Electoral institutions, partisan status, and political support in Lesotho

Does the introduction of proportionality in electoral systems help to boost popular evaluations of democracy? This article takes advantage of an electoral reform in Lesotho to conduct a natural experiment. We trace shifts over time in popular political support, using Afrobarometer data collected before and after reform to measure mass satisfaction with democracy and public trust in political institutions. We find both direct and indirect effects. In the aggregate, Lesotho's transition from a majoritarian to a mixed electoral system is directly associated with increased levels of citizen support for the country's state and regime. Importantly, however, formal institutions have only indirect effects at the individual level, where a person's informal partisan status – as a member of a winning majority or losing minority – mediates the impacts of institutional change.     

Winning cures everything? Beliefs about voter fraud,voter confidence,and the 2016 election

Rhetoric about “rigged” elections has raised concerns about the solidity of public trust in the integrity of the voting system. Mitigating these concerns, research by Sinclair et al. (2019) on the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign documents a robust “winner's effect” on voter confidence despite intense partisan messaging aimed at influencing citizens' acceptance of the legitimacy of the election. This suggests that regularly fluctuating electoral outcomes in competitive democracies limit the impact of elite messages on trust in electoral institutions. A critical question is whether similar dynamics apply to dimensions of electoral trust that are more clearly partisan-branded and targeted, such as beliefs about the prevalence of illicit voting. This paper uses a panel study with waves conducted before and after Election Day 2016 to compare the effect of election on beliefs about the extent of illicit voting and voter confidence. Underlining both the promise and limitations of democratic competition as a counterweight to elite efforts to sow electoral distrust, there are significant “winner's effects” on both but substantially smaller impact on beliefs about illicit voting, a difference that is especially large among strong Republican partisans.     

Popular evaluations of election quality in Africa: Evidence from Nigeria

Despite the important consequences of citizens' election quality perceptions on political behavior and political attitudes, very little is known about how citizens formulate their perceptions of election quality. In this paper, I assess the correlates of citizens' perceptions of election quality. I suggest that the performance of election-related institutions is an important correlate of citizens' election quality perceptions. However, citizens' experience with electoral irregularities, and partisan affiliation also matter. I test these hypotheses in the context of the 2007 Nigerian general elections using survey data from Afrobarometer and International Foundation for Electoral Systems. The findings provide robust support for the hypotheses. Most importantly, the results indicate that the performance of electoral management bodies is associated with citizens' assessment of election quality in Africa and that citizens demand electoral management bodies with impartiality and professionalism.     

When do political parties benefit from incumbents’ personal votes? Comparative analysis across different electoral systems

Do political parties benefit electorally from the personal votes cultivated by their incumbent candidates? How do these benefits vary across electoral systems? This paper offers the first systematic, comparative analysis of parties' electoral gains from fielding incumbent candidates. The paper provides a theoretical argument on how the parties' gains from running incumbents vary across electoral systems and examines it empirically using district-level election data in eleven established democracies. The results suggest that the gains are largest in the multimember district systems that allow voters to determine the intra-party rank of candidates, but these gains decline as district magnitude grows. There are also gains in the single-member district systems, but no gains, or small gains if any, in the multimember district systems that don't allow voters to determine the candidates' rank or allow it only partially. The findings have implications for the cross-system variation in the balance between the collective and individual accountability in democratic elections.     

Electoral accountability in the developing world

Do citizens of the developing world behave as economic voters? Do they blame and reward incumbent governments for their perceived economic performance? In addressing these questions, the current paper fills an important void left by the extant literature by adopting a large-n approach with the use of public opinion survey data and by focusing on emerging democracies of the developing world. The proposed analysis develops a series of incumbent support models to assess the impact of economic assessments. It relies on the use of public opinion survey data from countries of Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, South and East Asia, and the Arab world. The paper contributes to the extant literature at the empirical, methodological, and theoretical levels. Empirically, it provides a unique and systematic account of the phenomenon through a large-scale comparative approach. Theoretically, it contributes to the debate on the value of economic voting to explain electoral behavior in the developing world. Methodologically, it shows that using presidential approval is a fair alternative to vote choice and that a full model specification is not absolutely necessary to estimating the economic effect.     

Political judgments,perceptions of facts,and partisan effects

We test two competing hypotheses about the impact of partisanship and information on people's political judgments and perceptions of facts using Canadians' reactions to a major scandal. Our findings with respect to subjective political judgments confirm the argument that partisan predispositions are crucial. But there is no evidence to support the argument that the polarizing effect of partisanship is most evident among the most informed. When it comes to perceptions of “objective” facts, the results are consistent with Zaller's reception axiom: the more informed people are, the more likely they are to correctly perceive objective facts. Partisanship does not appear to affect these perceptions.     

Transparency: from Bentham’s inventory of virtuous effects to contemporary evidence-based scepticism

There is growing enthusiasm for transparency in public affairs. Discourses idealising the value of transparency are part of the rhetoric of advocates of ‘good governance’. However, there is little discussion of the justifications for transparency. The view that transparency underpins legitimacy is similar to that of the advocates for ‘publicity’ in the initial era of representative government, when transparency (or publicity) became a crucial issue in political debates. This article identifies the intellectual roots of claims for transparency through a retrospective examination of the initial pleas in its favour. It concentrates on Jeremy Bentham, who provided an extended inventory of reasons for publicity. We examine Bentham’s major arguments and how they are currently analysed. We conclude that the virtuous effects of transparency are today qualified by criticisms in scholarly work which emphasise the possible costs and perverse effects of the search for transparency or demonstrate that it may fail to deliver the expected benefits.     

威尔逊的行政监督思想及其现代启示2)Wilson’sA

介绍了威尔逊的行政监督思想。威尔逊行政监督思想是通过他对公共舆论与行政管理之间的关系所进行的分析而得到阐释的。公共舆论在行政管理中所起的作用倍受威尔逊“推崇”,但他同时也注意到了公共舆论的一些不足之处。从不同视角切入来解读威尔逊行政监督思想的关键词——公共舆论,最后分析和阐述了威氏行政监督思想与现代行政理念的契合点。     

责任政府：一个分析框架

从开放和相互依存的角度分析了责任政府的定义、责任的来源、责任履行的要素以及失职带来的后果。政府责任是国家职能的具体化。在现代民主政治中,民主授权和行政授权是政府责任的来源。而民主授权是权力的根本来源。随着全球化进程的推进,政府不仅要承担传统意义上的国内管理职能,还要承担国际义务。对于中国政府来说,责任的履行必须放在制度转型背景下考虑,处理好改革、发展和稳定是政府的核心责任。政府责任是由责任主体、责任客体(或责任对象)、责任实现形式以及责任实现的约束机制诸要素组成的,因此政府失职是这些要素间关系的失衡。要使政府责任得到有效履行,必须强化民主选举制度、明确政府内部各部门责权、扩大公民参与、完善监督机制,还要提高官员能力,树立公共责任意识和精神。从长远来看,建立一种公共责任文化更具有持久性。     

Three-Fifths a Racist: A Typology for Analyzing Public Opinion About Race

Is race politics primarily about symbolic racism, principled conservatism, or group conflict? After almost three decades, this debate among some of our best scholars seems scarcely closer to resolution, yet the theoretical, empirical, and normative issues at stake remain enormous. All three parties to the debate falsely assume that the causal structure driving opinion about race policy is homogenous. I reorient and advance the debate by showing how a methodological shift to a data-driven taxonomy of subjects can elucidate how race politics really is complex. I use this taxonomy to run new analyses, and to explain and assess the seemingly contradictory results of previous contributions to the debate. Each of the major parties to the debate is partially right in their account of public opinion about race politics, but about independently identifiable sub-sets of subjects.     

Issue Framing and Engagement: Rhetorical Strategy in Public Policy Debates

Conventional wisdom and scholarly research indicate that to win a policy debate political actors should frame the issue strategically—that is, selectively highlight considerations that mobilize public opinion behind their policy position. Engaging the opponent in a dialogue (i.e., focusing on the same considerations) is portrayed as a suboptimal strategy because political actors forfeit the ability to structure the debate. Using over 40 public opinion polls and a detailed content analysis of news stories, I examine the use of framing and engagement strategies during the 1993–94 debate over health care reform. The analysis shows that engagement was more effective at increasing support for reform than framing. This study is the first to document the role of engagement in a policy debate, and it extends work showing that this strategy is more common in election campaigns than scholars once suspected.

The power and limitations of televised presidential debates: Assessing the real impact of candidate performance on public opinion and vote choice

A growing literature establishes that presidential candidates can help and hurt themselves through their performance in televised debates. Debate performance, however, is a somewhat elusive concept. Voters' post-debate assessments of the participants may be heavily colored by pre-existing attitudes toward candidates, parties, and the incumbent president. This paper attempts to tease out the “true” impact of debate performance, i.e., those times in which the candidates' superiority or inferiority on stage breaks through voters' cognitive filters. We find that debate performance is responsible for only about half of the variance in viewers' assessments of winners and losers; that it is possible to be declared the winner in the post-debate polls based entirely on factors exogenous to the debate itself; and that even a highly successful performance might yield only a narrow win in the post-debate polls. We also present evidence that, when measured properly, debate performance can actually alter candidate preferences.     

Examining the Link Between Issue Attitudes and News Source: The Case of Latinos and Immigration Reform

This paper explores whether an individual’s news source can explain their attitudes on immigration. We focus on the Spanish-speaking population in the U.S., since they have the option of accessing their news in English, Spanish or in both languages. Our audience influence hypothesis predicts that Spanish-language news will cover immigration in a more positive and informative manner than will English-language news. Thus, Latinos who use Spanish-language news may have a higher likelihood of possessing pro-immigrant sentiments than Latinos who only use English-language news. Content analysis of Spanish and English-language television news segments reveals variations in the tone and substance of these news outlets. Analysis of Latino survey respondents indicates that immigration attitudes vary by news source. Generational status also influences Latinos’ immigration attitudes, though its impact is not as great as one’s news source.

Brothers’ Keepers?

Relying on rarely analyzed public opinion data from the 1930s and early 1940s, we take issue with the notion popular in contemporary liberal circles that the New Deal era represented a period of expansive commitment to the security and well-being of the poor and politically disenfranchised. At least where the public is concerned—as opposed to the progressive policy makers in the Roosevelt administration—the jobless were regarded with suspicion, immigrants should be forced to “go home,” women belong in the kitchen not on the shop floor. The harsher the economic conditions (by state), the more conservative were the public attitudes. Hence New Deal legislative victories accrued despite rather than because of public support.