Does survey mode matter for studying electoral behaviour? Evidence from the 2009 German Longitudinal Election Study

Online surveys are becoming increasingly popular in the social sciences, particularly in electoral research. However, several studies have shown that participants who take part in online surveys differ significantly from those in other surveys. Still, since electoral research aims primarily at explaining voting behaviour (i.e., looks at slopes and intercepts in statistical model output), online surveys are deemed to be useful tools if models based on this data source arrive at similar conclusions than models based e.g. on random-sample face-to-face or telephone surveys. This paper analyses these relationships by comparing models of voting behaviour based on data from various survey modes with different sample selections conducted by the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) 2009. The results indicate that the data quality of the different survey types is comparable; online surveys are thus useful for electoral research.     

Does housing create votes? Explaining the electoral success of the AKP in Turkey

In this paper we examine the rise and consolidation of the Justice and Development Party (Adelet ve Kalinma Partisi, AKP) by analyzing its success in local elections. Our examination of the durability of the AKP takes into account existing explanations of Turkish electoral politics such as economic voting, center-periphery relations, and traditional party cleavages, as well as the clientelistic tendencies of Turkish parties. We argue that the intensification of neo-liberal economic policies encouraged the AKP to seek alternative sources for distributive politics, which it found in Turkey's Mass Housing Administration (TOKİ). Using political, economic, and socio-demographic data for 900 municipal districts in Turkey, we empirically analyze the relationship between TOKİ financed housing projects and the AKP's success in the three mayoral elections between 2004 and 2014. Our results show that while traditional explanations of Turkish party voting account for some of the AKP's success, distributive politics in the form of TOKİ housing projects is a stronger predictor of the party's durability.     

Getting away with foul play? The importance of formal and informal oversight institutions for electoral integrity

Electoral integrity is increasingly being recognised as an important component of democracy, yet scholars still have limited understanding of the circumstances under which elections are most likely to be free, fair and genuine. This article posits that effective oversight institutions play a key role in scrutinising the electoral process and holding those with an interest in the electoral outcome to account. The main insight is that deficiencies in formal electoral management can be effectively compensated for via one or more other institutional checks: an active and independent judiciary; an active and independent media; and/or an active and independent civil society. Flawed elections are most likely to take place when all four checks on electoral conduct fail in key ways. These hypotheses are tested and supported on a cross‐national time‐series dataset of 1,047 national‐level elections held in 156 electoral regimes between 1990 and 2012.     

Does electoral competition affect politicians’ trade policy preferences? Evidence from Japan

This study examines the effect of electoral competition on politicians’ trade policy preferences using candidate observations from the House of Representatives in Japan’s 2012 general election. The study clarifies the effects of constituency size and the electoral strength of constituencies on candidates’ political stances. The empirical results provide evidence that politicians’ preferences for trade policy are sensitive to electoral pressure, but their reactions differ depending on the characteristics of each constituency. The results reveal that for a broad constituency with a large concentration of agricultural workers, election candidates are more likely to support protectionism than their counterparts running in a narrow constituency. For city district election candidates, electoral strength measured by the vote margin significantly affects their trade policy preferences. Candidates in close elections are more likely to be protectionist than candidates elected by a substantial majority, suggesting that electoral pressures deter politicians from supporting trade liberalization.     

Does immigration weaken natives’ support for?the?unemployed? Evidence from Germany

Using data from the 1997 and 2002 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel and from official statistics, I study whether natives are less supportive of state help for the unemployed in regions where the share of foreigners among the unemployed is high. Unlike previous studies, I use individual-level panel data, which allows a more convincing identification of a causal effect. I find that the negative bivariate association is mainly driven by observed individual differences, such as East German origin or income. While there remains some evidence of a negative association even after adjusting for observed and unobserved individual differences, the association is relatively weak.     

What determines preferences for an electoral system? Evidence from a binding referendum

Public Choice - Much has been written about politicians’ preferences for electoral systems, yet little is known about the preferences of voters. In 1993, New Zealand had a binding electoral...     

Does multiple office-holding generate an electoral bonus? Evidence from Belgian national and local elections

Traditionally, scholars have assumed that multiple office-holding (i.e. the combination of a local and national directly elected political mandate) leads to an enhanced electoral performance. Although the prospect of electoral benefits for such a mandate combination seems plausible, it remains unclear whether accumulating a national and local mandate does indeed provide an additional boost compared to holding either one prior to the election. Previous studies have only offered limited support for this assumption. For instance, they have focused exclusively on French national elections. This article, however, scrutinises whether dual mandate-holding pays off individually, for the candidate, as well as collectively, for the list as a whole in both Belgian national and local elections. The results here strongly suggest that cumul des mandats does not yield an additional electoral reward compared to single office-holders, contradicting both theoretical presumptions and normative beliefs.     

Does Partisan Self-interest Dictate Support for Election Reform? Experimental Evidence on the Willingness of Citizens to Alter the Costs of Voting for Electoral Gain

Political Behavior - Elite support for modifying electoral institutions and policies generally depends on whether a proposed change is expected to improve their party’s electoral prospects....     

Who’s afraid of a world state? A global sovereign and the statist-cosmopolitan debate

Wary of quick statist dismissal of their proposals, cosmopolitans have been careful not to associate themselves with a world state. I argue that this caution is mistaken: cosmopolitans should see the vision of a world state as strategically valuable in exposing weaknesses in statist accounts, particularly of the Rawlsian variety. This strategic value follows if the only cogent arguments against a world state belong to non-ideal theory which assumes non-compliance, rather than to ideal theory with its core assumption of full compliance. If our only convincing reasons to reject a world state are non-ideal, then any liberal theory revolving around separate states must itself be considered a non-ideal theory. As a non-ideal theory, a statist law of peoples cannot be presented as an end-state, but is rather a transitional stage. Yet once seen as a transitional theory, the statist “realistic utopia” can no longer dodge the cosmopolitan charge that it is neither sufficiently realistic nor sufficiently utopian.     

Does social trust determine the size of the welfare state? Evidence using historical identification

Most modern welfare states offer an extensive array of services and benefits that are wholly or partly financed by tax revenue. One missing link in explaining the long-run sustainability of such comprehensive welfare states could be the already-existing stock of trust. Indeed, our cross-country results suggest that trust determines the size of welfare states as well as three features that are arguably necessary for their preservation: high levels of political confidence, strong legal institutions protecting private property rights, and low levels of bureaucratic corruption.     

What drives the diffusion of inclusionary zoning?

Social scientists offer competing theories on what explains the policymaking process. These typically include economic rationalism, political competition or power struggles, and policy imitation of the kind that diffuses across spatially proximate neighbors. In this paper, we examine the factors that have influenced a recent local policy trend in California: inclusionary zoning (IZ). IZ programs require developers to make a certain percentage of the units within their market‐rate residential developments affordable to low‐ or moderate‐income households. By 2007, 68 percent of jurisdictions in the San Francisco Bay Area had adopted some type of IZ policy. We test the relative importance of economic, political, and spatial factors in explaining the rapid diffusion of IZ, across 100 cities and towns in the Bay Area. Consistent with an economic efficiency argument, results of hazard models provide some evidence that IZ is adopted in places with less affordable housing. However, political factors, such as partisan affiliation and the strength of affordable housing nonprofits, are even more robust predictors of whether or not a local government adopts IZ. There is no evidence of spatial diffusion in the case of IZ adoption; jurisdictions are not, on average, responding to the behavior of their neighbors. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

What about non-diffusion? The effect of competitiveness in policy-comparative diffusion research

Many scholars have convincingly shown that policies diffuse between national and sub-national entities for several different reasons. Although diffusion processes are empirically proven, we witness two shortcomings in the discussion: First, there is a lack of comparative research across policy areas. Second, the question of why diffusion might not occur in a certain domain is under-theorized and lacks an empirical test. By comparing the rationale behind diffusion processes in two policy domains??energy policy and locational policy??this paper shows that two aspects matter for diffusion processes: First is the observability of policy measures, that is, how easily things can be observed by others; second is the competitiveness of the policy domain. If policy measures can be hidden easily and the policy domain is highly competitive, policy diffusion is very unlikely to happen. Therefore, we seek the integration of these two aspects in prospective diffusion research.     

Can experts judge elections? Testing the validity of expert judgments for measuring election integrity

Expert surveys have been used to measure a wide variety of phenomena in political science, ranging from party positions, to corruption, to the quality of democracy and elections. However, expert judgments raise important validity concerns, both about the object being measured as well as the experts. It is argued in this article that the context of evaluation is also important to consider when assessing the validity of expert surveys. This is even more important for expert surveys with a comprehensive, worldwide scope, such as democracy or corruption indices. This article tests the validity of expert judgments about election integrity – a topic of increasing concern to both the international community and academics. Evaluating expert judgments of election integrity provides an important contribution to the literature evaluating the validity of expert surveys as instruments of measurement as: (1) the object under study is particularly complex to define and multifaceted; and (2) election integrity is measured in widely varying institutional contexts, ranging from electoral autocracies to liberal democracies. Three potential sources of bias are analysed (the object, the experts and the context), using a unique new dataset on election integrity entitled the ‘Perceptions of Electoral Integrity’ dataset. The data include over 800 experts in 66 parliamentary and presidential elections worldwide. It is found that validity of expert judgments about election integrity is increased if experts are asked to provide factual information (rather than evaluative judgments), and if they are asked to evaluate election day (rather than pre‐election) integrity. It is also found that ideologically polarised elections and elections of lower integrity increase expert disagreement about election integrity. The article concludes with suggestions for researchers using the expert survey data on election integrity on how to check the validity of their data and adjust their analyses accordingly, and outlines some remaining challenges for future data collection using expert surveys.     

Does India's growth matter? Evidence from the SAARC nations

The study estimates the extent of spillover effects that India's real per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate has on the growth rates of other countries in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) region for the period 2003–2016. It also identifies whether the conventional trade channel is the means through which growth is transmitted from India to her neighboring countries. Using a random effects model, we conclude that on average, a 1 percentage point increase in India's real per capita GDP growth rate results in 0.46 percentage point increase in the per capita GDP growth rates of other SAARC nations. However, this does not occur through the trade channel primarily due to low levels of intraregional trade. Also, using time dummies, the paper analyzes whether there has been any significant change in the degree of spillover effects in the postfinancial crisis period, where countries have been observed to insulate themselves to a certain extent.     

Mixed-member proportional electoral systems – the best of both worlds?

Mixed electoral systems are often associated with the hope of combining proportional election outcomes with a concentrated party system, and thus achieving the best of both worlds in electoral system design. It is especially the mixed-member proportional (MMP) variant that has retained a good reputation in this regard. Via a comparative analysis, we analyze whether or not the general praise for MMP systems is corroborated empirically. Our results show that the performance of MMP systems is heavily influenced by technical details, and elections conducted under MMP vary broadly with regard to possible proportionality–concentration combinations.     

The proximity paradox: the legislative agenda and?the?electoral success of ideological extremists

This paper presents a new approach to spatial models of legislative elections in which voters have preferences over the bundles of roll call votes implied by candidate locations rather than over the locations themselves. With such preferences, voters with single-peaked, symmetric preferences and perfect information can sincerely prefer a distant candidate to a more proximate candidate. Moreover, negative agenda control in Congress makes such preference orderings inevitable, so party agenda control can allow majority party extremists to defeat more centrist minority party candidates. The model has implications for theories of parties in Congress, and spatial modeling more broadly.     

Does public debt matter for human capital development? Evidence from Nigeria

An inquiry into the impact of external and domestic borrowings is considered timely for Nigeria, given the growing public debt profile amid deteriorating human capital development. Using data from 1990 to 2021, the study estimates the effects of domestic and external debts on Nigeria's human capital development. The study employed the fully modified ordinary least squares and canonical cointegration regression as the main estimation technique and the robustness check, respectively. The study discovered that domestic and external debt, economic growth and debt servicing exert positive and significant influence on human capital development in Nigeria while environmental pollution has an inverse and significant impact on human capital development in Nigeria. Premised on the outcomes, policy suggestions aimed at enhancing human capital development in Nigeria have been put forward.     

Does formal independence of regulators change? Evidence from Portuguese agencies

The rise of the regulatory state has led to the global diffusion of independent regulatory agencies (IRAs). IRAs are the result of the tension between the functional demands of regulatory capitalism and the need of politicians to control policies. Their life cycles have not been linear. Their legal statuses have changed over time, affecting their degrees of independence. This article revisits Gilardi's formal independence index, makes an in‐depth diachronic and cross‐sectorial analysis of 11 regulatory bodies in Portugal, and searches for explanations for the observed variations. It concludes that the formal independence of IRAs tends to increase due to external pressure and the need of governments to project credible commitment, but principals only grant as much independence as they see fit to satisfy those (external) demands (for change).     

Does Decentralization Improve Perceptions of Accountability? Attitudinal Evidence from Colombia

Decentralization is argued to create incentives for local and regional politicians to be more responsive and accountable to their constituents, but few studies have directly tested this claim. We use survey data from Colombia to examine individual‐level evaluations of the degree to which decentralization prompts citizens to view department government as more accountable. We estimate the effect of administrative, fiscal, and political decentralization, controlling for participation, political knowledge, confidence in government, education, and income on perceptions of accountability. Our results indicate that administrative and fiscal decentralization improve perceptions of accountability, while political decentralization does not.     

Does ticket-splitting decrease the accuracy of recalled previous voting? Evidence from three German panel surveys

This paper addresses the role of ticket-splitting in decreasing the accuracy of recalled previous voting. It suggests that ticket-splitting makes recalling vote choice a more difficult task and thus increases recall error. Using data from three German panel surveys conducted from 1998 to 2008, the paper demonstrates that ticket-splitting increases recall error by a considerable margin, even after controlling for behavioral and attitudinal predictors. This finding suggests that recall accuracy is not a stable voter characteristic. It also lends credence to the notion that the increase in ticket-splitting in recent German elections decreased the accuracy of recalled previous voting. Finally, the evidence suggests that electoral systems affect the validity of survey answers concerning previous vote choice.