The impact of closeness on electoral participation exploiting the Italian double ballot system

We investigate whether the degree of political competition affects electoral turnout by using Italian municipal election data from 1993 to 2011. Relying on elections held using a double ballot system, we apply an instrumental variable technique exploiting the actual closeness between the two leading candidates in the first round as an instrument for closeness in the second round. The use of this strategy to estimate the impact of closeness on turnout is new to the literature. Controlling for municipal fixed effects and candidates’ characteristics, we find that expected closeness significantly increases turnout, thus supporting the idea that the expected benefits of voting increase in tighter political races. The estimated effect is much larger than that found when measuring closeness with ex-post electoral results, suggesting quite a relevant endogeneity bias in previous studies.     

Informed voters and electoral outcomes: a natural experiment stemming from a fundamental information-technological shift

Public Choice - Do informed electorates choose better candidates? While that question is straightforward, its answer often is elusive. Typically, candidate-quality information is neither salient...     

The unfortunate natural experiment in ballot design: The Scottish Parliamentary elections of 2007

The 2007 Scottish Parliamentary elections were notable for the extensive variation across constituencies in rejected ballots (ranging from 1.90% to 12.09%). This paper uses an unfortunate natural experiment to identify the influence of ballot design on the occurrence of rejected ballots, or ‘residual votes’. In two electoral regions, visual prompts were removed and instructions were abbreviated on the (already poorly designed) ballot papers. Using zero-truncated negative binomial regression to model total residual votes as well as constituency and regional undervotes and overvotes, we find clear evidence that these changes made a major contribution to the extent of residual votes in constituencies within those regions. The findings emphasise that ballot design is not a trivial subject that can be neglected by electoral administrators.     

Duverger's Law in mixed legislative systems: The impact of national electoral rules on district competition

How do institutional factors shape district competition in mixed legislative systems? Preliminary evidence suggests the distinction between sub‐types of mixed systems alone poorly explains variation in district results. Consistent with the contamination thesis, this analysis suggests three additional national‐level factors at play: fused ballots, the electoral threshold for proportional representation seats, and the existence of compulsory voting laws. Regression analysis on an original dataset covering 90 mixed system elections in 23 countries (1990–2012) finds that while mixed member majoritarian systems correlate with fewer district candidates, these three often overlooked factors are also statistically significant. This analysis highlights the complexity of mixed systems and suggests why many of them diverge from Duverger's Law.     

The ballot order effect is huge: evidence from Texas

Primary and runoff elections in Texas provide an ideal test of the ballot order hypothesis, because ballot order is randomized within each county and the state offers many counties and contests to analyze. Doing so for all statewide offices contested in the 2014 Democratic and Republican primaries and runoffs yields precise estimates of the ballot order effect across 24 different contests, including several not studied previously. Except for a few high-profile, high-information races, the ballot order effect is large, especially in down-ballot races for judicial positions. There, the empirical results indicate that going from last to first on the ballot raises a candidate’s vote share by nearly ten percentage points. The magnitude of this effect is not sensitive to demographic and economic factors.     

The psychology of electoral mobilization: a subtle priming experiment

In this paper we test the idea that citizens can be stimulated to vote in an election via subtle psychological processes, which have little or nothing to do with the act of voting as such. More specifically, we argue that presenting voters with stimuli that induce an active mood will increase their tendency to vote. We conducted an experiment to test our ideas. Participants were subtly primed by giving them a campaign leaflet that contained a word puzzle, which included words that are associated with either action or inaction. The results indicate that subtly primed participants in the action condition reported stronger voting intentions than those in the inaction condition. These findings suggest that individuals can indeed be stimulated (or inhibited) to vote through subtle psychological processes. We discuss the implications of our results for the study of voting behaviour as well as campaigns aimed at electoral mobilization.     

Re-examining the evidence on the electoral impact of terrorist attacks: The Spanish election of 2004

This paper re-examines the electoral effect of the 11-M terrorist attacks in Madrid. Previous research has focused on post-electoral surveys to construct counterfactuals for the evaluation of the electoral impact of the attack. Bali (Electoral Studies, 2007) claims that the terrorists attacks had an important electoral impact while Lago and Montero (2005) claim the opposite. In this paper I propose to re-examine the evidence using a methodological approach based on actual votes instead of opinions revealed by surveys, and the difference-in-differences estimator. The calculations under the counterfactual of “no terrorist attack” support the forecasts of the polls taken prior to the terrorist attack and the results of Bali (2007). The incumbent (conservative) party would have won the election with between 42% and the 45% of the votes, while the socialist party would have obtained 37% of the votes.     

The impact of closeness on turnout: An empirical relation based on a study of a two-round ballot

Several methodological difficulties emerge from the empirical evaluation of the impact of closeness on turnout. The most critical resides in the use of the actual electoral results to assess the impact of closeness. Important doubt therefore remains with respect to the empirical validity of the relationship between turnout and closeness. This article intends to explore this ambiguity by an econometric analysis of the two-round French legislative elections. The first ballot gives excellent information to the voters on the expected closeness of the upcoming second ballot. The results show that closeness, whatever its measure, has an important and meaningful impact on electoral participation.     

Party strategies and electoral competition in post-Communist countries: Evidence from Poland

Poland's major post-Communist party, the SLD, was an electorally successful legacy party during the 1990's. An analysis of Polish National Election Studies data and data from a separate study of new firm creation in Poland indicates their success was built on two important and related factors. One is the growth of new firms, which stimulated the growth of a centrist constituency who voted for parties supporting economic reforms. Second, the SLD adapted to this constituency by themselves becoming more economically liberal, as documented by Grzyma?a-Busse (2002). A conditional logit model of voter choice in the 1997 and 2001 elections relates votes to the distance between voters' preferences on economic policies and the positions of the competing parties. From this analysis we estimate that if the SLD had remained an ideological non-reformist party as did the KS?M in the Czech Republic and the CPRF in Russia it would have been a far weaker party as measured by vote and seat shares. Without the new firm creation, an ideological SLD cum KS?M could have been electorally successful as was the CPRF. The paper concludes by contrasting the the Polish, Czech and Russian post-Communist parties and extending the implications of the results to other developing and industrial economies faced with the need for structural change.     

The effectiveness of institutional borrowing restrictions: Empirical evidence from Spanish municipalities

The need for restrictions on borrowing by subnational governments is a generally accepted notion that is justified both by public choice theory and by the fact that such restrictions are in force in the majority of decentralized countries. Furthermore, recent breaches of the Stability and Growth Pact of the European Union have led to the introduction of legislative tools aimed at balancing the budget at all levels of government have come to the forefront of interest in European public finance research. This paper is concerned with the financial situation and debt level of Spanish municipalities from 1988 to 2000. We have two main objectives: the first is to assess the value of mandatory limitations on municipal borrowing and past trends in the borrowing policies adopted by Spanish local authorities. The second is to develop an econometric model using panel data stratified by population size to measure indebtedness in Spanish municipalities. These measures enable us to formulate a series of hypotheses to explain municipal borrowing practices, which are then tested empirically. The evidence thus obtained appears to support the effectiveness of institutional borrowing restrictions to introduce some financial discipline in the borrowing policies adopted by local governments in Spain.     

Education,political discontent,and emigration intentions: evidence from a natural experiment in Turkey

Public Choice - We exploit the 1997 school reform that prolonged compulsory schooling from 5 to 8 years to investigate the causal effect of education on emigration intentions. Our IV...     

Party competition over decentralisation: The influence of ideology and electoral incentives on issue emphasis

Under what conditions is decentralisation a salient issue for state‐wide political parties? It is argued in this article that the extent to which state‐wide parties emphasise decentralisation depends on their strategic considerations: on their overall ideology, on the electoral incentives created by the context in which they compete, and on the interaction between the two. The results of the analysis of party manifestos in 31 countries since 1945 are as follows. First, parties that pay greater attention to cultural matters relative to economic matters tend to talk more about decentralisation. Second, the systemic salience of decentralisation also encourages parties to talk more about decentralisation. Third, the larger the regionally based ethnic groups within a country, the more salience all state‐wide political parties will attach to decentralisation. Finally, only parties that put greater relative emphasis on cultural matters tend to respond to the electoral threat of regionalist parties. The influence of territorial diversity on the salience of decentralisation thus works through two channels and is partly conditioned by political parties’ ideological profile.     

Party-related primacy effects in proportional representation systems: evidence from a natural experiment in Polish local elections

We study the primacy effects that occur when voters cast their votes because a candidate or party is listed first on a ballot. In the elections that we analyzed, there are three potential types of such effects that might occur when voters vote for (1) the first candidate listed on the ballot in single-member district (SMD) elections (candidate primacy); (2) the first party listed on the ballot in open-list proportional representation (OLPR) elections (party primacy); or (3) the first candidate on a party list in OLPR elections (list primacy). We estimated the party primacy effect (2) and established that there was no interaction between (2) and (3). A party primacy effect is especially difficult to estimate because parties’ positions on ballots are typically fixed in all multi-member districts (MMDs) and it is impossible to separate the first-position “bonus” from a party’s normal electoral performance. A rare natural experiment allowed us to estimate the primacy party bonus between 6.02 and 8.52% of all votes cast for the 2014 Polish local elections. We attribute the large size of such bonus to the great complexity of voting in the OLPR elections, especially the much longer ballots, voting in many simultaneous elections, and ballot design as a booklet rather than a sheet.

     

The electoral impact of the financial crisis: Evidence using district-level data

Do economic downturns increase voter support for left or right parties? In our empirical analysis, we combine fine-grained registry-data on the labor market impact of the crisis and how it varied across 5000 electoral districts, with district-level data on vote-shares for all major parties in Swedish parliamentary elections before and after the crisis. Because the impact was so diverse across districts, we can estimate the electoral impact of unemployment more efficiently than usual. Moreover, because the crisis was an external and unexpected shock to the Swedish economy, we argue that the selection bias that is usually inherent in estimating the electoral impact of unemployment is mitigated. We find that the electoral impact of crisis-induced unemployment was large, benefiting right parties.     

The economic impact of state restrictions on abortion: parental consent and notification laws and Medicaid funding restrictions.

State-legislative support for liberalized abortion policies, the availability of abortion providers, and actual abortion rates vary widely across states. This article uses national data to examine the impact of the following three major, enforceable state abortion restrictions as of 1988 on the access to and use of abortion services: state restrictions on Medicaid financing of abortions for low-income women (36 states), state requirements for parental consent or parental notification for minors to obtain abortions (11 states), and state restrictions on insurance coverage of abortion for public employees (8 states). The impact of state abortion restrictions is becoming an increasingly important policy issue as the number and types of restrictions which can be enforced in the US increase rapidly. The Supreme Court in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989) upheld a Missouri law banning abortions in public hospitals and the involvement of public employees in the performance of abortions; states via this ruling may also enforce mandatory testing for viability after a specified point in the pregnancy. The Supreme Court then in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992) effectively ruled that states can enforce a 24-hour waiting period and a state-prescribed talk on abortion for women seeking abortion. Analysis of the data found that there are significantly fewer hospitals, clinics, and private physicians' offices providing abortions in states with parental consent or notification laws. Moreover the rate of minors' abortions per 1000 teen pregnancies is 16% lower, and the rate of minors' abortions per 1000 women aged 15-19 is 25% lower in states with such laws compared to states without the laws. Data from abortion clinics and referral services in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Rhode Island suggest that 20-55% of minors are going to court instead of informing their parents. 35% of minors who contacted a clinic in Massachusetts and 49% in Rhode Island went out of state for abortions. As for Medicaid restrictions, there are significantly fewer hospitals, clinics, and private physicians' offices providing abortions in states which restrict funding of abortions as compared to states which do not. State restrictions on insurance coverage of abortion for public employees do not appear to be associated with statistically significant differences in abortion rates or abortion availability.     

Location,location, location: the Davis-Hinich model of electoral competition

The Davis-Hinich multidimensional model of electoral competition is the foundation for a very broad set of models in economics, political science, public choice and political economy. This essay reviews some of these models and how they build on and extend the original Davis-Hinich model. It also presents a new extension that makes individual preferences endogenous to the electoral process. The essay concludes with a discussion of the positive and normative implications of endogenous preferences and then returns to the basic theme of the central importance of the early Davis-Hinich papers.     

A note on electoral competition and turnout in run-off electoral systems: Taking into account both endogeneity and attenuation bias

In this short note, I propose an identification strategy to estimate the causal effect of expected electoral competition on voter turnout in run-off systems taking into account both endogeneity and attenuation bias. I find that electoral competition significantly raises turnout. Not addressing attenuation bias yields estimates that are biased by up to 50%.