Journal of Electoral Studies

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Home Issues Backissues Volume 31, No.1 Partisan and Personal Voting in SNTV: A Mixed Logit Model

Partisan and Personal Voting in SNTV: A Mixed Logit Model

Nathan F. Batto
2013 / 05
Volume 20, No.1

pp.121-153
10.6612/tjes.2013.20.01.121-153
Paper

Abstract

There are reasons to believe that both partisan and personal factors should be important in the voting decision in SNTV elections, but this has not been rigorously tested in previous literature. This paper presents evidence that both types of factors have significant impacts, but partisan factors are much more powerful than personal factors. In general, partisan factors dominate the candidate vote choice, and personal factors serve primarily as tiebreakers among candidates from the same party. Moreover, the importance that voters place on personal factors varies in different partisan contexts, and there is generally a partisan logic to these varying weights.Methodologically, this paper proposes mixed logit as an appropriate tool for modeling voting choices in SNTV and examines data from the five legislative elections in Taiwan from 1992 to 2004.

Keywords

Single non-transferable vote (SNTV)

mixed logit

vote choice