Varieties of Clientelism: Machine Politics during Elections

Although many studies of clientelism focus exclusively on vote buying, political machines often employ diverse portfolios of strategies. We provide a theoretical framework and formal model to explain how and why machines mix four clientelist strategies during elections: vote buying, turnout buying, abstention buying, and double persuasion. Machines tailor their portfolios to the political preferences and voting costs of the electorate. They also adapt their mix to at least five contextual factors: compulsory voting, ballot secrecy, political salience, machine support, and political polarization. Our analysis yields numerous insights, such as why the introduction of compulsory voting may increase vote buying, and why enhanced ballot secrecy may increase turnout buying and abstention buying. Evidence from various countries is consistent with our predictions and suggests the need for empirical studies to pay closer attention to the ways in which machines combine clientelist strategies.     

What Wins Votes: Why Some Politicians Opt Out of Clientelism

In a context where clientelism is widespread, why do some politicians choose not to condition the delivery of goods and services to citizens on individual political behavior? I argue that the answer to this question lies in the heretofore unexamined electoral costs of clientelism: clientelism decreases support from nonpoor constituents even while it generates votes from among the poor. Taking into account these costs and other factors that shape politician incentives, I posit that the interaction between political competition and poverty will explain variation in clientelism. I test this claim using an original measure of clientelism that assesses mayoral involvement in social policy implementation in Argentine municipalities. The results of statistical analysis suggest that high levels of political competition are compatible with clientelism when poverty is also high. Only when high competition is coupled with low rates of poverty does clientelism decline.     

Approval and plurality voting with uncertainty: Info-gap analysis of robustness

Voting algorithms are used to choose candidates by an electorate. However, voter participation is variable and uncertain, and projections from polls or past elections are uncertain because voter preferences may change. Furthermore, electoral victory margins are often slim. Variable voter participation or preferences, and slim margins of decision, have implications for choosing a voting algorithm. We focus on approval voting (AV) and compare it to plurality voting (PV), regarding their robustness to uncertainty in voting outcomes. We ask: by how much can voting outcomes change without altering the election outcomes? We see fairly consistent empirical differences between AV and PV. In single-winner elections, PV tends to be more robust to vote uncertainty than AV in races with large victory margins, while AV tends to be more robust at low victory margins. Two conflicting concepts—approval flattening and approval magnification—explain this tendency for reversal of robust dominance between PV and AV. We also examine the robustness to vote uncertainty of PV in elections for proportional representation of parties.

     

When Threat Mobilizes: Immigration Enforcement and Latino Voter Turnout

Immigration enforcement, and deportation in particular, has been shown to have social and psychological effects on the non-deported as well, but its political effects have gone largely unexamined. I use the staggered implementation of Secure Communities, an information-sharing program between the federal government and local law enforcement, to estimate the short-term effects of stricter immigration enforcement on Latino voter turnout. A difference-in-differences analysis indicates that enrollment in Secure Communities led to an increase in county-level Latino voter turnout of 2–3 percentage points. This relatively large effect appears due to greater Latino activism in the wake of program implementation, rather than individuals responding to particular police interactions. These results extend the existing literature on mobilization in response to threat, demonstrate that policies can have far-reaching and unexpected political implications, and suggest that the current immigration debate may have major consequences for the future makeup of the American electorate.     

The 2000 E-Campaign for U.S. Senate

Abstract

The 2000 election saw another increase in the number of Web sites produced by candidates for the U.S. Senate, to over 90% for the major party candidates and nearly 60% for third-party candidates. A content analysis of these campaign Web sites finds an increase in design elements that advance campaign purposes, such as online and credit card contributions. At the same time, few features or services were directed to the mass electorate. The absence of voter registration information and privacy policies from the large majority of Web sites is particularly striking. Sites often lacked basic navigation tools, making it difficult to find desired information. They also took little advantage of the interactivity that makes Web sites such a powerful communication and marketing tool. Third-party candidate Web sites lagged behind those of Democrats and Republicans in most respects, with the notable exceptions of mentioning their party names and the candidates at the tops of their tickets. The study concludes that campaign Web sites have not leveled the playing field for third parties, nor become a vehicle for increasing voter education and activation of the mass electorate. Neither are these Web sites employing a relationship     

Identifying the effect of mobilization on voter turnout through a natural experiment

Although numerous get-out-the-vote field experiments have identified the effects of particular mobilization tactics (e.g., canvassing, phone calls, direct mails) on voter turnout, we do not yet have a full understanding of the causal effect of overall mobilization. We study this by leveraging a natural experiment in Japan, in which the timing of a municipal election is as-if randomly assigned. The results show that almost concurrently held municipal elections boost these municipalities’ voter turnout in prefectural elections by one to two percentage points. We argue that some unique settings in Japan allow us not only to mitigate omitted variable bias but also to attribute the estimated effect only to mobilization, rather than the effects of cost sharing and psychological stimulus.     

Voting,non‐voting and consumer buying behaviour: non‐voter segmentation (NVS) and the underlining causes of electoral inactivity

This paper examines some of the issues and debates surrounding the voting and non‐voting of the UK electorate. It attempts to compare and contrast voter behaviour from both a political science perspective and a consumer buying behaviour perspective. In particular, the paper details the output of primary research into non‐voter behaviour and attempts to cluster these motivations and rationales into psychographic segments of non‐voting behaviour. Issues such as alignment and dealignment, social and inherited values are debated in detail, with particular attention being paid to party identification, issue voting and social determinant theory. The paper both challenges and supports previously presented arguments regarding political issues and voting. In addition, electoral turnout and voter participation are analysed and the consequences for democracy discussed. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications     

The impact of legal constraints on voter registration,turnout, and the composition of the American electorate

Research on the effects of restrictive voter registration laws has been largely passé for nearly a decade, apparently due to the widespread acceptance of Wolfinger and Rosenstone's (1980) study of voter turnout. Wolfinger and Rosenstone's research indicates that fully liberalized registration laws would produce a larger voting population, which would differ only marginally in its composition from the existing electorate. But their analysis only addresses turnout, not registration itself, and is based on a single sample of the American electorate, 1972. This paper focuses on the impact of restrictive laws on registration and turnout in presidential and nonpresidential election years during the period 1972–1982, relying on data from both the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Surveys and the National Election Studies. The results of the analyses do mark important points of difference from Wolfinger and Rosenstone's findings. Ultimately, however, there is no escaping their conclusion that the implications of liberalized voter registration laws on the composition of the electorate would be relatively minor.     

Voter information and power dilution: Evidence from Sicilian provincial elections

Public Choice - It is generally accepted that an increase in the amount of voter information is desirable. As Reisman (1990) points out, a well-informed and committed electorate is better able to...     

Making Votes Count with Internet Voting

This paper reassesses the claim that electronic voting systems help voters to avoid common mistakes that lead to their votes remaining uncounted. While prior studies have come to mixed conclusions, I provide new, more robust evidence based on a case study of extended Internet voting trials in Geneva canton, Switzerland. The trials almost exclusively involved referendum votes. For causal identification I exploit the unique circumstance that federal safety legislation created a near-natural experiment, with some of the canton’s municipalities participating in the trials and others not. Using difference-in-differences estimation, I find that the residual vote rate decreased by an average of 0.3 percentage points if municipalities offered the possibility to vote online in addition to (mostly optically scanned) paper ballots. For cantonal measures, which are located towards the bottom of ballot papers in Geneva, the reduction increases to 0.5 percentage points. These remain relatively modest effects, and I find no evidence for a knock-on effect on electoral outcomes. However, on average only around 20% of votes were cast online where the opportunity existed, and online voting was most popular among voters with high levels of education. Despite the small effect sizes, the results of this study therefore point to the potential of Internet and, more generally, electronic voting technology to reduce avoidable voter mistakes.

     

What’s in a poll? Incentives for truthful reporting in pre-election opinion surveys

We examine the ability of pre-election polls to aggregate information about voter preferences. We show that if the electorate is small and voting costs are negligible, then an equilibrium exists in which citizens report their true political preferences. If the electorate is large or voting costs are significant, however, then no such equilibrium exists because poll respondents possess incentives to influence the voting behavior of others by misreporting their true preferences. We find that when a truthful equilibrium does exist, a poll can raise expected welfare by discouraging turnout among members of the minority.     

Inclusion and Public Policy: Evidence from Sweden’s Introduction of Noncitizen Suffrage

The largest disenfranchised group in modern democracies is international migrants who lack citizenship of their country of residence. Despite that noncitizen suffrage has been introduced in some countries and has been the subject of vigorous public debate in many others, there have been no systematic attempts to investigate its policy consequences. Drawing on standard models of political competition, I argue that there will be a selection bias inherent in estimating the impact of noncitizen suffrage on public policy and analyze data that are uniquely suitable to deal with this methodological problem, namely data on exogenous changes in the composition of the electorates of Swedish municipalities generated by the introduction of noncitizen suffrage. According to the results, the effect of enfranchising noncitizens on public policy was large, causing spending on education and social and family services to increase substantially in municipalities where noncitizens made up a nonnegligible share of the electorate.     

Female representation and electoral clientelism: New insights from South African municipal electionss

Do citizens experience less electoral clientelism in polities with more elected female representatives? The current literature is remarkably silent on the role of gender and female political representation for electoral clientelism. Due to gender differences in issue priorities, targeted constituent groups, networks and resources, we argue that voters experience less clientelism in municipalities with a higher proportion of female politicians because either female politicians are likely to engage less in clientelism or women are less likely to be viable candidates in more clientelist settings. Through either mechanism, we expect all voters – and female voters in particular – to experience less exposure to clientelism in municipalities with higher female representation. We examine this idea using survey data from the 2016 municipal elections in South Africa – a country with high levels of female representation in politics but increasing problems of corruption and patronage in the political system. Our findings are consistent with the argument that municipalities with more elected female councilors have considerably lower rates of electoral clientelism and that this mostly affects whether female voters are targeted by clientelist distribution. These findings shed new light on how women's representation in elected political office shapes the incidence and use of clientelist distribution during elections.     

Unemployment and voter turnout revisited: A brief note

This brief study revisits the issue of whether higher unemployment rates elicit an increase in the voter participation rate. Using a state-level panel dataset for all five of the Presidential election cycles of this century, it is hypothesized that, following Cebula (2008) and Burden and Wichowsky (2014), the higher the unemployment rate, the greater the degree to which eligible voters, whether unemployed or employed, show up at the polls, arguably because they are expressing the concerns and fears regarding prevailing economic policies and conditions and because by voting they are expressing the desire for changes to address those concerns and fears. The estimation implies that a one percentage point higher unemployment rate leads to a nearly 1.0% higher voter participation rate. This result is in principle compatible with and supportive of the hypothesis that higher unemployment rates motivate voters and the empirical finding of a positive voter turnout/unemployment rate association obtained in the studies by Cebula (2008) and Burden and Wichowsky (2014). Moreover, this finding is potentially important because it implies that elected officials are, to at least some degree, held accountable by the electorate for a weakly performing economy.     

Electoral Selection with Parties and Primaries

We develop a model of intraparty candidate selection under partisan electoral competition and voter uncertainty. Candidates for office belong to parties, which are factions of ideologically similar candidates. Each party’s candidate for a general election can be selected either by a “centralized” mechanism that effectively randomizes over possible candidates or by voters in a primary election. The electorate cares about ideology and valence, and both primary and general elections may reveal candidate valences. Our main theoretical result is that while primaries raise the expected quality of a party’s candidates, they may hurt the ex ante preferred party in a competitive electorate by increasing the chances of revealing the opposing party’s candidates as superior. Thus, primaries are adopted in relatively extreme districts where a clear favorite party exists. An empirical analysis of the adoption of direct primaries and the competitiveness of primary elections across U.S. states supports these predictions.     

A model for disaggregating political change

We present a model for identifying the components of aggregate change in an electorate between two points in time. When the electorate is constant in size, change in the mean opinion disaggregates into two components: conversion among those who continue to participate in the electorate (Stayers), and replacement of those who drop out of the electorate at Time₁ (Dropouts) by Newcomers to the electorate at Time₂. We add to this simple formulation the possibility of variation in the size of the electorate. When an electorate expands, the model includes a mobilization term to accommodate the fact that there are more Newcomers at Time₂ than Dropouts at Time₁. When an electorate shrinks in size, the demobilization term reflects the fact that Newcomers as a group are smaller than Dropouts. The model includes appropriate weights for each component so that the change in opinion (or any other aggregate characteristic in the electorate) can be allocated across the three components. We apply the model to Iowa caucus attenders in both parties between 1984 and 1988, and we suggest that the model can be also productively applied to a variety of contexts besides nomination politics, where fluctuations in the size of electorates are significant.Ronald B. Rapoport. College of William and Mary.     

The abiding voter: The lengthy horizon of retrospective evaluations

Although the theory of retrospective voting receives wide support in the literature on voting behaviour, less agreement exists on voters’ time horizon when assessing the government's performance – that is, whether voters are myopic. Previous studies on voter myopia tend to focus on aggregate-level measures of the economy, or use an experimental approach. Using panel data, this article offers the first investigation into voter myopia that uses individual-level evaluations of government performance in a representative survey at several points during the electoral cycle. The study focuses on The Netherlands, but it also provide tests of the generalisability and robustness of the findings, and a replication in the American context. The results indicate that voter satisfaction early in the government's term adds to explaining incumbent voting. Thus, rather than the myopic voter, evidence is found of the abiding voter – steady at her or his post, evaluating government performance over a long length of time.     

Leaders, voters and activists in the elections in Great Britain 2005 and 2010

Discussion of the relationship between parties and the electorate is often based on the notion of partisan constituencies, that parties adopt policy positions that correspond to the average position of the party supporters. In contrast, the Downsian “spatial model” assumes that parties are purely opportunistic and maneuver to gain as many votes as possible. A third, more empirical model, based on the early work of Stokes, assumes that voter choice is based on the evaluation of each of the party leader’s competence or ability to deliver policy success. Such an evaluation can be provided by individual voter overall assessment in terms of the leaders’ character traits.This paper attempts to relate these three classes of models by examining the elections in Great Britain in 2005 and 2010. Using the British Election Study, we construct spatial models of these elections in Great Britain as well as in the three regions of England, Scotland and Wales. The models incorporate the electoral perceptions of character traits. We compare the equilibrium vote maximizing positions with the partisan positions, estimated by taking the mean of each of the parties voters’ preferred positions. We define an equilibrium to be a stable attractor if the vote share at the equilibrium exceeds the share at the partisan position by a significant proportion (determined by the implicit error of the stochastic model). We infer that none of the equilibria are stable attractors, and suggest that the partisan positions are also preferred by the party activists, the key supporters of each party.     

(De)Centralization and voter turnout: theory and evidence from German municipalities

A vast academic literature illustrates that voter turnout is affected by the institutional design of elections (e.g., compulsory voting, electoral system, postal or Sunday voting). In this article, we exploit a simple Downsian theoretical framework to argue that the institutional framework of public good provision—and, in particular, the distribution of political and administrative competences across government levels—likewise affects voters’ turnout decisions by influencing the expected net benefit of voting. Empirically, we exploit the institutional variation across German municipalities to test this proposition, and find supportive evidence.     

All-mail voting in Colorado increases turnout and reduces turnout inequality

The COVID-19 crisis has generated interest in all-mail voting (AMV) as a potential policy solution for avoiding in-person elections. However, the quality of AMV implementation has varied greatly across states, leading to mixed results in previous research. We exploit the understudied 2014 implementation of AMV in Colorado to estimate the effect on turnout for all registered voters, along with age, racial, education, income and wealth, and occupational subgroups. Using large voter file data and a difference-in-differences design within individuals, we find a positive overall turnout effect of approximately 8 percentage points—translating into an additional 900,000 ballots being cast between 2014 and 2018. Effects are significantly larger among lower-propensity voting groups, such as young people, blue-collar workers, voters with less educational attainment, and voters of color. The results suggest that researchers and policymakers should look to Colorado's AMV approach as an effective model for boosting aggregate turnout and reducing voting disparities across subgroups.