian elections. In Australia, there are around 5-6% of voters who submit an informal vote, which doesn’t count towards the total. In this chapter, I make use of a natural experiment, based on exogenous changes in electorate boundaries, to identify what factors influence the number of informal votes. I find that factors that feature in the traditional theory on voter decisions, competitiveness and number of other voters, do not affect the rate of informal voting. Instead I find that more candidates on the ballot results in higher levels of informal voting. Halving the number of options would reduce informal voting by 27%. This effect is present regardless of the level of education, indicating it is likely a decision to abstain rather than an error. Chapter 2, deals with the role of politicians’ personal ideology in determining their voting behaviour. I extend recent empirical findings by applying a text-as-data approach to analyse speeches in parliament following a recent politically charged moment in Australia –- a national survey on same sex marriage (SSM). I estimate opposition to SSM in parliamentary speeches and measure how speech changed following the SSM vote. I find that Opposers of SSM became stronger in their opposition once the results of the national survey were released, regardless of how their electorate voted. No consistent and statistically significant change is seen in the behavior of Supporters of SSM. This result indicates that personal ideology played a more significant role in determining changes in speech than did the position of the electorate. In Chapter 3, I analyze the transition to instant run-off voting (IRV) that is occurring in some jurisdictions in the U.S. There are mixed findings in the literature on the benefits of IRV for voters and politicians, making informed debate around its adoption challenging. Analysis of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metro Area, which has strong natural experiment characteristics, indicates that the introduction of IRV caused a 9.6 percentage point increase in turnout for Mayoral elections. The effect is larger for precincts that have higher poverty rates. Text based sentiment analysis of mayoral debates across the U.S., a new approach in this area, indicates that the introduction of IRV improved the civility of debates with candidates substituting negative or neutral words for positive words.

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