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Are you attending the 2017 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in San Francisco during August 31 – September 3?  If so, you may be interested to attend one or more of the below presentations, panels and poster sessions which make use of CSES data.

This year’s conference theme is: The Quest for Legitimacy: Actors, Audiences and Aspirations

If you are making a presentation which makes use of CSES data and it does not appear here, please let us know via email to: [email protected]


FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 1, 2017

Panel: Media Diversity and Media Freedom
Friday September 1, 8:00 to 9:30am, Hilton Union Square, Continental Parlor 2

Presentation:  Increasing Media Diversity and Political Knowledge Gaps: A Longitudinal Study
Atle Haugsgjerd, University of Oslo; Stine Hesstvedt, University of Oslo; Rune Karlsen, Institute for Social Research

Recent dramatic events such as the “Brexit” referendum in England and the electoral victory of Trump in the US election testify to the dramatic impact of an increasing gap between “insiders” accustomed to modern politics and “outsiders” feeling detached from the political system. We investigate what role the disruptive changes in the political communication systems play in this process. Combining CSES survey data with media system data (level of media diversity) we study if polarization in political knowledge has increased in the period from the mid-1990s until today and the role of media fragmentation.

Panel: Globalization and Domestic Politics
Friday September 1, 8:00 to 9:30am, Parc 55, Cyril Magnin II

Presentation:  Declining Turnout in New Democracies: The Effect of Economic Globalization
Jungmin Song, University of Iowa

Contrary to former voter turnout studies that focused solely on the cases of established democracies, this paper extends the theoretical discussion to cases of new democracies by examining why the levels of turnout in new democracies have declined more dramatically than they have in established democracies. It hypothesizes that the starker declining turnout in new democracies compared to established democracies is largely attributable to the negative turnout effect of economic globalization.

Mini-Conference: Making Electoral Democracy Work
Friday, September 1, 8:00, Westin St. Francis, California East

Presentation:  Elections Activate Partisanship Across Countries
Shane P. Singh, University of Georgia; Judd Thornton, Georgia State University

It has long been argued that elections amplify partisan predispositions. In this paper, we take advantage of the timing of the cross-national post-election surveys included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems to explore the effects that elections have on individuals’ attachments to political parties. Within these surveys, the dates on which respondents are interviewed are assigned as if randomly and thus independent of factors known to affect partisanship. Consequently, we are able to identify the causal effects of election salience on partisan attachments. We find strong evidence that election salience increases the probability of one having a party attachment, increases the strength of attachments, and heightens the relationship between partisanship and evaluations of political stimuli. Empirical tests of our identifying assumption bolster its validity. Our results substantiate the causal role that elections play in activating partisanship. Additional analyses of survey data from the Making Electoral Democracy Work project suggest that the election itself— and not just the campaign period—is critical to bolstering partisan attachments.

Panel: Political Studies Association of Ireland; Ireland after the great recession
Friday September 1, 10:00 to 11:30am, Westin St. Francis, Victorian

Presentation: Challenger Parties and the Irish Voter: Pragmatists, Populists, and Localists
Theresa Reidy, University College Cork; Jane Suiter, City University

The Great Recession begot economic and political crisis in many states heralding a renewed march towards populism and party system fragmentation in many states. The severity of the crisis propelled long standing critics of the Irish economic model centre stage and party system fragmentation advanced with the long dominant centrist parties suffering severe losses at elections and new and more radical political forces emerging. We develop a demographic and attitudinal profile of the challenger voter to distinguish between voters who support small and micro parties and those who support candidates of no political party affiliation.

Panel: Labor and the Left
Friday September 1, 12:00 to 1:30pm, Hilton Union Square, Union Square 3 & 4

Presentation: Social Class, Union Membership and Erosion of Support for the Mainstream Left
Jonas Pontusson, University of Geneva; Line Rennwald, European University Institute

The formation of successful electoral coalitions has become an increasingly complex task for political parties, especially for mainstream Left parties whose traditional reservoir of votes has diminished with manufacturing employment. This paper revisits the impact of union membership and social class on the support for the Left and tests the proposition, advanced by Przeworski and Sprague, that unionization reinforces the class identity of workers and thereby mitigates the trade-off between working-class and middle-class support faced by Left parties.

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 2, 2017

Panel: Electoral Legitimacy and Representation
Saturday September 2, 12:00 to 1:30pm, Hilton Union Square, Nob Hill 10

Presentation: General Warfare and the Crisis of Democratic Legitimacy
Maarja Luhiste, Newcastle University; Jeffrey A. Karp, University of Exeter; Laura Sudulich, University of Kent

Disaffection, anger, and anti-establishment sentiment have become common themes in recent elections on both sides of the Atlantic. Does such frustration with politics as usual represent a rejection of incumbents and ruling parties or democracy itself? It is well known that age affects political engagement; younger generations are less likely to vote than older cohorts. However, it is not at all clear whether younger citizens hold different opinions about democratic norms. We investigate this by drawing on data from CSES to examine these generational difference in advanced industrial democracies.

Poster Session:  Part II: Comparative Politics
Saturday September 2, 1:30 to 2:00pm, Hilton Union Square, Grand Ballroom

Poster:  Voters’ Ideological Placements of Parties and Political Knowledge
Frederico Batista Pereira, University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Guilherme Russo, Vanderbilt University

Studies in comparative political behavior often use survey respondents’ placements of parties on the left-right scale as a proxy measure for their level of political knowledge. These studies claim that, while factual knowledge questions have problems of cross-national comparability, the aggregate distance between a given respondent’s placement of parties and the sample’s average placement in his/her country yields a more comparable and valid measure of political knowledge across countries. We investigate the extent to which this measure truly provides a cross-nationally comparable measure of the construct.

Panel: Electoral Systems and Voting Rules
Saturday September 2, 2:00 to 3:30pm, Hilton Union Square, Union Square 17 & 18

Presentation:  Number of Alternatives, Ballot Structure, and Voter Turnout
Peter Söderlund, Åbo Akademi University

This study examines how the number of alternatives in an electoral district interacts with ballot structure to produce different levels of turnout. It addresses two puzzles of voter turnout. First, many studies report a negative or null link between the number of parties and turnout. This is a paradox considering the apparently strong positive effect of proportional representation on voter participation. Second, studies show that turnout is lower in electoral systems where the voters may cast a personal vote, particularly in open list PR systems with preference voting for individual candidates.

Panel: Representation & Gender
Saturday September 2, 4:00 to 5:30pm, Hilton Union Square, Franciscan A

Presentation:  Gender Representation and the Quality of the Vote
Ruth Dassonneville, University of Montreal; Marc Hooghe, University of Leuven; Richard R. Lau, Rutgers University; Mary Nugent, Rutgers University

Across the world, women are increasingly represented in parliament and government. While quota laws have been an important step in this process, the trend toward increased gender equality in electoral politics can be considered almost universal. There are competing views about the relation between increased gender equality and the quality of electoral democracy. The goal of this paper is to connect this trend toward gender equality with the broader literature on the quality of democratic representation.