Abstract
This paper analyses, models mathematically, and compares national voting behaviours across seven democratic countries that have a long term election history, focusing on re-election rates, leaders' reputation with voters and the importance of friends' and family influence. Based on the data, we build a Markov model to test and explore national voting behaviour, showing voters are only influenced by the most recent past election. The seven countries can be divided into those in which there is a high probability that leaders will be re-elected and those in which incumbents have relatively less success. A simple stochastic phenomenological dynamical model of electoral districts in which voters may be influenced by social neighbours, political parties and political leaders is then created to explore differences in voter behaviours in the countries. This model supports the thesis that an unsuccessful leader has a greater negative influence on individual voters than a successful leader, while also highlighting that increasing the influence on voters of social neighbours leads to a decrease in the average re-election rate of leaders, but raises the average amount of time the dominant party is in charge.© 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.