Who votes for mayor? Evidence from midsized American cities

Who, or what, governs the mosaic of the almost 39,000 general purpose local governments across the United States? While the determinants of voter turnout in both national and sub-national elections have been well studied, there is a dearth of empirical literature examining voter turnout at the municipal level. Utilizing an original dataset of 356 midsized US cities drawn from the Midwest, South, and Northeast regions, this paper ponders the drivers of mayoral turnout, and asks if electoral timing, competitiveness, or characteristics of the electorate best predict turnout. Sequenced hierarchical linear models and OLS regressions are employed to control for sub-national effects, and model results indicate that election timing greatly dictate who governs midsized American cities. While local competitiveness and characteristics of the electorate also matter, their explanatory value is greatly over-shadowed by timing.     

The attractiveness of local and national list labels: the role of socio-economic inequalities on the success of electoral lists

ABSTRACT

According to the nationalisation hypothesis, it is sometimes argued that electoral lists competing at local elections under a national party label are more likely to win. Yet, in many countries, local lists are still much present. This article seeks to assess the attractiveness of local and national list labels at local elections. Following Rokkan’s hypothesis of the nationalisation of local politics, we test the role of socio-economic inequality on the success of electoral lists across local polities. Based on an original dataset distinguishing the labels of 1.012 electoral lists – be they local, mixed or national – in the 262 Walloon municipalities in Belgium, the multilevel regression demonstrates that local and mixed labels present a significant electoral advantage vis-à-vis national party labels. However, the article shows that this electoral gain decreases as economic inequalities increase: national labels, especially left-wing parties, attract more voters as inequalities rise.     

Unravelling clientelism in the Zambian electoral campaigns

Based on reports on selected parliamentary by-elections from 2009 to 2015 and two presidential elections in 2011 and 2015 in Zambia, this paper examines the political rhetoric to determine the presence and nature of clientelism in Zambian electoral campaigns. Zambia’s three leading newspapers, The Post, Times of Zambia and Zambia Daily Mail, were searched for reports of electoral campaigns. In total, 605 issues of each of the three newspapers spanning a period of 20 months were used. The paper concludes that a blend of vote buying and turnout buying were more evident in the campaign rhetoric in parliamentary by-elections than the presidential elections. Further, the ruling parties extended their clientelistic rhetoric to include perverse accountability.     

Access to What? Legal Agency and Access to Justice for Indigenous Peoples in Latin America

Abstract

In this paper I issue a call for a primary focus on expanding and strengthening alternative, community-based justice systems, as a strategy for securing the full benefits of legal agency to indigenous and other culturally distinct groups. I do so because what lies within the formal justice system – the very system to which so many well-meaning programmes promise access – is, for these groups and their members, often partial justice at best. Efforts to increase the space governed by autochthonous justice are more likely to produce true legal agency for both the communities and their members, although they raise important issues for included subgroups, such as women or culturally nonconforming groups. Somewhat paradoxically, indigenous groups’ engagement with the very apex of formal systems, through constitutional litigation, has been one avenue for increasing that space, thus reflecting the exercise of collective legal agency in the pursuit of collective and individual legal agency.     

Exu is not Satan – the dialogics of memory and resistance among Afro-Brazilians

ABSTRACT

In 2000s Brazil, an unprecedented number of Brazilian afrodescendentes (Afro-Descendants) have been mobilizing to secure rights and resources for the Brazilian black population. From carnival parading in ‘cultural’ groups to electoral campaigning, from consciousness-raising education to antiracist community outreach, black activists have been aggressively taking a critical stance toward the discursive fabric of Brazilian race relations and national identity. Placing examples of their discursive struggles over Afro-Brazilian history and culture under the lens of intertextual and heteroglossic relations, I illustrate black activists’ efforts to dispute what they see as misconceptions about black people and blackness that have found their way into the dominant narrative conceptions of Brazilian society. In doing so, I argue, they are accomplishing something of broader social significance: They are revising not only the history and collective memory of race relations in Brazil but blackness itself.     

Merging county administrations – cross-national evidence of fiscal and political effects

ABSTRACT

While many central governments amalgamate municipalities, mergers of larger county administrations are rare and hardly explored. In this article, we assess both fiscal and political effects of county mergers in two different institutional settings: counties act autonomously as upper-level local governments (Germany), or counties being decentralised branches of the state government (Austria). We apply difference-in-differences estimations to county merger reforms in each country. In both cases, some counties were amalgamated while others remain untouched. Austrian counties (Bezirke) and German counties (Landkreise) widely differ in terms of autonomy and institutions, but our results are strikingly similar. In both cases, we neither find evidence for cost savings nor for staff reductions. Instead, voter turnout consistently decreases in merged counties, and right-wing populists seem to gain additional support. We conclude that political costs clearly outweigh fiscal null benefits of county merger reforms – independent of the underlying institutional setting.     

Ethnic party competition beyond the segmented market

The outbidding model of ethnic politics focuses on party competition in an ethnically perfectly segmented electoral market where no party appeals to voters across the ethnic divide. The power sharing model retains this assumption, yet tries to prevent outbidding through moderation-inducing institutional design. Empirically, imperfectly segmented electoral markets and variance of ethnic party strategies beyond radical outbidding have been observed. To provide a stepping stone towards a more complete theory of ethnic party competition, this article introduces the notion of nested competition, defined as party competition in an imperfectly segmented market where some – but not all – parties make offers across ethnic divides and where competition in intra-ethnic arenas is nested within an inter-ethnic arena of party competition. The notion of nested competition helps explain why ethnic outbidding is not omnipresent in contemporary multi-ethnic democracies. A moderate position on the ethnic dimension that appears inauspicious from the perspective of intra-ethnic competition can turn into the strategically superior choice once ethnic parties take the whole system of competitive interactions within intra- and inter-ethnic arenas into account. A case study of nested competition for Hungarian votes in the Vojvodina region of Northern Serbia illustrates the conceptual innovations.     

United Russia’s Primaries and the Strength of Political Machines in the Regions of Russia: Evidence from the 2016 Duma Elections

Abstract

The primary elections of the United Russia party serve as a tool for party organisation and voter mobilisation. In this study, we employ United Russia’s capacity to mobilise voter turnout in the 2016 primary elections as an indirect indicator of the strength of party-controlled regional political machines. Our analysis of the results of the 2016 Duma elections in 83 regions of Russia demonstrates that voter turnout in the spring 2016 party primaries of United Russia to a significant extent explains cross-regional variation in party success.     

Voter turnout and municipal amalgamations—evidence from Denmark

ABSTRACT

The study utilizes evidence from the Danish 2007 municipal reform to inquire into the relationship between municipal amalgamations and voter turnout, that is, the classical discussion on size and democracy. The Danish municipal reform is particularly suited for investigating the relationship as a large number of units were merged due to reasons thought to be unrelated with the democratic performance while others were left unchanged. This allows us to investigate the relationship in a quasi-experimental setup. The study finds some evidence of a short-term positive effect on turnout and only limited evidence of a medium- to long-term negative effect when comparing amalgamated and non-amalgamated municipalities. However, stronger indications of negative effects on turnout are found when considering the intensity of the amalgamations.     

Voting home or abroad? Comparing migrants' electoral participation in countries of origin and of residence

The political participation of immigrants has received increased scholarly attention over recent decades. However, comparisons between the electoral behavior of immigrants in their countries of origin and of residence are still limited. This article addresses this gap in the literature and seeks to identify the determinants of Romanian immigrants’ electoral participation in the local elections of four West European countries (Germany, France, Italy, and Spain) as compared to their turnout in their home country's legislative elections. Looking through the lenses of exposure theory, we hypothesize that contact with institutions, people, and values from the countries of residence are likely to have different effects in the two types of elections. We test the explanatory power of four main variables – time spent in the host country, social networks, degree of involvement in the local community, and the type of relationship with citizens of their host countries – to which we add a series of individual-level controls such as age, education, gender, and media exposure. To assess our claim, we employ binary logistic regression to analyze original web survey data collected in the summer of 2013. The result supports the empirical implications of exposure theory.     

Electoral Fraud and Electoral Geography: United Russia Strongholds in the 2007 and 2011 Russian Parliamentary Elections*

Despite United Russia’s (Edinaya Rossiya—UR) dominance in repeated Russian legislative elections, the correlates of the party’s electoral support remain noticeably understudied beyond the influence of electoral manipulation. I pinpoint the specific contours of UR’s strongholds in the two most recent parliamentary elections in Russia—2007 and 2011—focusing on raion- and regional-level correlates of the vote using an original dataset. UR has been undergirded by geographically concentrated ethnic minorities and the countryside, and these patterns of support have persisted even in the absence of fraud, suggesting that the dominant party’s electoral windfalls cannot be attributed solely to electoral malfeasance.     

Anti-immigrant Attitudes in Russia: The Group Position Model Reconsidered

Abstract

This article analyses the relationship between relative group position in an ethnically stratified social order and anti-immigrant attitudes in Russia. Based on data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey of the Higher School of Economics, it studies the role of two objective indicators of group position: relative ingroup size and the group’s dominant political status within a region. The findings show that when a group position is measured in numerical terms, the attitudes of ethnic Russians seem to follow social dominance theory, while titulars tend to conform to the alienation-based extension to the group position model.     

Populism in Taiwan: The Rise of a Populist-Democratic Culture in a Democratising Society

Taiwan's democratic transition has emerged alongside a rise of populism. Based on an analysis of post-electoral survey data, it is shown that populist resentments – embodied in such emotion-laden campaign issues as ethnic identity, national identity and a party's image of interest representation and clean politics – have been the most efficient vote-getting appeals in Taiwan's post-authoritarian electoral competition between two major political parties, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT). In Taiwan's democratic transition, mass demands for the ‘indigenisation’ of politics and the people's worry about an ever-increasing military threat from Mainland China have also popularised as well as polarised these populist appeals. As empirical data show, due to its position as the first Taiwanese party with a lion's share of populist advantages, the DPP was able to win the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. In sum, Taiwan's electoral politics in the past decade have given rise to a kind of ‘populist-democratic culture’, which inclines Taiwanese politicians to bring up populist issues rather than the rational policy debates of an electoral democracy.     

Political Competition and Local Social Spending: Evidence from Brazil

Electoral theories of democracy imply electoral competition insures accountability. Using data on local elections, socioeconomic factors, and municipal budgets from more than 5,000 municipalities in Brazil for the years 1996, 2000, and 2004, we find that municipalities with more competitive elections allocate less to social spending compared to municipalities with little political competition. We argue that previous theory on political competition and public goods obscures the critical role that financial resources play in shaping the dynamics of social spending and political competition. Municipalities with small budgets lack the resources necessary to engineer convincing electoral victories. Where resources are negligible, voter turnout is low, and incumbents rarely win reelection. Incumbent parties in municipalities with large financial resources win big. Armed with adequate resources, incumbent parties mobilize voters and win by large margins. This new argument and evidence reconcile contradictory findings in the existing literature on competition and public goods.     

Electoral theocracy and hybrid sovereignty in Iran

Post-revolution Iran is uniquely based upon the contradictory principles of divine and popular sovereignty but with ultimate authority delegated to jurists. At the same time, the theocratic basis of clerical dominance is rooted within a pluralistic and decentralised theological tradition peculiar to the Shiite establishment. Despite the tutelary institutional arrangements engineered by the ruling clergy, elections have generated unexpected outcomes and unleashed power and policy shifts. Emphasising the political dynamic generated by elections, this paper examines the uncertainties stemming from electoral processes that have been constructed by conflicting electoral and theocratic principles. In developing the concept of electoral theocracy, the paper highlights the paradoxes underpinning the hybridity of Iran’s clerical and electoral authoritarian system of governance. These hybrid features have remained largely neglected in the literature on electoral authoritarian regimes.     

Gendering the border effect: the double impact of Colombian insecurity and the Venezuelan refugee crisis

Abstract

In the Colombian–Venezuelan borderlands, the reconfiguration of armed group presence and mass migration create and reinforce conditions of high violence and risk. Against this backdrop, we ask: What are the gendered security implications of the double crisis in the borderlands? Based on fieldwork in four regions along the border, this article argues that the border effect is gendered; the very factors that coalesce to produce this effect exacerbate existing gendered power dynamics, particularly as these relate to gender-based violence. Accordingly, this article demonstrates the specific ways in which the border – as a facilitator, deterrent, magnet and/or disguise – reinforces experiences of gendered insecurity in this region. The article finishes by outlining the implications for other international borderland settings.     

Income Inequality and Redistributive Spending: Evidence from Panel Data of Texas Counties

Abstract

The relationship between redistributive spending and income inequality has been of interest to researchers for several decades. Existing literature has largely focused on country-level studies and may be broadly divided into two groups: studies that find a positive relationship between the two and studies that find a negative relationship. The positive association is usually explained through the median voter theory and the negative association through the social insurance theory.

This study offers a test of the median voter and social insurance hypotheses by examining the relationship between economic inequality, voter turnout and redistributive spending at the sub-national level among the 50 largest counties in Texas over years 2006 to 2012. One of the advantages of using a regional sample is that counties are relatively more homogeneous and allow for the collection of better records across time. Random effects models suggest that income inequality is positively associated with redistributive spending. The study improves our understanding of the patterns of redistribution at the sub-national level and highlights the importance of careful inter-temporal modelling of relationships between redistributive spending and inequality.     

The ugly face of the state: Nigerian security forces,human rights and the search for Boko Haram

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the aggressive and gratuitously violent insurgency in northeastern Nigeria – Boko Haram – is the entirely understandable consequence of more than a half-century of misrule by what I call the parasitic and predatory Nigerian political class. Evidence of widespread human rights abuses including extortion, rape and theft comes from investigations by various international human rights organizations, international non-governmental organizations, church groups, press reports and interviews. I focus primarily on incidents and practices in the northeast but examples are adduced from other parts of the country as well. I discuss the policy of coercion and brutality embedded in the very nature of the colonial and post-colonial state using Crawford Young’s concept of bula matari (the state as rock crusher).     

Electoral Engineering in the Russian Regions (2003–2017)

Abstract

This article addresses the puzzle of electoral engineering in autocracies using data from three rounds of Russian regional legislative elections between 2003 and 2017. The analysis shows that electoral engineering was widespread in regions where governors lacked the resources necessary to rely on blatant forms of electoral malpractice for the benefit of United Russia. This pattern became evident during the third round of regional legislative elections. The study indicates that the manipulation of electoral systems may be important for authoritarian rulers when they are unable to rely on blatant electoral malpractice to ensure the certainty of electoral outcomes.     

Evangelical violence: Western Christianity and the use of force against the Third World

Abstract

Recognising the impact of religion on state action, this article identifies two variables that interact to affect the type and level of violence employed by Western states against Third World targets. First, variation in the degree to which the prominent Christian denominations and organisations within these states view evangelisation as either an individual-level or national-level process – Christian individualism vs Christian nationalism – has determined church support for using violence as a tactic. Second, the level of influence that churches and missionary organisations have over their home states affects the ability of Christian actors to directly impact state actions. Western violence against Third World peoples is expected to be lowest when churches and Christian organisations view evangelisation in primarily individualistic terms and have significant influence over the state. The article examines the relationships between concepts of evangelisation, Christian influence over state policies, and levels of violence against the Third World by examining British, French and German colonialism during the late colonial period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.