While elections are an instrument to hold politicians accountable, corrupt politicians are often re-elected. A potential explanation for this paradox is that citizens trade-off integrity for competence. Voters may forgive corruption if corrupt politicians manage to deliver desirable outcomes. While previous studies have examined whether politicians’ competence moderates the negative effect of corruption, this paper focuses on voters’ priorities and directly assesses what citizens value more: integrity or favourable outcomes. Using a survey experiment, we assess citizens’ support for politicians who violate the law in order to improve the welfare of their community and, in some cases, benefit personally from these violations. The results indicate that citizens prefer a politician who follows the law, even if this leads to a suboptimal outcome. However, voters are more likely to overlook violations of the law that benefit the community if these do not result in a personal gain for politicians (i.e., in the absence of corruption). These findings suggest that the mild electoral punishment of corruption may be due to the public’s unawareness of private gains from malfeasance, or to the delay in these private benefits becoming apparent by election day.

À la lumière de récents développements en politique québécoise, le présent article jette un regard critique sur deux éléments controversés entourant la légitimité du référendum sur la souveraineté du Québec de 1995, soit (1) le rejet de bulletins de vote le jour du scrutin et (2) l'effet du rallye pour l'unité canadienne tenu le 27 octobre 1995. Cette analyse mobilise des données historiques agrégées d’Élections Québec ainsi que des données individuelles de sondage collectées par Canadian Facts Limited en octobre 1995 (n = 930). Les résultats ne révèlent aucun prédicteur attitudinal du rejet de bulletins de vote à travers les circonscriptions québécoises. Des analyses suggèrent cependant l'existence d'un impact statistiquement significatif du rassemblement du love-in qui pourrait avoir profité à la cause fédéraliste à quelques jours du vote, particulièrement à l'extérieur de l’île de Montréal. Cette recherche vise à contribuer au débat public sur la transparence des processus démocratiques en contexte référendaire.

Much attention has been paid to the changing class cleavage that structured political conflict in the twentieth century. In contrast to most advanced democracies, class voting has traditionally been weak in Canada. Using the entire series of the Canadian Election Study (1965–2019), we find the historic pattern of working-class voting for the New Democratic Party (NDP) held outside of Quebec in recent elections, before suddenly falling off in 2019. Starting in 2004, we find a clear and distinct trend where the working class has increased its support for the Conservatives. Although greater partisan sorting is occurring over the economy, cultural issues such as moral traditionalism and anti-immigration are now significant drivers of working-class Conservative support. The findings carry important implications for class-party relationships and reveal that Canada, despite its comparatively weak nativist cleavage, is not immune from the tensions social democratic parties have recently experienced in maintaining cross-class coalitions amid socio-economic structural changes.

Populism's electoral success has been linked to socio-economic crises and to inflammatory political discourse. However, little is known of populist attitudes in contexts in which these supply-side factors are not salient. The present article diverges from the conception of populism that sees it as being activated or fuelled by contextual factors and, rather, conceives populism as an ideological attitudinal dimension that can have an impact on vote choice when supply-side factors are not salient. Using the particular context of the 2015 Canadian federal election as a case to test this theory, empirical analyses support this conception of populism by demonstrating that populist attitudes can be relatively prominent and even impact vote choice in a setting in which the traditional supply-side factors to activate or fuel populism are not salient. Ultimately, populism is shown to be an important demand-side attitudinal dimension even when there is little or no fertile ground for it.

In 2016, attitudes related to racism and sexism were strong predictors of vote choice for president. Since then, issues related to race and gender have continued to be an important part of the political agenda. This letter shows that hostile sexism and denial of racism emerged as stronger predictors of the House vote in the 2018 cycle than they had been in 2016. The results show that the increased importance of these factors came largely from the shifting of less sexist and less racist voters from voting Republican in 2016 to voting for Democrats in 2018. Overall, the results suggest that Trump's hostility towards women and minorities is becoming part of the Republican Party's brand, and that this appears to have created an electoral penalty for Republican candidates in 2018.

The 2018 Brazilian elections saw the rise to power of Jair Bolsonaro, yet another conservative politician who won an election in recent years. What were the ideological underpinnings of the Bolsonaro vote? Was his support based exclusively on resentment toward the Workers’ Party? This article uses a unique public opinion dataset, the 2018 Brazilian Electoral Panel Study, to explore how positions on divisive issues related to social, political, and cultural factors influenced vote choice and Bolsonarismo—affection toward Bolsonaro supporters—in the 2018 Brazilian presidential elections. Results indicate that in addition to resentment against the Workers’ Party, a cultural backlash perspective, and strict views on law and order, as well as economic liberalism and rejection of social policies, were the characteristics of support for Bolsonaro.

This study investigates the factors explaining voting in the 2016 Italian referendum on constitutional reform. As we show through voting alignments within the Parliament and key aspects of the electoral campaign, this was a case where the government took the leadership of the entire referendum process, transforming it into a plebiscite. Within this context, we hypothesize that key elements explaining voting choices follow a government-support vs. opposition dynamics. Employing Italian National Elections Studies Association pre/post-referendum survey, we estimate the effects of factors increasing predictability (e.g. party closeness, ideology, social cleavage) or uncertainty (e.g. government performance, the economy) of voting choices. The resulting logistic regression models show that the leading role of the government in the referendum reshapes the impact of factors explaining voting choices. While some lose significance, others follow a pro- or anti-government logic.

Nous étudions dans un modèle à générations imbriquées le rôle primordial du gouvernement pour la pérennité des systèmes de retraite par répartition. Nous montrons que les systèmes de retraite à fort taux de cotisation, comme ceux que l'on observe en Europe, ne sont viables à long terme qu'à la condition qu'une partie des droits accumulés par les retraités lorsqu'ils étaient actifs est garantie par le gouvernement. Cette condition peut néanmoins être relativisée à partir du moment où les agents de l'économie croient suffisamment en cette garantie. Ainsi, il est possible d'interpréter la baisse des droits à pension, que des retraités de certains régimes ont été amené à accepter, non plus comme la seule conséquence d'une démographie défavorable mais aussi comme résultant d'une révision de croyance.