Search

Enacting stringent climate policy has proven politically challenging, not least because of concentrated losses in fossil fuel-producing communities. "Just transition" strategies have been proposed to mitigate this distributional challenge. Yet, little is known about how such strategies affect voting behavior. Using a mixed-methods approach, we exploit a local climate policy in Spain—a "Just Transition Agreement" (JTA) to phase out coalmining, support affected workers, and invest in affected municipalities—which was negotiated by the incumbent Socialist Party (PSOE) government with affected unions and businesses shortly before a national election. A difference-in-differences study shows that PSOE's vote share in coalmining municipalities increased at the 2019 election relative to similar municipalities, implying that the JTA was electorally successful. Further statistical tests and elite interviews suggest that this electoral boost was driven by unions' support of the JTA. Our findings have implications for how parties can craft popular climate policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does motivated reasoning harm democratic accountability? Substantial evidence from political behavior research indicates that voters have "directional motives" beyond accuracy, which is often taken as evidence that they are ill equipped to hold politicians accountable. We develop a model of electoral accountability with voters as motivated reasoners. Directional motives have two effects: (1) divergence—voters with different preferences hold different beliefs, and (2) desensitization—the relationship between incumbent performance and voter beliefs is weakened. While motivated reasoning does harm accountability, this is generally driven by desensitized voters rather than polarized partisans with politically motivated divergent beliefs. We also analyze the relationship between government performance and vote shares, showing that while motivated reasoning always weakens this relationship, we cannot infer that accountability is also harmed. Finally, we show that our model can be mapped to standard models in which voters are fully Bayesian but have different preferences or information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incumbents in electoral regimes often retain power despite having to regularly compete in multiparty elections. We examine a specific channel through which incumbents can seek to prevent the emergence of a strong opposition that might threaten them in future elections. We present a formal model demonstrating that incumbents can strategically induce opposition fragmentation by appointing some opposition members to ministerial cabinet positions. Opposition politicians who have the opportunity to secure a cabinet position in an incumbent's government tend to compete for office independently rather than coalescing into broad-based parties or electoral alliances. The model shows that weaker incumbents are more likely to rely on this cooptation strategy. Using original data on presidential elections across African countries during 1990–2016, we show that past cooptation of opposition politicians is associated with a more fragmented opposition field in subsequent elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For incumbents to be accountable for their issue stances, voters must sanction incumbents whose positions are "out of step" with their own. We test the electoral accountability of British legislators for their stance on Brexit. We find that there is very limited issue accountability. Individuals who disagreed with their representative's stance on Brexit were 3 percentage points less likely to vote for them. The aggregate consequences of these individual effects are limited. A one-standard-deviation increase in the proportion of constituents agreeing with their incumbent's Brexit stance is associated with an increase of 0.53 percentage points in incumbent vote share. These effects are one and a half times larger when the main challenger has a different Brexit stance to the incumbent. A follow-up survey of Members of Parliament (MPs) shows that MPs' estimates of the effects of congruence are similar in magnitude. Our findings suggest that issue accountability is conditional in nature and limited in magnitude even for an issue such as Brexit, which should be maximally amenable to such effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have documented ethnic/racial bias in politicians' constituency service, but less is known about the circumstances under which such ethnocentric responsiveness is curbed. We propose and test two hypotheses in this regard: the electoral incentives hypothesis, predicting that incentives for (re)election crowd out politicians' potential biases, and the candidate selection hypothesis, stipulating that minority constituents can identify responsive legislators by using candidates' partisan affiliation and stated policy preferences as heuristics. We test these hypotheses through a field experiment on the responsiveness of incumbent local politicians in Denmark (N = 2,395), varying ethnicity, gender, and intention to vote for the candidate in the upcoming election, merged with data on their electoral performance and their stated policy preferences from a voting advice application. We observe marked ethnocentric responsiveness and find no indication that electoral incentives mitigate this behavior. However, minority voters can use parties' and individual candidates' stances on immigration to identify responsive politicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In more than half of the democratic countries in the world, candidates face legal constraints on how much money they can spend on their electoral campaigns, yet we know little about the consequences of these restrictions. I study how spending limits affect UK House of Commons elections. I contribute new data on the more than 70,000 candidates who ran for a parliamentary seat from 1885 to 2019, and I document how much money each candidate spent, how they allocated their resources across different spending categories, and the spending limit they faced. To identify the effect on elections, I exploit variation in spending caps induced by reforms of the spending-limit formula that affected some but not all constituencies. The results indicate that when the level of permitted spending is increased, the cost of electoral campaigns increases, which is primarily driven by expenses related to advertisement and mainly to the disadvantage of Labour candidates; the pool of candidates shrinks and elections become less competitive; and the financial and electoral advantages enjoyed by incumbents are amplified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does democracy emerge from authoritarian rule? Certain influential theories contend that incumbents deliberately choose to share or surrender power. They do so to prevent revolution, motivate citizens to fight wars, incentivize governments to provide public goods, outbid elite rivals, or limit factional violence. Examining the history of all democratizations since 1800, I show that such deliberate-choice arguments may help explain up to about one-third of the cases. In more than two-thirds, the evidence suggests that democratization occurred not because incumbents chose it but because, while trying to prevent it, they made mistakes that weakened their hold on power. Rather than being granted by farsighted elites or forced on them by the rise of new classes, democracy appears to have spread most often because of incumbents' missteps that triggered previously latent factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral accountability requires that voters have the ability to constrain the incumbent government's policy-making power. We express the necessary conditions for this claim as an accountability identity in which the electoral system and the party system interact to shape the accountability of parliamentary governments. Data from 400 parliamentary elections between 1948 and 2012 show that electoral accountability is contingent on the party system's bipolarity, for example, with parties arrayed in two distinct blocs. Proportional electoral systems achieve accountability as well as majoritarian ones when bipolarity is strong but not when it is weak. This is because bipolarity decreases the number of connected coalitions that incumbent parties can join to preserve their policy-making power. Our results underscore the limitations that party systems place on electoral reform and the benefits that bipolarity offers for clarifying voters' choices and intensifying electoral competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do social networks moderate the way political information influences electoral accountability? We propose a simple model in which incumbent malfeasance revelations can facilitate coordination around less malfeasant challenger parties in highly connected voter networks, even when voters update favorably about incumbent party malfeasance. We provide evidence from Mexico of this mechanism by leveraging a field experiment in a context where the provision of incumbent malfeasance information increased support for incumbent parties, despite voters continuing to believe that challengers were less malfeasant than incumbents. Combining this experiment with detailed family network data, we show that—consistent with the model—the increase in incumbent party vote share due to information provision was counteracted by coordination around less malfeasant challengers in precincts with greater network connectedness. Individual-level data further demonstrate that networks facilitated explicit and tacit coordination among voters. These findings suggest that networks can help voters coordinate around information to help remove poorly performing politicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies of economic voting have focused on the role of the local economy, but with inconclusive results. We argue that while local economic conditions affect incumbent support on average, the importance of the local economy varies by citizens' interactions with it. More recent and frequent encounters with aspects of the local economy make those aspects more salient and, in turn, feature more prominently in evaluations of the incumbent government. We label this process "context priming." We provide evidence for these propositions by studying local housing markets. Linking granularly detailed data on housing prices from Danish public registries to both precinct-level election returns and an individual-level panel survey, we find that when individuals interact with the housing market, their support for the incumbent government is more responsive to changes in local housing prices. The study thus provides a framework for understanding when citizens respond politically to the local economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fluctuations in the volume and the value of financial remittances received from abroad affect the livelihood of households in developing economies across the world. Yet, political scientists have little to say about how changes in remittances, as opposed to the receipt of remittance payments alone, affect recipients' political attitudes. Relying on a unique four-wave panel study of Kyrgyz citizens between 2010–2013 and a cross-sectional sample of 28 countries in Central Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, we show that when people experience a decrease (increase) in remittances, they become less (more) satisfied about their household economic situation and misattribute responsibility to the incumbent at home. Our findings advance the literature on the political consequences of remittance payments and suggest that far from exclusively being an international risk-sharing mechanism for developing countries, remittances can also drive fluctuations in incumbent approval and compromise rudimentary accountability mechanisms in the developing world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to model the incumbent's allocation of efforts that maximize his electoral chances in the presence of both vote buying (persuasion) and turnout buying (mobilization). The existing literature on distributive politics concludes that political candidates should concentrate their campaigning efforts either on safe districts or on swing districts. This paper shows that when candidates can use both persuasion and mobilization strategies, and the ideology of voters is unknown to the incumbent party, a third option should be taken into account. In fact, the optimal allocation of resources—rather than focusing on safe or swing districts—should target opposition strongholds, that is, the incumbent should try to sway voters in those districts in which the challenger is favored. The intuition for this result is simple. Since the incumbent does not know individual preferences (he only observes the distribution of preferences in the districts), all voters in a given district look identical to him. Hence, when approaching voters in a district to buy their vote, the incumbent always faces the risk of buying the vote of his supporters (who would have voted for him anyway). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A handful of recent studies have investigated the causal effect of incumbency on dynasty formation in candidate-centered electoral contexts. We use candidate-level data and a regression discontinuity design to estimate the incumbency advantage and its relation to dynasty formation in the party-centered, closed-list, proportional-representation setting of Norway. The results indicate that the incumbency advantage exists even in this party-centered environment; however, in contrast to recent findings for the United States and the Philippines, we find no evidence that incumbency is important to the formation of dynasties. This finding underscores the need for more research into the role of internal party organizational networks in the perpetuation of political dynasties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does sexual orientation and gender identity matter at election time? While previous literature has explored the effect of candidate gender and ethnicity on electoral results, this is the first study to quantitatively investigate the impact of sexual orientation. We build an original dataset combining individual-level data on more than 3,000 candidates in the 2015 UK election with sociodemographic indicators at the constituency level. In addition to sexual orientation and other demographic characteristics, we include candidate education, political experience, and campaign spending. We find that LGBT candidates generally do not have a negative impact on party vote share. Even in more conservative environments, LGBT candidates perform at least as well as their straight counterparts. This work is important to understand the consequences of descriptive representation and, relatedly, how rapid social change happens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elections are often violent affairs, casting doubt on the canonical claim that democracy makes societies more peaceful by creating nonviolent means to contest for power. We develop a formal argument to demonstrate that this conclusion is incorrect. Holding elections has a direct effect of increasing levels of violence close to the voting, as this is when electoral violence can influence political outcomes. Precisely for this reason, elections also have an indirect effect of decreasing levels of violence at all other times, as parties can wait for the election when their efforts are more likely to succeed. The direct and indirect effects generate a “political violence cycle” that peaks at the election. However, when the indirect effect is larger, politics would be more violent without elections. When elections also provide an effective nonviolent means to contest for power, they unambiguously make society more peaceful while still generating a political violence cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We study how representation works in a context where accountability to voters is restricted because of term limits and accountability to parties is limited because of party weakness. Analyzing all Brazilian mayoral elections between 1996 and 2012 using a regression discontinuity design, we show that becoming the incumbent party results in large subsequent electoral losses. We theorize that the presence of term limits, combined with political parties to which politicians are only weakly attached, affects the incentives and behavior of individual politicians in such a way that their parties’ suffer systematic losses. A descriptive analysis of an original dataset on the career paths of Brazilian mayors suggests that our assumptions are an accurate description of Brazil’s political context, and we find support for three central empirical implications of our theoretical explanation. Moreover, based on an analysis of additional data from Mexico, Peru, Chile, Costa Rica, and Colombia, we show that the negative effects found in Brazil also exist in other democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Do parties learn from or emulate parties in other political systems? This research develops the argument that parties are more likely to employ the heuristic of learning from and emulating foreign successful (incumbent) parties. Spatial-econometric analyses of parties’ election policies from several established democracies robustly confirm that political parties respond to left-right policy positions of foreign political parties that have recently governed. By showing that parties respond to these foreign incumbent parties, this work has significant implications for our understanding of party competition. Furthermore, we contribute to the literature on public policy diffusion, as we suggest that political parties are important vehicles through which public policies diffuse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most electoral fraud is not conducted centrally by incumbents but rather locally by a multitude of political operatives. How does an incumbent ensure that his agents deliver fraud when needed and as much as is needed? We address this and related puzzles in the political organization of electoral fraud by studying the perverse consequences of incentive conflicts between incumbents and their local agents. These incentive conflicts result in a herd dynamic among the agents that tends to either oversupply or undersupply fraud, rarely delivering the amount of fraud that would be optimal from the incumbent’s point of view. Our analysis of the political organization of electoral fraud explains why even popular incumbents often preside over seemingly unnecessary fraud, why fraud sometimes fails to deliver victories, and it predicts that the extent of fraud should be increasing in both the incumbent’s genuine support and reported results across precincts. A statistical analysis of anomalies in precinct-level results from the 2011–2012 Russian legislative and presidential elections provides preliminary support for our key claims. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why do political actors undertake reforms that constrain their own discretion? We argue that uncertainty generated by political competition is a major driver of such reforms, and test this argument using subnational data onMexican states' adoption of state-level access to information (ATI) laws. Examining data from 31Mexican states plus the Federal District, we find that more politically competitive states passed ATI laws more rapidly, even taking into account the party in power, levels of corruption, civil society, and other factors. The fine-grained nature of our data, reflecting the staggered timing of elections, inauguration dates, and dates of passage, allows us to distinguish between different theoretical mechanisms. We find the greatest evidence in favor of an insurance mechanism, by which incumbent parties who face uncertainty over future political control seek to ensure access to government information, and means of monitoring incumbents, in the future in case they lose power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1972, campaign spending by House incumbents has skyrocketed, particularly in those districts with marginal support for the incumbent's party. At the same time, parties in the House have become much more cohesive in the way they vote, producing more precise and informative party brands. We argue that these two phenomena are fundamentally linked. As parties have developed more precise reputations, incumbents in these districts must spend much more to attract voters in “marginal” districts, who would be willing to vote for a candidate with the particular incumbent's legislative record, but not the average member of his party. Increasingly precise party reputations provide voters with stronger priors that incumbents are just like the rest of their party, and incumbents in marginal districts must spend more to overcome these beliefs. We demonstrate this using a simple formal model and test it empirically using campaign-spending data from 1972 to 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Are citizens competent to assess the performance of incumbent politicians? Observational studies cast doubt on voter competence by documenting several biases in retrospective assessments of performance. However, these studies are open to alternative interpretations because of the complexity of the real world. In this article, we show that these biases in retrospective evaluations occur even in the simplified setting of experimental games. In three experiments, our participants (1) overweighted recent relative to overall incumbent performance when made aware of an election closer rather than more distant from that event, (2) allowed an unrelated lottery that affected their welfare to influence their choices, and (3) were influenced by rhetoric to give more weight to recent rather than overall incumbent performance. These biases were apparent even though we informed and incentivized respondents to weight all performance equally. Our findings point to key limitations in voters’ ability to use a retrospective decision rule. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Particularistic spending, a large literature argues, builds support for incumbents. This literature equates money spent in the district with the credit constituents allocate. Yet, constituents lack the necessary information and motivation to allocate credit in this way. We use extensive observational and experimental evidence to show how legislators’ credit claiming messages—and not just money spent in the district—affect how constituents allocate credit. Legislators use credit claiming messages to influence the expenditures they receive credit for and to affect how closely they are associated with spending in the district. Constituents are responsive to credit claiming messages—they build more support than other nonpartisan messages. But contrary to expectations from other studies, constituents are more responsive to the total number of messages sent rather than the amount claimed. Our results have broad implications for political representation, the personal vote, and the study of U.S. Congressional elections. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article calls into question the conventional wisdom that incumbent parties are rewarded when unemployment is low and punished when it is high. Using county-level data on unemployment and election returns for 175 midterm gubernatorial elections and 4 presidential elections from 1994 to 2010, the analysis finds that unemployment and the Democratic vote for president and governor move together. Other things being equal, higher unemployment increases the vote shares of Democratic candidates. The effect is greatest when Republicans are the incumbent party, but Democrats benefit from unemployment even when they are in control. The explanation for these findings is that unemployment is a partisan issue for voters, not a valence issue, and that the Democratic Party “owns” unemployment. When unemployment is high or rising, Democratic candidates can successfully convince voters that they are the party best able to solve the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Identifying causal mechanisms is a fundamental goal of social science. Researchers seek to study not only whether one variable affects another but also how such a causal relationship arises. Yet commonly used statistical methods for identifying causal mechanisms rely upon untestable assumptions and are often inappropriate even under those assumptions. Randomizing treatment and intermediate variables is also insufficient. Despite these difficulties, the study of causal mechanisms is too important to abandon. We make three contributions to improve research on causal mechanisms. First, we present a minimum set of assumptions required under standard designs of experimental and observational studies and develop a general algorithm for estimating causal mediation effects. Second, we provide a method for assessing the sensitivity of conclusions to potential violations of a key assumption. Third, we offer alternative research designs for identifying causal mechanisms under weaker assumptions. The proposed approach is illustrated using media framing experiments and incumbency advantage studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Previous research on coalition politics has found an "incumbency advantage" in government formation, but it has provided no clear explanation as to why this advantage exists. We classify existing theories as either preference-based or institutions-based explanations for why incumbent coalitions might be likely to form again, and we integrate these explanations into a coherent theoretical argument. We also claim that it is possible, to some extent, to distinguish these explanations empirically by taking into account the "historical context" of coalition bargaining. Using a comprehensive new data set on coalition bargaining in Europe, we show that coalitions, in general, are more likely to form if the parties comprising them have worked together in the recent past, and that incumbent coalitions are more likely to re-form if partners have not experienced a severe public conflict while in office together or suffered a recent setback at the polls. The incumbency advantage disappears completely if partners have become mired in conflict or have lost legislative seats (even after accounting for the impact of seat share on coalition size). Moreover, in certain circumstances, institutional rules that grant incumbents an advantage in coalition bargaining greatly enhance their ability to remain in office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the probability of legislators to win reelection in the United States. Argument on professionalization to change incentives and capabilities of legislators; Indication of resources abundant to professionalized legislature; Discussion on the separation of legislature to political, economic and social environment.

Proposes a comprehensive statistical model for analyzing multiparty, district-level elections in Great Britain. Regression analysis; American two-party context; Attempt to resolve a controversy over the size of and trend in the electoral advantage of incumbency in Great Britain; Geographic distribution of electoral results; Features of the election campaign or aggregate areas.

From an early, incorrect consensus that party identification was free of the short-term influences of political life, its aggregate, macropartisanship, drew little scholary notice. Though macropartisanship, typically seen as a biennial time series, appears essentially constant, our quarterly treatment demonstrates substantial and notably systematic movement of this crucial barometer of the U.S. party system. We demonstrate that it varies systematically with respect to time, has electoral consequences, and can be modeled as a function of economic evaluations and approval of the incumbent presidential administration. Macropartisanship, we argue, is a variable like others, subject to routine ebb and flow as citizens in the aggregate reflect their experiences of politics onto the parties. Its medium-term movements of considerable magnitude are lasting enough to matter but occur without connoting shifts in the underlying party system and can be understood without invoking the crises and convulsions of realignment theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]