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Using an original database of legislative and presidential electoral results from the democratic transitions of the 1970s and 1980s to the present day, we provide a new assessment of electoral volatility in Latin America. Following a model established in studies of other regions, we decompose volatility into two subtypes: party replacement and stable party volatility. We demonstrate the relevance of this approach to Latin America and, further, document that volatility has persisted rather than waned in Latin America’s posttransition period largely because of party replacement. We then examine the contested link between economic performance and volatility and document temporal instability in this relationship: our analysis affirms previous conclusions regarding a connection in the 1980s in Latin America but uncovers scant evidence of a relationship between the economy and volatility for the 1990s to present day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We theorize that evaluations of leaders under terrorist and economic threat vary by both incumbency status and politician partisanship. This argument is based on insights from theories of rally effects, economic voting, and issue ownership, and we assess it with data from four national studies. The first two are experiments featuring hypothetical candidates; consistent with expectations based on issue ownership, the analyses show that Republican incumbents (Democratic challengers) are viewed comparatively better in times of terrorist (economic) threat. Then, with another experiment and with survey data, we consider evaluations of President Obama, whose image under terrorist threat should be helped by his incumbency but harmed by his partisanship, and the reverse for economic decline. We again find evidence supporting our argument and, further, individual-level evidence of issue ownership effects. We conclude that threats, incumbency status, and politician partisanship interact in important ways as they affect evaluations of political leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate how conditions of crisis affect perceptions of charisma and how these, in turn, affect blame attribution and self-sacrificial behavior. Our data are from a 2004 experimental study that preceded the U.S. presidential election, in which we manipulated concerns of a terrorist attack. The results show that those in the Crisis condition rated Bush higher on perceptions of charisma compared to those in the Good Times condition. The Crisis condition also directly and indirectly, via perceptions of charisma, affected whether Bush was blamed for failures in Iraq and our subjects' willingness to sacrifice their personal resources for his candidacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]