Pre-Election Positions and Voting Behaviour in Parliament: Consistency among Swiss MPs

This article examines the determinants of positional incongruence between pre-election statements and post-election behaviour in the Swiss parliament between 2003 and 2009. The question is examined at the individual MP level, which is appropriate for dispersion-of-powers systems like Switzerland. While the overall rate of political congruence reaches about 85%, a multilevel logit analysis detects the underlying factors which push or curb a candidate's propensity to change his or her mind once elected. The results show that positional changes are more likely when (1) MPs are freshmen, (2) individual voting behaviour is invisible to the public, (3) the electoral district magnitude is not small, (4) the vote is not about a party's core issue, (5) the MP belongs to a party which is located in the political centre, and (6) if the pre-election statement dissents from the majority position of the legislative party group. Of these factors, the last one is paramount.

Leader corruption depends on power and testosterone

We used incentivized experimental games to manipulate leader power-the number of followers and the discretion leaders had to enforce their will. Leaders had complete autonomy in deciding payouts to themselves and their followers. Although leaders could make prosocial decisions to benefit the public good they could also abuse their power by invoking antisocial decisions, which reduced the total payouts to the group but increased leader's earnings. In Study 1 (N = 478), we found that both amount of followers and discretionary choices independently predicted leader corruption. In Study 2 (N = 240), we examined how power and individual differences (e.g., personality, hormones) affected leader corruption over time; power interacted with testosterone in predicting corruption, which was highest when leader power and baseline testosterone were both high. Honesty predicted initial level of leader antisocial decisions; however, honesty did not shield leaders from the corruptive effect of power.

Understanding Political Knowledge and Its Influence on Voting Preferences in the 2007 Federal Election

In this article we propose a model to explain how voters' perceptions of their ideological proximity to a party affect their propensity to vote for that party. We argue that political knowledge plays a crucial moderating role in the relationship between party proximity and voting propensity. It is necessary, however, to distinguish between institutional knowledge (information about the political system) and party knowledge (information about the parties' left-right positions). An analysis of survey data from the 2007 Swiss federal elections supports our main hypothesis that party knowledge enhances the link between party proximity and voting propensity. Institutional knowledge may have additional influence, but clear evidence for this effect was obtained only for propensities to vote for the Swiss People's Party (SVP). Overall, the impact of political knowledge was found to be substantial, even after controlling for the outstanding influence of party identification and other predictors of voting propensities

Leadership at the upper echelons : three essays

"IT'S THE ECONOMY STUPID", BUT CHARISMA MATTERS TOO: A DUAL PROCESS MODEL OF PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OUTCOMES. ABSTRACT Because charisma is assumed to be an important determinant of effective leadership, the extent to which a presidential nominee is more charismatic than his opponent should be an important determinant of voter choices. We computed a composite measure of the rhetorical richness of acceptances speeches given by U.S. presidential candidates at their national party convention. We added this marker of charisma to Ray C. Fair's presidential vote-share equation (1978; 2009). We theorized that voters decide using psychological attribution (i.e., due to macroeconomics and incumbency) as well as inferential processes (i.e., due to leader charismatic behavior) when voting. Controlling for the macro-level variables and incumbency in the Fair model, our results indicated that difference between nominees' charisma is a significant determinant of electoral success, particularly in close elections. This extended model significantly improves the precision of the Fair model and correctly predicts 23 out of the last 24 U.S. presidential elections. Paper 2: IT CEO LEADERSHIP, CORPORATE SOCIAL AND FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE. ABSTRACT We investigated whether CEO leadership predicted corporate financial performance (CFP) and corporate social performance (CSP). Using longitudinal data on 258 CEOs from 117 firms across 19 countries and 10 industry sectors, we found that determinants of CEO leadership (i.e., implicit motives) significantly predicted both CFP and CSP. As expected, the most consistent positive predictor was Responsibility Disposition when interacting with n (need for) Power. n Achievement and n Affiliation were generally negatively related or unrelated to outcomes. CSP was positively related to accounting measures of CFP. Our findings suggest that executive leader characteristics have important consequences for corporate level outcomes. Paper 3. PUNISHING THE POWERFUL: ATTRIBUTIONS OF BLAME AND LEADERSHIP ABSTRACT We propose that individuals are more lenient in attributing blame to leaders than to nonleaders. We advance a motivational explanation building on the perspective of punishment and on system justification theory. We conducted two scenario experiments which supported our proposition. In study 1, wrongdoer leader status was negatively related to blame and the perceived seriousness of the wrongdoing. In study 2, controlling for the Big-Five personality factor and individual differences in moral evaluation (i.e., moral foundations), wrongdoer leader status was negatively related with desired severity of punishment, and fair punishments were perceived as more just for non-leaders than for leaders.

E-tools for civic education : experiences from the election campaign in Switzerland 2007

Political participation is often very low in Switzerland especially among students and young citizens. In the run-up to the Swiss parliamentary election in October 2007 several online tools and campaigns were developed with the aim to increase not only the level of information about the political programs of parties and candidates, but also the electoral participation of younger citizens. From a practical point of view this paper will describe the development, marketing efforts and the distribution as well as the use of two of these tools : the so-called "Parteienkompass" (party compass) and the "myVote"-tool - an online voting assistance tool based on an issue-matching system comparing policy preferences between voters and candidates on an individual level. We also havea look at similar tools stemming from Voting Advice Applications (VAA) in other countries in Western Europe. The paper closes with the results of an evaluation and an outlook to further developments and on-going projects in the near future in Switzerland.

The Half-Life of Election Pledges : What makes MPs change their positions?

"Thou shalt not bear false witness," as we all know. Yet changing one's mind in case of respectable reasons seems to be allowed. Which is good news for politicians, but reduces the effectiveness of prospective voting, i.e. the focus on "the commitments of candidates to take actions that citizens desire to be taken" (Powell 2000: 9). This may be bad news for voters. By comparing pre-election commitments of Swiss members of parliament (MPs) with actual voting behaviour in the lower house of parliament, the following article explores the question how much confidence voters can have in prospective voting and what factors explain (non-)fulfilment of election pledges.

Undercoverage and Nonresponse in a List-sampled Telephone Election Survey

For landline telephone surveys in particular, undercoverage has been a growing problem. However, research regarding the relative contributions of socio-demographic bias and other composition effects is scarce. We propose to address this issue by analyzing an election survey which used a sample from a register-based sampling frame containing basic socio-demographic information and to which telephone numbers were subsequently matched. With respect to socio-demographic representation of the final sample, we find that difficult to match groups are also difficult to contact, while those who cooperate tend to have different characteristics. We find bias due to undercoverage to be of greater magnitude than noncontact bias, while noncooperation falls between the two. As for substantive variables, both additional efforts to match missing telephone numbers and the construction of better weights are successful in closing the gap between survey estimates of voting behavior and true values from the election results.

When does charisma matter for top-level leaders? Effect of attributional ambiguity

One stream of leadership theory suggests leaders are evaluated via inferential observer processes that compare the fit of the target to a prototype of an ideal (charismatic) leader. Attributional theories of leadership suggest that evaluations depend on knowledge of past organizational performance, which is attributed to the leader's skills. We develop a novel theory showing how inferential and attributional processes simultaneously explain top-level leader evaluation and ultimately leader retention and selection. We argue that observers will mostly rely on attributional mechanisms when performance signals clearly indicate good or poor performance outcomes. However, under conditions of attributional ambiguity (i.e., when performance signals are unclear), observers will mostly rely on inferential processes. In Study 1 we tested our theory in an unconventional context-the U.S. presidential election-and found that the two processes, due to the leader's charisma and country economic performance, interact in predicting whether a leader is selected. Using a business context and an experimental design, in Study 2 we show that CEO charisma and firm performance interact in predicting leader retention, confirming the results we found in Study 1. Our results suggest that this phenomenon is quite general and can apply to various performance domains.

How women and men project their gender prototypes on leader prototypes.

Both role incongruency theory (Eagly & Karau, 2002) and the lack of fit model by Heilman (1983) suggest that the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions can be explained by the male-typedness of leader prototypes. We examine how women and men project their gender prototypes onto leader prototypes. We found initially that men more so than women projected their gender prototypes on leader prototypes. For men there is more of an overlap between a prototypical men and a prototypical leader than there is an overlap between a prototypical woman and a prototypical leader. Women, however, do not engage in so called relative ingroup projection. In the current study, we further decompose this finding asking whether the gender difference in relative ingroup projection on leadership prototypes is driven by female prototypes, male prototypes, and/or leader prototypes. We further examine to what extent this gender difference is more manifested on positively valenced or negatively valenced attributes of prototypes. Our findings show that, while women and men have similar prototypes of leaders and men on both positively and negatively valenced attributes, men relative to women have less favorable prototypes of women but only on positively valenced attributes. An interesting implication is that efforts to address gender differences in the projection of gender prototypes onto leader prototypes should focus less on leader prototypes and more on the female prototypes. Theoretically, our findings allude to the importance of distinguishing between more subtle (evaluating the outgroup less positively on positive properties) and less subtle forms (evaluating the outgroup more negatively on negative properties) of outgroup derogation.