Electoral cycles in active labor market policies

We examine how electoral motives influence active labor market policies that promote (short term) job-creation. Such policies reduce measures of unemployment. Using German state data for the period 1985 to 2004, we show that election-motivated politicians pushed job-promotion schemes before elections.     

Campaign claims,partisan cues,and media effects in the 2011 British Electoral System Referendum

Campaigning in the British Electoral System Referendum of 2011 provoked much controversy. Accusations of negativity and dissemination of misinformation came from both sides. Using panel data spanning the crucial period of the campaign, this paper examines shifts in perceptions and intentions associated with information and opinion. First, it takes into account ‘baseline’ effects such as initial partisan cues. Then, in the context of criticism of the low quality information content of the campaign, it asks how much changes in the attitudes of respondents affected electoral system opinion, and the extent to which these changes reflected learning and the provision of information or misinformation. The roles of the Electoral Commission, television coverage, and newspapers are also examined.     

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.     

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.     

Another look at the evidence for rational partisan cycles

In presenting evidence in favor of rational partisan cycles, where electoral victories by leftist parties are expected to create temporary expansions and electoral victories by rightist parties are expected to create temporary recessions, Alesina, Cohen, and Roubini (1999) rely upon autoregressive time series intervention regressions. These regressions, however, are not consistent with their model. In this paper, a model is derived which is consistent with the intervention approach in its reduced-form. The differences between the models are highlighted and new empirical estimates are presented on a panel of seven OECD nations, which generally does not support the rational partisan cycle implications.     

Recalibrating social protection: Electoral competition and the new partisan politics of the welfare state

This article investigates the new party politics of welfare states with a particular focus on electoral competition. The argument is that welfare state politics are no longer just about more or less, but involve trade-offs among ‘new’ versus ‘old’ social rights, and hence social investment versus social consumption. However, party priorities on these issues are highly dependent upon their electoral situation. As electoral competition becomes more intense, parties focus more on vote maximisation than on their traditional policy goals. For left parties, this means focusing more on social investment, which appeals to their growing constituency of progressive sociocultural professionals, and less on defending the traditional income maintenance programmes favoured by their core blue-collar voters. Centre-right parties, on the other hand, should hesitate to retrench old social rights when electoral competition intensifies because they need to prioritise their appeal to culturally conservative working-class voters over their traditional fiscally conservative policy profiles. Using a new dataset and a recently published measure of electoral competitiveness, the article shows that as electoral competition intensifies, left governments are willing to prioritise social investment by reducing pension rights generosity in order to expand programmes for new social risks, while centre-right governments by contrast avoid retrenchment of pension rights and pension expenditures. The findings demonstrate that this relationship is moderated by the presence of a credible radical right challenger, which increases the electoral risk of welfare state recalibration.     

Social spending,partisan bias and vote choice. Evidence from the US

Most models in political science and political economy assume that benefiting from public spending increases the likelihood of voting for the government. However, we do not have much empirical evidence on the conditions under which recipients of public spending reward governments for their public transfers. This article studies the electoral implications of welfare spending cuts in the early years of the Reagan Presidency, when public spending changes were particularly pronounced. Using 1982 NES data, this paper demonstrates that voters who lost public benefits punished Reagan but this only occurred when they identified with the Democratic Party. By contrast, benefit recipients not affected by government cuts were more likely to support Reagan, but again this was only significant among voters identifying with the party of government. This paper thus finds that governments cannot automatically “buy” votes by using welfare spending, the influence of which is instead cushioned by party identification.     

Electoral cycles in the administration of criminal justice

Based on an analysis of over one million felony charges disposed in North Carolina courts during the 1990s, this paper describes the effects of district attorney elections on criminal case outcomes. Defendants face a higher probability of conviction and a lower probability of having all charges dismissed in an election year. The results suggest that in election years, DAs are more likely to prosecute cases that might otherwise be dismissed. The estimated effects are more pronounced for defendants charged with property or drug crimes than for defendants charged with violent crimes, and more pronounced in districts with more electoral competition.     

Finding political capital for monetary tightening: Unemployment insurance and partisan monetary cycles

How do governments find the political capital to raise interest rates in pursuit of inflation stabilisation? Against common wisdom, this article shows that the ability of governments to exercise tight monetary policy largely depends on the level of unemployment insurance. Unemployment insurance is particularly useful to social democratic parties since their core constituency – labour – is the hardest hit by economic downturns. Empirical evidence from 17 OECD countries over thirty years demonstrates that high levels of unemployment insurance present a strong incentive for social democratic governments to respond more aggressively to positive changes in inflation. These findings resolve the puzzle of why partisan monetary cycles are not often observed in the literature and have important policy implications, given continued calls for scaling down social insurance.     

Left-right perceptions,partisan preferences,electoral participation,and partisan choice in France

An analysis based on survey data shows that electoral participation at the second ballot in France can be accounted for by partisan preferences but not by left-right perceptions of party locations. This finding runs counter to the work of Rosenthal and Sen (1973), who validated a spatial model of participation at the second ballot employing left-right perceptions and partisan preferences interchangeably. Because they use aggregate data, Rosenthal and Sen (1973) are restricted in two ways that, operating interactively, lead them to an unwarranted conclusion concerning the power of left-right perceptions. Later work by Rosenthal and Sen (1977) indicating that left-right perceptions can account for shifts in partisan choice between the two ballots by voters who have decided to participate is confirmed, but partisan preferences account even better for second-ballot choices. Left-right perceptions and partisan sympathies are related, but discrete partisan attitudes are a more powerful factor than left-right perceptions in French second-ballot electoral behavior.     

Distinguishing between the effects of swing ratio and bias on outcomes in the US Electoral College, 1900–1992

We review a number of different statistical techniques for creating seats-votes curves and apply the most reliable of these to estimate seats-votes relationships in the US electoral college 1900–1992. We consider the now rejected claim, once firmly established as part of the common journalistic and even academic wisdom, that the US Electoral College has recently been strongly biased in favor of Republicans, and show that this claim was based largely on a confusion between bias (asymmetry in the electoral college gains earned by the votes received by different parties or candidates) and swing ratio (responsiveness of change in electoral college seat share to change in popular vote). Although there has been substantial bias during this century in the way the electoral college translates Democratic and Republican votes into electoral college seats, and for the earlier party of this century (from 1900 to 1940) that bias has been in favor of Republicans, to explain why many recent electoral college majorities have been so lopsided we must look not at bias but at swing ratio.We show that the swing ratio in the electoral college has generally been increasing since 1900, rising from an average value (1900–1924) around three to an average value (1976–1992) ranging from about five to about eight, depending upon which of the various statistical estimation techniques we use. Thus, for every one point vote share gain above 50 per cent, a winning presidential candidate in a two-candidate competition can now expect to pick up somewhere between a 5 percentage point and an 8 percentage point increase in electoral college seats—giving the illusion of mandate even for relatively close contests and frequently creating apparent landslides. We show that this historical rise in swing ratio in presidential elections is due almost entirely to changes in the responsiveness of outcomes in the US South as the influence of the Civil War slowly (very slowly) erodes. Drawing on the analysis of the determinants of bias and of swing ratio in the House of Representatives in Brady and Grofman (1991b), we show that the increases in electoral college swing can be accounted for by the nationalization of presidential competition as signaled by the decrease over time in the standard deviation of Democratic share of the two-party vote across states, and that changes in bias can be linked to changes in the magnitude of differences between the mean and the median of that distribution.     

Electoral effects of candidate valence

Ideological proximity is not the sole determinant of electoral choices. Voters frequently select candidates whose policy profiles do not exhibit the closest match with their own policy preferences. Instead, non-spatial factors can govern the vote. The empirical literature has struggled to assess the effect of candidate valence on electoral outcomes due to the challenge of estimating a comprehensive indicator of candidate valence. This paper investigates the effect of non-spatial factors on candidates’ electoral results by estimating candidate valences from a vote advice application. A conservative estimate based on an analysis of the two-tiered German federal election system suggests a surplus of several percentage points for high-valence candidates over low-valence competitors – even for competitors from minor parties.     

Electoral misgovernance cycles: evidence from wildfires and tax evasion in Greece

We present detailed empirical evidence from Greece that around elections, misgovernance results in significant increases in wildfires and tax evasion and has important economic implications: these effects have led to the destruction of property or loss of government revenue estimated at 8 % of GDP. There are two plausible reasons why misgovernance might intensify around elections: (i) attention and effort of elected officials is directed to campaigning instead of governing; and (ii) the misgovernance may benefit special interests and serve as a pork barrel transfer that is hard to monitor or control. Empirically, we find that redistributive politics are likely a dominant cause of electoral misgovernance. In the case of wildfires we also find evidence that political competition tends to increase electoral misgovernance; furthermore, electoral misgovernance helps incumbents get reelected. While misgovernance may manifest differently among countries, our analysis suggests that electoral cycles everywhere may be much more multifaceted and harmful than previous literature suggests.     

Mass Media and Electoral Preferences During the 2016 US Presidential Race

Political Behavior - This paper uses analyses of commercial polls alongside content-analytic measures of sentiment in the content of nine newspapers to explore the relationship between voter...     

Revenue Source and Electoral Accountability: Experimental Evidence from Local US Policymakers

Political Behavior - Existing research suggests that tax-reliant governments are more accountable to citizens. This pattern is consistent with micro-level evidence that citizens who are taxed are...     

Walking the line: Electoral cycles and the shift in legislative priorities among German parliamentarians

This article sheds light on how MPs' priorities change in the course of legislative terms. We purport that members of parliament (MPs) balance a variety of incentives over the electoral cycle. While they emphasize issues that relate to the policy-making agenda of their party right after an election, competition with other parties increasingly gains influence over legislators’ priorities as the next election day approaches. We show supportive evidence for these patterns based on a unique longitudinal dataset combining information on sponsorship of legislative proposals, public opinion, party manifestos, and committee chair positions in Germany between 1990 and 2013. By bringing variation within the electoral cycle to our attention, the results enhance our understanding of the factors that set the incentive structure for MPs and the relationship between party competition and legislative behavior.     

The effects of technical parties and partisan election management bodies on voting outcomes

Research on election integrity has noted the important role of election administration in facilitating free and fair practices. However, limited research has assessed how the staffing of polling station level election commissions may influence voting. Using extensive personnel and election data from Ukraine, this article investigates how partisanship and liberal registration rules permit major parties to “stack” election commissions with sympathetic officials. The empirical analysis demonstrates that the placement of representatives from major parties, or affiliated parties, in leadership positions on polling station commissions is associated with improved election outcomes.     

What explains attitudes across US trade policies?

Examining the demographic, economic and political variables that are associated with attitudes toward various trade policies can provide some insight into the public perceptions of globalization, and the political response to those perceptions. Using detailed data from the Program on International Policy Attitudes survey “Americans on Globalization, Trade, and Farm Subsidies,” I assess a number of potential determinants of trade policy attitudes. Education is associated with pro-trade attitudes, and Democrats are pro-trade on particular, politically salient trade issues. In addition, there is substantial variation in the determinants of trade policy attitudes across policies.     

Correction to: Mass Media and Electoral Preferences During the 2016 US Presidential Race

Political Behavior - This erratum provides additional analysis and clarification relating to the original version of the article.     

Spatial effects and party nationalization: The Geography of partisan support in Mexico

Nationalization captures the degree to which parties receive similar vote shares throughout the national territory, and is therefore explicitly interested in spatial aspects of party competition. This paper draws on spatial econometrics to analyze how parties compete across space. On the basis of a geo-referenced dataset of support for three major Mexican parties during the 2012 election, the analysis examines why there are spatial patterns of party support beyond what would be expected on the basis of district composition. The paper shows that spatial context has an independent effect on cross-district party performance, and that party support in one district increases the likelihood of party support nearby, thus highlighting why more explicit attention to space is important to understand the origins of nationalization.