Leadership Experiences Within Civil Organizations and Candidacy in Public Elections: Causal Evidence from a Quasi-Experimental Approach

Standing as a candidate in public elections has been characterized as the ultimate act of political participation. We test the hypothesis that acquiring office within civil organizations increases the probability of becoming a candidate in public elections. In order to take self-selection problems into account, we provide quasi-experimental evidence using election discontinuities, in which we compare the likelihood of being nominated for public office between closely ranked winners and losers in Swedish student union (SU) elections. Our original data cover 5,000 SU candidates and register data on their candidacies in public elections (1991–2010). The analysis provides support to the hypothesis: Students elected to SU councils were about 34 percent (6 percentage points) more likely to become a candidate in a public election than SU council candidates who were not elected. The causal impact is fairly stable over time. The analysis makes important contributions to two interrelated bodies of literature: First, it provides political recruitment literature with causal evidence that acquiring leadership experiences at arenas outside of representative democratic institutions facilitate entry into election processes. Second, it provides strong evidence to an increasingly contested issue within political participation research by showing that certain organizational activities increase individuals’ political involvement.     

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.     

Gubernatorial elections and attitudes toward the police: State elections as focusing events

Traditional views hold that citizens’ attitudes toward the police are driven by local concerns. We contend that public attitudes toward the police are also responsive to systematic and periodic state-level political factors. We show that state elections as a focusing event alter periodically the determinants of attitudes toward the police. Using an ordered logistic regression model and data from national public policy surveys from 1998 and 1999, we find that gubernatorial elections have a significant effect on the state/police relationship. State elections create conditions that separate the bureaucratic and partisan functions of the state government. In turn, the bureaucratic performance of the state government is less related to police approval, while partisan contestation for control of the governor office (control of the state) is significantly and positively related to police approval. During gubernatorial election years, attitudes toward the state government account for more of the variation in police attitudes.     

Do female politicians empower women to vote or run for office? A regression discontinuity approach

Persistent gender gaps in political officeholding and mass political participation jeopardize women's equal representation in government. This paper brings new evidence to the longstanding hypotheses that the presence of additional female candidates and officeholders helps address these gaps by empowering other women to vote or run for office themselves. With a regression discontinuity approach and data on 3813 US state legislative elections where a woman opposed a man, I find that the election of additional women in competitive US state legislative elections has no discernible causal effects on other women's political participation at the mass or elite levels. These estimates are precise enough to rule out even substantively small effects. These results stand in stark contrast to a number of findings from India, suggesting that although electing the first women in a society can have these empowering effects, remaining barriers to women's inclusion in American democracy go beyond what further increases in female officeholding can themselves erode.     

Are elections in autocracies a curse for incumbents? Evidence from Chinese villages

Are elections in autocracies a curse for incumbents? Using panel data from village elections in China, the OLS regression shows that introducing competitive elections has a relatively small effect on the removal of autocratic incumbents. However, the effect becomes much larger when the endogenous timing is instrumented with the passage of provincial election laws and village-specific election cycles. Additional evidence also suggests that removing incumbents through competitive elections enhances local governance. I interpret these results as suggesting that political selection matters in electoral autocracies.     

Are Niche Parties Fundamentally Different from Mainstream Parties? The Causes and the Electoral Consequences of Western European Parties' Policy Shifts, 1976–1998

Do “niche” parties—such as Communist, Green, and extreme nationalist parties—adjust their policies in response to shifts in public opinion? Would such policy responsiveness enhance these parties' electoral support? We report the results of statistical analyses of the relationship between parties' policy positions, voters' policy preferences, and election outcomes in eight Western European democracies from 1976 to 1998 that suggest that the answer to both questions is no . Specifically, we find no evidence that niche parties responded to shifts in public opinion, while mainstream parties displayed consistent tendencies to respond to public opinion shifts. Furthermore, we find that in situations where niche parties moderated their policy positions they were systematically punished at the polls (a result consistent with the hypothesis that such parties represent extreme or noncentrist ideological clienteles), while mainstream parties did not pay similar electoral penalties. Our findings have important implications for political representation, for spatial models of elections, and for political parties' election strategies.     

Electoral Cycles and Turnout in Multilevel Electoral Systems

This article differentiates between three ways in which electoral cycles may impact on participation in elections. First, it identifies a simultaneity effect – turnout increases to the extent that elections are held on the same date. A second effect is voter fatigue – turnout declines when another election has just been held before. Poll voting is a third effect. It suggests that turnout increases when another election is to be held shortly after. On the basis of a novel dataset that includes 2,915 regional elections held in 317 regions and 18 countries from 1945 to 2009, evidence is found for all three effects. The results point towards a basic dilemma in multilevel electoral systems: increase turnout by holding elections on the same date but accept high vote congruence across elections or decouple election cycles, which decreases vote congruence but lowers participation rates.     

Price-earnings changes during US presidential election cycles: voter uncertainty and other determinants

Using electronic-markets data, this paper investigates partial determinants of change in Graham’s price-earnings ratios (P/E) during US presidential election cycles. We document evidence over six elections, that as the probable winner of the election becomes clearer, markets surprisingly respond with decreases in P/E ratios. We consider that our results are consistent with rational markets reacting to presidential campaigns focused on influencing biased, sociotropic voters. These results should be of great interest to researchers concerned with market reaction to election cycles, public policy, and the overall role of election uncertainty in financial markets.     

Fear in the Voting Booth: The 2004 Presidential Election

Every presidential election offers interesting questions for analysis, but some elections are more puzzling than others. The election of 2004 involves two linked and countervailing puzzles. The first is: How did President George W. Bush manage to win at all, avoiding the fates of George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter? The other is: Why didn’t he win by a more substantial margin than in his first election, as all reelected presidents since Eisenhower were able to do? On the one hand, in the wake of September 11, the president had approval ratings around 90% and the threat of terrorism remained a substantial concern through Election Day. This would seem to afford Bush an overwhelming advantage. On the other hand, the public’s views of the state of the economy and of the course of the war in Iraq were negative. We think that the juxtaposition of these questions will help to explain the outcome of the election and of the pattern of the results. Moreover, by unpacking our explanation of the vote into three policy-related issue components—economic retrospective evaluations, domestic policy views, and foreign policy views—we examine the way these preferences contributed to the electorate’s voting decisions.     

Multicandidate Equilibrium in American Elections

The United States presidential election of 1992 is anexample of a multicandidate contest involving bothDemocratic and Republican candidates. Using a spatialmodelling approach, I analyze candidate policystrategy for such elections, under the assumption thatvoters choose according to the multivariate votingmodel of behavioral research. This model representsvoters' decisions as probabilistic functions of theirpolicy preferences and political partisanship. Isuggest reasons why partisan voting motivatescandidates to locate near their party's partisans inthe policy space, and illustrate this argument withrespect to the 1992 presidential election. The resultsof computer simulations suggest that these motivationslead to multicandidate spatial equilibria, which arerobust to changes in the model's parameters.Partisanship appears to be an important source ofstability in multicandidate electoral competition.     

The nonpartisan ballot and the decline of American parties: A contextual effect?

The nonpartisan municipal ballot is one of several turn-of-the-century reforms intended to weaken political parties. Through its effects on individuals' political contexts and voting experiences, it might have contributed to the twentieth-century decline in public support for political parties. This paper tests this hypothesis with items available in the 1980 CPS presidential election survey augmented with a ballot form variable. There are no significant differences in measures of party support among residents of partisan and nonpartisan communities, and thus no measurable evidence that nonpartisan elections discouraged the public from supporting political parties.This is a revised version of a paper delivered at the XIII World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Paris, July 1985.     

Election campaigns and the cyclical nature of emotions—How politicians engage in affective polarization

Do politicians get emotional during an election campaign? We examine the existence of changes in partisan in-group favoritism and partisan out-group hostility among political elites by evaluating the degree to which they fluctuate before, during and after election campaigns. The lack of elite level panel data has prevented scholars from studying the dynamics of politicians' emotions around the most emotionally intense political event in democracies: elections. We focus on Sweden around the 2014 election and follow more than 700 Swedish politicians before, during and after a national election campaign using a unique three-wave panel survey. The results reveal that politicians' emotions towards other parties are affected during the election, but less so for their own party. Our study adds to the body of recent evidence that campaigns mobilize partisan identities and increase partisan animus.     

Truman defeats Dewey: The effect of campaign visits on election outcomes

Political science research suggests that campaign visits by presidential candidates produce small and short-lived effects, consistent with mixed findings of their influence on election returns. We argue that existing studies are constrained by two issues: most studies rely on state-level data, rather than more localized data, and do not incorporate differentiation in the quality of campaign appearances in their assessment of visit effects. To incorporate these concerns in a study of campaign visit effects on election outcomes, we study the 1948 presidential election, during which Harry Truman engaged in a major whistle-stop train tour and won a surprise victory over his opponent, Thomas Dewey. Using data on campaign stops gathered from archival sources, we estimate the effect of campaign appearances on candidate vote share at the county level. We find that Truman, on average, gained 3.06 percentage points of the overall vote share in counties that he visited. Consistent with contemporary judgments of the “quality” of the two candidates' campaign stops, we find no effect of Dewey's appearances on his performance. Our results provide strong evidence that candidate visits can influence electoral returns, rather than merely affect short-term public opinion. In counterfactual simulations, we show that Truman's extensive campaign tour likely won him the state of Ohio, highlighting the importance of strategic campaign decisions and campaign effects in close elections.     

Implementing HAVA's Voter Education Requirement: A Crisis and a Federal Mandate Improve State-Local Cooperation in Florida

The political fallout from the presidential election of 2000that landed on both state and local officials, HAVA's broadlywritten voter education requirement giving the state great latitudein defining education, and the act's block-grant funding allowingmore programmatic decisions to be made by county supervisorsof elections each played a role in improving voter educationin Florida. Relationships between state and local election officialsalso improved, even though the state legislature expanded therule-making and coordination roles of the state Division ofElections. Voter education efforts in the 2002 and 2004 electioncycles, much more extensive than in 2000, were judged to bequite effective by both the voters and the county election supervisors.Improvements in voter confidence and participation paralleledthe expanded voter education efforts in this highly competitivebattleground state.     

Political Cycles,Fiscal Deficits,and Output Spillovers in Europe

This paper investigates whether national elections in Europegenerate political cycles in other European countries, and, ifso, whether these spillover effects are likely to surviveinside EMU. The paper first tests whether elections in Germanyaffect macroeconomic outcomes in other European countries andthen investigates the impact of elections on budget deficits.The results indicate that German politics significantlyimpacts macroeconomic variables in other European countries,and also that politics significantly affects the behaviour ofEuropean budgetary policy. The prospect of elections tends toincrease public deficits in recessions, whereas left-winggovernments tend to be more deficit-prone than right-winggovernments regardless of the state of the economy. Moreover,the existence of political cycles spillovers among Europeancountries suggest that there may be a need for electoralcoordination.     

Who benefits? Intergovernmental transfers,subnational politics and local spending in Ecuador

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at the intervening role that local political elites play to translate government transfers into effective public spending. We want to know whether mayors spend IGTs to provide basic public services or infrastructure works, and whether such investments are instrumental to secure their advantage as incumbents. To test these arguments, we use a combined dataset of local public finances between 2001 and 2015 and electoral results for the 2009 and 2014 municipal elections in Ecuador. We find that mayors do respond to political incentives and make strategic spending decisions to invest on public services and visible infrastructure projects. However, we find selective spending was insufficient to secure incumbency advantage in the 2014 election. We argue that the executive intervened to block or limit the impact of spending decisions at the local level, thus creating an incumbency disadvantage for mayors. Further research is needed to explain this.     

Mobilizing Interests: Group Participation and Competition in Direct Democracy Elections

We examine group mobilization in direct democracy elections by assessing the conditions under which interests will actively support or oppose ballot measures. Motivating our analysis is that the decision to mobilize is driven by the costs and benefits of group participation, a calculus shaped by issue characteristics, state political institutions, and the electoral context. Using data from initiative and referendum measures appearing on statewide ballots from 2003 to 2008, we find that ballot measures involving social and tax issues are likely to produce competition among groups and increase the overall number of groups involved. In addition, we find that group competition and levels of mobilization increased in response to how difficult it would be for the legislature to undo the change brought about from passage of a ballot measure. Lastly, group competition and levels of mobilization increased for ballot measures appearing in nonpresidential election years and for ballot measures featuring a close election. Taken together, our results suggest that groups engage strategically in direct democracy elections to pursue a mix of policy and political goals.     

Making Every Vote Count: The Important Role of Managerial Capacity in Achieving Better Election Administration Outcomes

A public agency's capacity to implement policy and achieve valued public outcomes has been a long-running area of research in public administration. Many articles provide theory and empirics regarding the capacity to implement policy, but relatively few examine multiple types of agency capacity within the same analysis. This article develops a model based on the election administration literature in political science and public administration to examine the effects of managerial capacity, financial capacity, and technology on the election management outcome of the residual vote rate in North Carolina election jurisdictions. The results indicate that higher levels of management capacity and technology significantly reduce problems with voting as measured by the residual vote rate. Financial capacity shows a negative association with the residual vote rate but is not significant. The article concludes by discussing how studying election administration provides an important and uniquely good administrative context for developing administrative theory.     

One voter, two first-order elections?

Conventional wisdom has it that elections other than national ones are “second-order elections,” driven by political conditions in the “first-order” national arena. It has not yet been shown that a sub- or supra-national election can exhibit qualities similar to those of first-order elections. This paper uses the 2003 Ontario Election Study, from a provincial election in extremely decentralized federation, to demonstrate that a sub-national election can be a first-order election. Aggregate evidence shows voters' interest and turnout is comparable to national elections. Individual-level evidence shows vote choice is determined by arena-specific factors. And dynamic evidence shows that this sub-national campaign had its own homegrown events that influenced voters, just as campaign events influence national elections.     

Candidate and Party Strategies in Two-Stage Elections Beginning with a Primary

In the United States and Latin America, candidates for national and state-level office frequently must win primary elections in order to advance to the general election. We model policy and valence issues for office-seeking candidates facing such two-stage elections. We determine a Nash equilibrium for the candidates' optimal strategies, and we find that holding a primary is likely to increase a party's chances of winning the general election, particularly in situations where valence issues that involve the candidates' campaigning skills and that are not known prior to the campaign are more salient than policy issues. Furthermore, we find that primary elections are especially likely to benefit parties that expect to be underdogs in the general election. Our conclusions are directly relevant to U.S. politics and by extension to the strategic decisions that many Latin American parties currently confront, about whether it is strategically desirable to hold primaries.