Electoral Competition, Participation, and Government Responsiveness in Mexico

In this article I test two competing visions about how democracy produces responsive government. Electoral theories of democracy posit that elected governments are responsive to public demands because citizens are able to sanction bad politicians and select good ones. Participatory theories attribute responsiveness to a citizenry's ability to articulate demands and pressure government through a wider range of political action. I test hypotheses derived from these two approaches, using an original dataset that combines electoral, socioeconomic, and public-financial indicators for Mexico's 2,400 municipalities, from 1989 to 2000. The data show that electoral competition has no effect on municipal government performance. But the results are consistent with the hypothesis that nonelectoral participation causes improved performance. Thus, I suggest that the quality of municipal government in Mexico depends on an engaged citizenry and cooperation between political leaders and their constituents, rather than the threat of electoral punishment. I recommend that scholars broaden the study of government responsiveness to account for participatory strategies of political influence and critically assess the claims of those who would promote elections as a cure-all for poor democratic performance.     

Differential Influences on Latino Electoral Participation

Relying on the Voter Supplement File of the November 2000 Current Population Survey (CPS), this study assesses sociodemographic influences on the registration status and turnout of Latino citizens in the United States. Latinos' deficits on socioeconomic status and social-connectedness largely account for their lower levels of participation. This study also provides a thorough assessment of whether and of how the influences on electoral participation differ between Anglos and Latinos. Noteworthy findings emerge. Whereas formal education and marriage demonstrate greater influence on the participation of Anglos, Latinos reap greater participatory benefits from age.     

The Electoral Relevance of Political Talk: Examining Disagreement and Expertise Effects in Social Networks on Political Participation

Although people with larger, more politicized social networks are more likely to participate in elections, we know very little about what drives this relationship. I argue that the electoral relevance of political talk depends heavily on the political expertise imbedded in discussion networks. Using data gathered during the 1996 presidential election, I demonstrate that the level of political sophistication in a person's social network exerts a positive influence on participation. Importantly, this effect is greater than the impact of political preferences in the network, the factor that is implicitly considered to be the main link between networks and involvement. This evidence makes two contributions to research on networks and participation. First, it provides support for a theoretical model that better accounts for research on the relationship between political talk, political disagreement, and involvement. Second, it changes the normative implications associated with political talk by suggesting that networks can encourage both higher levels of involvement and increased consideration of differing viewpoints.     

Policy Responsiveness and Electoral Incentives: A (Re)assessment

Political Behavior - Competitive democratic theory predicts that electoral factors enhance policy makers' responsiveness to public opinion. Yet findings on the effects of electoral...     

The Development of Stable Party Support: Electoral Dynamics in Post-Communist Europe

What conditions help stable patterns of party support to emerge? Using pooled time‐series cross‐section data on election results from 15 East European democracies, the empirical analysis finds that (1) right after a regime change electoral volatility increases while the trend is reversed after democracy has endured for about a decade; (2) ethnic cleavages have no effect on stability while social cleavages affect electoral stability only during economic downturns; (3) both institutions and economic performance influence the stability of party support; however, the effect of the latter diminishes over time when democracies mature.     

Generations and Socialization into Electoral Participation in Finland

This article examines the extent to which political socialization accounts for generational differences in electoral participation found in recent studies. Political socialization is defined as the learning process in which an individual adopts various political attitudes, values and patterns of actions from his or her environment. The analysis is based on the Finnish National Elections Study 2003. The results show that even though politics has had the smallest role during the formative years of the youngest generation and they most often do not know their parents' partisanship, this generation has received the most encouragement for voting and the attitudinal change towards voting within an individual's life span has been the most positive. Consequently, the study shows that if there were no differences in the socialization between the youngest and the older generations, the difference in turnout would be larger if only sex and socioeconomic factors were taken into account. Based on these results, the author draws the conclusion that, rather than political socialization, the factors behind the low turnout among the young generation have to be searched for elsewhere.     

The Effect of Bureaucratic Responsiveness on Citizen Participation

What effect does bureaucratic responsiveness have on citizen participation? Since the 1940s, attitudinal measures of perceived efficacy have been used to explain participation. The authors develop a “calculus of participation” that incorporates objective efficacy—the extent to which an individual's participation actually has an impact—and test the model against behavioral data from the online application Fix My Street (n = 399,364). A successful first experience using Fix My Street is associated with a 57 percent increase in the probability of an individual submitting a second report, and the experience of bureaucratic responsiveness to the first report submitted has predictive power over all future report submissions. The findings highlight the importance of responsiveness for fostering an active citizenry while demonstrating the value of incidentally collected data to examine participatory behavior at the individual level.     

Interdependence Effects in Mixed-Superposition Electoral Systems: An Empirical Test on Women's Participation in Sub-national Elections

Mixed-superposition electoral systems, while devoid of compensatory mechanisms interconnecting their proportional and non-proportional sections, may create effective linkages that exert some impact upon the behaviour of political parties. This article examines the resulting interdependence effects with respect to women's electoral participation and legislative representation. It is hypothesized that if political parties embrace the logic of ticket-balancing when forming their candidate lists in the proportional representation sections of elections, they become more willing to nominate female candidates in majoritarian districts, which creates an important interdependence effect that ultimately contributes to the increased levels of women's representation. This hypothesis is empirically tested on a sample of 139 sub-national elections held in Russia in 2003–2011, with some additional information derived from the results of 81 previously held elections. The statistical analysis confirms the presence of interdependence effects with respect to women's political participation. The principal contextual factor that intermediates the observed effects is political regime. It is shown that electoral authoritarianism mitigates the interdependence effects of mixed-superposition electoral systems.     

To Participate or Not to Participate: The Link Between Survey Participation, Electoral Participation, and Political Interest

Survey participation, electoral participation, and politicalinterest have been given wide attention in the research literature,but no one so far has combined these three variables in onemodel. Taking the social isolation-hypothesis as our startingpoint, we developed a model with one factor, social involvement,as the common factor underlying these three types of participation.We reviewed the literature and concluded that we had to includea second underlying factor: attachment to society. Using a newdata set, gathered on the occasion of the 1998 Dutch nationalelections and including validated voter turnout measures, wewere able to test the model. After making some adaptions, wefound a model with a satisfactory fit. The results show that,by including social involvement and attachment to society asmediating variables, we can reach much higher levels of explainedvariances of survey and electoral participation than we canwith traditional models. The results also add to our understandingof the relationship between survey and electoral participationand political interest.     

Electoral Participation in Pursuit of Policy Representation: Ideological Congruence and Voter Turnout

In this article, we examine whether lack of ideological congruence with the viable party options discourages turnout, and under which conditions. We conceive congruence from the perspective of the individual citizen, and, drawing on policy-based arguments for non-voting, we hypothesize that: having no party in the political menu sharing similar views should especially reduce turnout of citizens holding extremist views and that this effect would be greatest in proportional electoral systems. Relying on data collected by the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), we show that lack of congruence with the electoral menu reduces extremists’ turnout and does so particularly in PR systems.     

The Paradox of Proportional Representation: The Effect of Party Systems and Coalitions on Individuals' Electoral Participation

Empirical findings based on aggregate data have found that proportional representation (PR) has a mixed relationship with electoral participation. Large party systems, thought to be one of the benefits of PR in increasing turnout, instead depress turnout. This article examines two theories that seek to account for this paradox – that coalition governments resulting from larger party systems serve to depress turnout, and that larger party systems increase the complexity of the decision environment for voters. By combining individual-level data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems with contextual measures of effective number of parties, coalition structure and disproportionality, this article tests for interactions between the characteristics and attitudes of individuals and the contextual influences on electoral participation. The frequency of coalitions that violate the minimal-winning rule depresses turnout, especially among supporters of major parties. By accounting for variations in coalition governments, larger party systems appear, on balance, to enhance, rather than depress, individuals' propensity to vote. Limited evidence is reported that indicates that this participation-enhancing role of larger party systems is not evenly distributed across the electorate, as those lacking a university degree may find the decision environment created by larger party systems more complex.     

Electoral Choice,Ideological Conflict,and Political Participation

Generations of democratic theorists argue that democratic systems should present citizens with clear and distinct electoral choices. Responsible party theorists further argued that political participation increases with greater ideological conflict between competing electoral options. Empirical evidence on this question, however, remains deeply ambiguous. This article introduces new joint estimates of citizen preferences and the campaign platforms chosen by pairs of candidates in U.S. House and Senate races. The results show that increasing levels of ideological conflict reduce voter turnout, and are robust across a wide range of empirical specifications. Furthermore, the findings provide no support for existing accounts that emphasize how ideology or partisanship explains the relationship between ideological conflict and turnout. Instead, I find that increasing levels of candidate divergence reduce turnout primarily among citizens with lower levels of political sophistication. These findings provide the strongest evidence to date for how mass political behavior is conditioned by electoral choice.     

Residential Mobility, Community Mobility, and Electoral Participation

This article investigates why Americans who move have lower voter turnout than those who stay put. Two hypotheses are drawn from the political science literature. One emphasizes the need to register at one's new address in order to vote. The other locates the cause of lower turnout in the disruption of social connections that results from moving. By distinguishing those who change residences within their communities from those who move outside of their communities, I test the hypotheses. The findings show that both types of moves affect turnout. However, changing residences appears to be more important than changing communitites. Thus it appears that the explanation for the relationship between moving and turnout derives more from the need to register after moving than the disruption of social ties.     

Between Detachment and Responsiveness: Civil Servants in Europe and North America

The article shows that civil servants who believe that the long-term interest of society is best served by their detached policy advice to policy-makers also hold on to their opinion more than any other actor involved in policy development. However, more civil servants currently emphasise responsiveness, at the expense of detached analysis, owing to increased exposure to international consultancy and forums. As a consequence, the attitude of civil servants in developing public policy is more likely to be indistinguishable from that of actors who have political functions, without significant variation from country to country. Evidence supporting this argument is provided by an analysis of the results of a survey first conducted in 2006 and repeated in 2008. The two waves of the survey drew responses from civil servants, interest group representatives and non-governmental experts who contribute to biotechnology policy development in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and the European Union.     

The Electoral Fate of Ethnoregionalist Parties in Western Europe: A Boolean Test of Extant Explanations

In this study I argue that we need to rethink some theoretical and empirical considerations related to our understanding of ethnoregionalist (ETR) parties in Western Europe. Research has stressed the strong impact of structural attributes of political systems, mostly electoral systems with proportional representation (PR), on the electoral success of ETR parties. From applying Boolean analysis to compare 12 ETR parties with varied levels of electoral success, it is claimed that the emphasis on type of electoral system as the determinant factor present in the relevant literature on small and regional parties is unjustified and that the presence of a distinctive local language, understood as a facilitating factor to translate regional demands and protest into political influence, is the most critical variable to avoid electoral failure. Moreover, most causal factors are linked through a structure of 'elective affinity' (social and political determinants as lying in closely related bundles) according to the specificity of ethnoregionalist politics. This finding not only sheds light on the fate of ETR parties but may also apply to other ideologically eclectic political parties.     

Left-Authoritarians and Policy Representation in Western Europe: Electoral Choice across Ideological Dimensions

Citizens can face a difficult electoral decision when no party even broadly represents their views. In Western Europe, this applies to those citizens with left-wing preferences on economic issues and traditional/authoritarian preferences on socio-cultural issues. There are many voters with such ‘left-authoritarian’ views, but few parties. Hence, the former often have to choose between parties that only match their views on one of these two ideological dimensions. This study shows that whether these citizens privilege economic or socio-cultural congruence in their electoral preferences depends on the issues they are concerned about. In general, it is found that left-authoritarians privilege economic concerns and therefore prefer parties that are left-liberal. These findings have implications for our general understanding of electoral choice and of changing patterns of political competition in Western Europe.     

The Effect of Distributive Politics on Electoral Participation: Evidence from 70 Million Agricultural Payments

Political Behavior - Policy feedbacks take place when public policies change mass participation and mobilize key constituencies. This can influence future rounds of policymaking and solidify...     

Everything to Everyone: The Electoral Consequences of the Broad‐Appeal Strategy in Europe

Parties often tailor their campaign message differently to different groups of voters with the goal of appealing to a broader electorate with diverse preferences and thereby winning their votes. I argue that the strategy helps a party win votes if it can convince diverse groups of voters that the party is ideologically closer to their preferred positions. Using election data from nine Western European democracies, I first show that parties gain votes when they appeal broadly. Analysis of individual‐level survey data suggests that voters perceive broadly appealing parties as ideologically closer to their own positions, a finding that identifies a plausible mechanism behind the aggregate positive effect of this strategy on party election performance. These findings not only help explain the behavior of some European parties, but they may also offer a potential recipe for electoral success in multiparty democracies.     

Party debate over Europe in national election campaigns: Electoral disunity and party cohesion

Few political parties are willing to lead the public debate on how the European Union should develop and parties rarely publicly discuss issues on the EU agenda. This is probably one of the most important democratic problems in the contemporary EU. When and why parties are willing (or not willing) to discuss European cooperation is therefore an essential issue in which political science should engage. Previous research has shown that parties that are internally divided on EU issues downplay these issues in order to avoid internal disputes. At the same time, parties that have severe intraparty conflicts over the issue are unable to contain the debate. Thus, parties that are unified in their position on EU issues and parties that are heavily split speak about the EU, but others do not. Also, earlier research has shown that political parties downplay issues in response to internal divisions among their supporters. It is argued in this article that the focus should not be solely on intraparty conflict or whether or not a party's voters are hesitant or disunited, but rather on how these factors interact in order to better understand how parties act strategically regarding EU issues. Using a new dataset that relies on quantitative content analysis of quality newspapers during the national election campaigns in the period 1983–2010 in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Sweden, it is found that parties that have a high degree of internal dissent on European issues, while at the same time having an equally divided electorate, are the parties that are most present in the public debate. Hence, it is the interaction between these two important factors that explains much of the variation in the amount of attention paid to European issues in national election campaigns.