Explaining Domestic Violence Policy Outcomes in Chile and Argentina

This article explains why Chile has outperformed Argentina in policy responses to the problem of domestic violence. It argues that policy variation is due to both macro‐level institutional features (state capacity and centralization) and to more contingent political factors that shape the structure, role, and resources of the women's policy agencies that coordinate and implement domestic violence policies. The initial design of Chile's National Women's Service has allowed it to act as a crucial “insider” ally to advocacy groups. In contrast, Argentina's National Women's Council has suffered repeated downgrading and loss of resources due to ideological conflicts and changes in government, rendering it unable to coordinate policy responses to domestic violence effectively or to act as an ally to advocates inside and outside the state seeking increased resources and more effective policy responses to violence against women.     

Explaining Strike Outcomes in Chile: Associational Power,Structural Power,and Spatial Strategies

Research on strikes has traditionally focused on how economic, institutional, and political variables shape strike patterns. Recent work examines how workers' structural, associational, and symbolic power facilitate strikes. Building on this research, this article asks, what factors determine strike outcomes? It analyzes four strikes at MADECO, Chile's largest copper manufacturer, across democratic, authoritarian, and postauthoritarian regimes. Using qualitative and documentary evidence, it argues that strike outcomes reflect workers' capacity to halt or disrupt production and to access government allies who can pressure management to settle strikes in workers' favor. Outcomes vary based on the political composition of government, workers' capacity to halt production, and industry's and government's dependence on foreign investment. MADECO workers' location in Santiago, near national officials, allowed them to mobilize at the local, national, and international scales to pressure management. Comparisons with other strikes in Chile, Argentina, and Peru identify similar mobilization patterns.     

Candidate ballot information and election outcomes: the Czech case

This study measures the importance of candidate characteristics listed on ballots for a candidate's position on a slate, for preferential votes received by a candidate, and, ultimately, for getting elected. We focus on the effects of gender, various types of academic titles, and also several novel properties of candidates' names. Using data on over 200,000 candidates competing in recent Czech municipal board and regional legislature elections, and conditioning on slate fixed effects, we find that ballot cues play a stronger role in small municipalities than in large cities and regions, despite the general agreement on higher candidate salience in small municipalities. We also quantify the electoral advantage of a slate being randomly listed first on a ballot.     

Is Brazil becoming a “boring” country?

The article looks at the condition of Brazil's political system in light of the 1998 electoral results. It critically examines arguments that electoral volatility, political fragmentation and weak institutionalisation have produced a highly unstable political system unsuitable for sound policy‐making and processing change. While not underestimating the influence of electoral rules, it argues that given the combination of political, institutional and economic turmoil of the 1980s, it is not surprising that electoral volatility over the period was amongst the highest in the world. Arguably, however, these factors are now having a diminished impact on the political system, lessening volatility and allowing the emergence of a more institutionalised party system.     

Student Protest and the Nueva Mayoría Reforms in Chile

Chile's Nueva Mayoría government (2014–2018) responded more forcefully to student demands for a more assertive public role in education than any of its post‐authoritarian predecessors. Existing scholarship suggests that this change reflected the success of the 2011 student protests in tapping into latent public discontent with neoliberalism and the politics of consensus. This article argues that it is also crucial to understand how the wave of protest interacted with the dynamics of party politics at the elite level. Public support translated into substantive policy and institutional changes because it contributed to a coalition and platform shift that favoured more extensive reform.     

Transparency and Political Budget Cycles at municipal level

We analyze the effect of municipal financial transparency on the magnitude of political budget cycles. Our sample covers the Spanish largest municipalities in the period 1999‐2009. While the impact of transparency on the electoral cycle has been studied at the international and regional level, there is no empirical evidence of its effect at the local level. Using the financial transparency index made by Transparency International Spain, we show that municipalities with lower levels of financial transparency present an electoral cycle in total spending, whereas such an electoral impact on total spending does not appear in high transparent municipalities. Furthermore, the magnitude of cycles in capital spending and taxes does not vary among low‐transparency municipalities and high‐transparency municipalities.     

Reforming Local Government in Germany: Institutional Changes and Performance Impacts

The article analyses trajectories and impacts of local government reforms in Germany. It scrutinises four major approaches of reform that have affected the local authorities since the beginning of the 1990s: decentralisation, privatisation, administrative reforms (‘New Steering Model’) and the direct election of mayors. The objective of the article is to encompass the multifaceted elements and effects of local government reform in Germany. Firstly, the author examines the institutional changes that have occurred in the local councils. Secondly, the broader effects and impacts of the institutional transformations are dealt with, analysing how the latter has enhanced performance, steering capacity and political accountability. Finally, the author evaluates the extent to which the reforms have put their mark on the inherited and historic tradition of the German local government system.     

Gennadiy Zyuganov and the ‘Third Road’

Political scientists examine Vladimir Putin's efforts to ensure political control within a regime structure that is formally democratic. Methods for managing factional infighting, concentrating political resources in the "party of power," United Russia, and to limit electoral competition are specified. A Monte Carlo electoral simulation leads to counter-intuitive conclusions about the impact of proportional-representation rules on electoral processes and outcomes. Conclusions are drawn about the effectiveness of efforts to institutionalize an authoritarian regime in which shared power is vested in a hegemonic party.     

Islamist Mobilisation in Secularist Strongholds: Institutional Change and Electoral Performance in Turkey

How do Islamist parties mobilise support and win elections in secularist strongholds? What explains the electoral performance of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey’s most consistently secularist region – western Anatolia? This article explores these questions with a comparative case study of two similar cities in the periphery of ?zmir where the AKP registered significantly different electoral results: Ödemi? and Salihli. It shows that deep institutional transformations of the local party organisations, including leadership turnover, reshuffling of the party cadres, and an explicit attempt by local party leaders to moderate and move to the political centre, were necessary factors for the AKP to succeed in elections where the Islamist constituency is weak.     

Chile's Criminal Law Reform: Enhancing Defendants' Rights and Citizen Security

Many democratic governments in Latin America have implemented broad judicial reforms, some of which are aimed at making criminal law and legal institutions more transparent and modern. Although such reforms are important for democratic development, scholars debate whether the reforms result in more rights for defendants and whether they jeopardize citizens' perceptions about security. Using two original datasets and a fixed‐effects model, this study shows that groundbreaking criminal law reforms in Chile have improved certain aspects of defendants' rights by decreasing the number of individuals in pretrial detention. Chileans' perceptions about crime and violence in regions where the reforms were implemented also have improved. Chile's success appears to be due to the government's commitment to the reforms, as well as to concerted and consistent efforts by the police to fight crime. These results have implications for other countries implementing similar significant reforms.     

All by Myself: Personal Qualifications versus Party Affiliation in Colombian Mayoral Elections

Political decentralization has been promoted as a way to devolve responsibility, bring government closer to citizens, and improve accountability. The shift prompted new local elections, but were the elected officials responsive to citizens or to national party elites? This study examines unique survey data from 125 Colombian mayors to identify the factors they believe were critical in their victories and thereby to identify the people to whom they believe they owe loyalty: citizens or party leaders. Examining the relative value mayors assign to their own actions versus those of the party, combined with information on how they financed campaigns, sheds important light on subnational electoral dynamics in Colombia.     

Legal Inequality and Federalism: Domestic Violence Laws in the Argentine Provinces

This article shows that the institutional design of Argentine federalism allows for differences in the protective scope of the provincial domestic violence laws. It holds that the broad legislative capacities of subnational districts enable the working of political and social local factors, which, in turn, determine heterogeneity in these laws’ protective scope. It analyzes, compares, and measures 37 laws on domestic violence sanctioned between 1992 and 2009. It advances a methodology to measure their differences and it evaluates the impact local factors have on legal variations across jurisdictions. The article shows that the protective scope of these laws is determined by the intensity of the local electoral competition and by the strength of women's organizational capacity. Results also show that time matters insofar as it allows for the diffusion of more protective laws.     

Expanding Accountability Through Participatory Institutions: Mayors, Citizens, and Budgeting in Three Brazilian Municipalities

As new political institutions provide Brazilians with unprecedented access to policymaking and decisionmaking venues, politicians and activists have undertaken reform efforts to promote institutional arrangements partly designed to expand accountability. The expansion of participatory decisionmaking venues may grant citizens greater authority, but these institutions could also undermine municipal councils' ability to curb the prerogatives of mayors. This article analyzes participatory budgeting in São Paulo, Recife, and Porto Alegre to illustrate that mayors have differing capacities to implement their policy preferences, and this greatly affects how accountability may be extended.     

Institutional Change and Ethnic Parties in South America

The central question of this article is why indigenous social movements formed electorally viable political parties in Latin America in the 1990s. This development represents a new phenomenon in Latin America, where ethnic parties have been both rare and unpopular among voters. Institutional reforms in six South American countries are examined to see if the creation and success of these parties can be correlated with changes in electoral systems, political party registration requirements, or the administrative structure of the state. The study concludes that institutional change is likely to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for the emergence and electoral viability of ethnic parties.     

Why Party Organization Still Matters: The Workers' Party in Northeastern Brazil

Does party organization still matter? Much of the party literature suggests that politicians, who can use substitutes like mass media to win votes, lack incentives to invest in party organization. Yet it remains an electoral asset, especially at lower levels of government. Evidence from Brazil's Workers' Party (PT) indicates that party elites invest in organization when they prioritize lower‐level elections and that this investment delivers electoral returns. In the mid‐2000s, the PT strengthened its support across levels of government in the conservative, clientelistic Northeast. Drawing from underutilized data on party offices, this article shows that organizational expansion contributed substantially to the PT's electoral advances in the Northeast. While President Lula da Silva's (PT) 2006 electoral spike in the Northeast resulted from expanded conditional cash transfers, the PT's improvement at lower levels followed from top‐down organization building. The PT national leadership deliberately expanded the party's local infrastructure to deliver electoral gains.     

Conditional Cash Transfer Programs and Electoral Accountability: Evidence from Latin America

Do conditional cash transfer programs reduce voters' incentives to hold their government accountable for its performance? Studies show that these programs generate considerable electoral returns for the governments responsible for them. One important and unexplored question is whether these popular programs have also changed the landscape of accountability in Latin America. Survey data from 16 Latin American countries that have adopted CCT programs do not offer support for the claim that such programs have a detrimental effect on electoral accountability for corruption and for the economy. Only in countries where CCT programs do not follow strict rules do beneficiaries attribute relatively less weight to the government's economic performance, but this effect is marginal. These findings fill an important gap in the literature and offer reassuring evidence that cash transfers can alleviate poverty while preserving voters' incentives to exercise electoral accountability in crucial areas of government performance.     

Is electoral authoritarianism good for women's representation? Evidence from the 1999–2011 regional legislative elections in Russia

This article employs a comprehensive set of data on 226 regional legislative elections held in Russia in 1999–2011 in order to assess the impact of electoral authoritarianism upon women's representation in sub-national legislative bodies. The analysis of 50,520 cases of candidate nomination and 9553 cases of electoral success, supported by a cross-regional statistical study of the factors of women's nomination and success, empirically confirms an explanatory model that incorporates three working hypotheses derived from the mainstream literature on women's representation. According to this model, the 2002–2003 electoral reform, by introducing proportional representation into regional electoral systems, strongly facilitated women's representation. After the advent of electoral authoritarianism, proportional rules, in combination with the increased ‘party magnitude’ of the pro-government party, continued to exert expectedly positive effects; yet these effects were offset by the decreased competitiveness in majority districts. As a result, political regime transformation did not lead to a significant increase in the number of female deputies.     

Electoral Systems in a Divided Society: The Case of Afghanistan

Electoral systems can be powerful instruments for shaping the content and practice of politics in divided societies, such as Afghanistan; and their design needs to be closely linked to context. This paper explores the suitability of Afghanistan's electoral mechanisms in light of the nation's political system, social divisions, and the process, which led to their adoption. There is no perfect electoral system; and the winners of the country's first-ever presidential election and the subsequent assembly elections face the formidable challenge of transforming Afghanistan from a war torn fiefdom into a nation. Hamid Karzai's victory and Afghanistan's improved, although fragile, security environment appear to represent an important step toward democracy. Yet, elections and electoral mechanisms are a necessary but insufficient means to the introduction and endurance of constitutional democratic government. The legitimacy of Afghanistan's new democratic institutions will rest on the government's progress in producing results, such as disarming the private militias of powerful commanders, some of whom represent sizeable ethnic minorities, and curbing the burgeoning poppy cultivation. An electoral system is but one piece, significant but not the linchpin, of the schema of Afghan political dynamics.     

On the Way to Limited Competitiveness: Political Consequences of the 2011 Electoral Reform in Hungary

This article tests the effects of a new electoral system in Hungary that was introduced by the governing FIDESZ party in 2011. We are especially concerned with the shape of single-member district (SMD) level electoral competition following a significant transformation that tends to be viewed as serving FIDESZ's goal of preserving its constitutional majority. The results show not only transformation of Hungarian electoral politics between 2010 and 2018 elections but also the fact that the return of bipolarization is far from reality in Hungarian electoral politics. On one hand, the reform resulted in an increased number of districts with clear dominance of the two strongest parties nationally, but on the other hand, this trend was connected to asymmetrical bipartism, with clear advantage of the FIDESZ. Furthermore, there was a persistently high number of SMDs where the competition took place between the FIDESZ and one of the third-place parties.     

The Decline of a Dominant Party and the Destabilization of Electoral Authoritarianism?

The demonstrations following the December 2011 legislative election and the poorer performance of United Russia in that election suggest a potential crisis in the Russian electoral authoritarian regime. Assuming the Russian leadership wishes to stabilize electoral authoritarian rule, how should it go about doing this? Increasing electoral competition and decreasing control potentially can lead to democratization, and therefore regime change. A safer course for the regime may be reform of United Russia. This article analyzes United Russia's performance, asking if it has been carrying out the tasks of a dominant party, and considers the party's best chances for long-term stabilization of electoral authoritarianism.