Volume 10, Issue 1

This article examines the influence of religion on voter choice homogeneity (VCH) in the Nigerian presidential elections of the fourth republic (1999–2015). The result indicates that in the first two elections, religion did not have a significant impact on VCH but had increasing influence from 2011. Thus, compared with the 1999 and 2003 elections, the effect of faith in 2011 and 2015 elections was positive, but the impact of religion was highest in 2015, having a significant and robust effect on VCH. Thus, the paper demonstrates that impact of faith in the presidential elections in the fourth republic has strengthened over time. This finding is, however, put in the context of each election regarding the role of candidates’ popularity, party-identification, ethnicity, candidates’ performance, the number of candidates contesting the election and the position of prominent leaders of the different regions of the country. The paper demonstrates that placing the influence of religion on vote choice in the context of each election and place-specific manifestation of VCH is pertinent in understanding better how religion shapes voting behaviour in Nigeria.

Centralized inspections face scepticism among local public managers, and voluntary evaluations have become a popular complement. This study uses the Swedish local government benchmarking programme (Kommunens Kvalitet i Korthet) to investigate what correlates with partaking in a benchmarking exercise empirically. This study finds evidence for temporal and spatial clustering: participants cluster geographically at an early stage of the exercise, new entrants tended to attach to existing clusters of participants rather than forming new clusters themselves. From event history analyses this study also finds that the proportion of participants among direct neighbours increases the conditional probability of entering the exercise. This suggests that public managers and local councils mimic the behaviour from nearby councils when it comes to the use of performance evaluations.

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have proliferated in the last decade as part of electoral campaigns in Europe. Several studies have linked the usage of the applications to an increase in voting intention, yet the literature on the factors that make people more likely to be influenced by VAAs is not really developed. This paper tries to contribute to this literature by addressing two key questions: first, how non-institutional forms of political participation influence abstentionism among VAA users and second, how VAA encourages voting intention among these politically engaged abstentionists (activation effect). We first examine (a) whether being engaged in non-institutional forms of participation increases the likelihood of a VAA user declaring him/herself to be a voter and (b) whether being engaged in non-institutional forms of political participation has an effect on the probability of becoming a “voter” after filling in the VAA questionnaire. Our results suggest that the VAA “activation effect” nexus exists and it affects a significant percentage of abstentionist. Those users that have participated in non-institutional forms of participation – such as demonstrations or online petitions – are more likely to declare being voters before filling in the VAA. Among the abstentionists, once they answered the set of 30 key questions, a considerable percent (between 14 and 22 percent depending on the threshold used) declared to have the intention to vote (activation effect). The prevailing profile of the activated user is a young man with tertiary education. The motivational reason for voting a party also matter in increasing the probability that an “activation effect” happens. The competency of the party, its ideology, the candidate presented by the party and the users’ self-interest are also good predictors of the “activation effect.”