Coalition incentives and party bias in Chile

This article revisits the debate over Chile's binomial electoral rules and its consequences and examines how the new electoral system conceived by a democratic congress altered political competition. It utilizes a seat-vote model of multiparty competition to analyze party bias under the binomial rule. This approach differs substantively from prior studies of the Chilean case that focused primarily on the disproportionality of aggregate results. In contrast to earlier analyses, the findings reveal that the allocation of the seats under the binominal resulted in significant party bias benefiting the main parties of the right. This bias, however, was eliminated after the electoral reform. The new rule continues to provide majoritarian benefits to parties receiving larger shares of votes, but this effect is less pronounced than before. It is now easier for small parties to gain seats, which has increased party fragmentation. However, we show that coalition incentives, which were heralded as one of the main advantages of the binomial rule, are also significant under the new rule in use since 2017.     

The 2020 presidential election and beliefs about fraud: Continuity or change?

The 2020 presidential campaign was plagued by charges of voter fraud both before and after the election took place. While past literature finds that electoral losers are most likely to express misgivings about election integrity, little else is known about the characteristics of individuals who exhibit these beliefs or how the beliefs have changed over time. Employing national surveys from 2012, 2016, 2018, and 2020, we examine the levels of pre-election expectations of fraud in the event of an electoral loss over time, as well as the individual-level correlates of beliefs in a range of election-related conspiracy theories prominent in 2020. Our analysis reveals that beliefs in election fraud are common and stable across time, and only occasionally relate to partisanship. Moreover, we find that, even accounting for the influence of partisan motivated reasoning, several psychological orientations––conspiracy thinking, anomie, dark triad personality traits, and denialism––play a unique role in promoting perceptions of voter fraud.     

Hidden in plain sight? Irregularities on statutory forms and electoral fraud

The most common method of tabulating election results around the world is manually compiling paper forms at the local level. Recent election disputes in developing democracies, particularly in Africa, have centered on irregularities observed on these forms. However, scholars do not yet have a good understanding of the distribution of these irregularities, nor of their relationship to systematic fraud. In this paper, we theorize a catalog of irregularities that goes beyond simple vote tally editing. We use deep neural networks to identify these irregularities on forms from about 30,000 polling stations in Kenya’s 2013 presidential election. We find that although irregularities manifest differently in government and opposition strongholds, they do not correlate with election outcomes, and they are unaffected by the presence of electoral observers. Taken together, our findings suggest scholars of election integrity should pay greater attention to problems of benign human error and overtaxed bureaucrats.     

It's Only Made Things Worse: A Critique of Electoral Reform in Britain

Since it came to power, New Labour has introduced a range of new electoral system into the British political system, implicitly accepting the argument that Britain's traditional electoral system - first-past-the-post (FPTP) - has been a cause of voter disenchantment with Britain's representative democracy. In this article, it is asserted that Labour's reforms have merely compounded this problem, while demonstrating that all electoral systems have significant flaws. Indeed, it is argued that the flaws of the new systems are more serious than those of FPTP and threaten an even greater disconnection between UK politicians and the people they represent."     

No (Parliamentary) Gender Gap Please, We're British

Although the number of women MPs has increased in recent years, there continues to be a pronounced gender gap in the British House of Commons. Most attempts to close this gap have involved political parties selecting candidates on the basis of some form of electoral gender quota, but quotas are problematic, and more radical steps need to be taken if we are serious about women being equally represented in the Mother of Parliaments. This article proposes a possible solution that accords as far as possible with Britain's governing and representative traditions: the modification of current electoral arrangements so that voters in each constituency vote for and are represented by both a male and a female MP.     

美国总统选举人团制度

总统选举入团制度是美国总统选举制度的重要组成部分.总统选举人团方案本身就是各种利益妥协的结果.经过二百多年的演变和发展,总统选举人团制度的内容和运行方式发生了诸多变化.迄今为止,它仍然是选举美国总统的重要机制,但存在许多缺陷和弊端.     

From Reset to Restart: The US-Russia Cyclical Relationship in the Post-Cold War Era

ABSTRACT

After a quarter of a century of oscillating relations between Washington and Moscow, Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy named Russia as one of the main challengers to the US-led order. Power transition theory is used to explain the alternating cooperative and competitive phases during each of the first three post-Cold War US presidencies: first, initial attempts at cooperation are driven by US willingness to integrate its former rival into the liberal order; then, regression into competition follows as Washington’s influence rises in territories that Moscow considers sensitive for its national security.     

技术权力、技术生命周期与大国的技术政策选择

大国技术竞争是指国家行为体综合运用各类政策手段争夺技术权力的过程。技术权力可分为强制性权力、网络性权力和制度性权力。技术竞争往往是一个长时段的互动过程,可能涵盖一个或多个技术生命周期。各类技术权力在一个技术生命周期内出现的时间有所不同,技术权力的积累在两个技术生命周期的交替期也可能呈现延续或中断的不同走向。这意味着在技术发展的不同阶段,竞争主体的政策选择将依据技术权力的变化而相应发生改变。美、俄、中、欧在全球卫星导航领域的博弈以及美、欧、日、中在移动通信领域的竞争,均鲜明体现了驱动国际政治行为体开展技术竞争的意愿因素(获取权力)以及它们在技术发展相应阶段的政策选择。前者仅涉及单个技术生命周期,后者则包含多个时间上紧密衔接的技术生命周期。中国是当前大国技术竞争的主要参与者。为了在竞争中立于不败之地,应注意把握技术发展的阶段性特征,因时制宜,选择与技术发展阶段匹配的技术政策,并针对下一阶段技术发展的重点方面提前进行布局,以坚持自主创新和扩大对外开放为基本原则,通过科技创新掌握技术权力,推进构建新发展格局。     

Comparisons among electoral systems: Distinguishing between localism and candidate-centered politics

Carey and Shugart (1995) offer a four component composite index of “incentives to cultivate a personal vote.” We argue that this index, while tapping important aspects of electoral system choice, is best regarded as encompassing two distinct dimensions: degree of party-centeredness of the electoral system, on the one hand, and incentives for “parochial” behavior on the part of legislators, on the other. Also, while we have no problem with the three indicators used by Carey and Shugart to measure party-centeredness; to measure parochial incentives we prefer to use a new measure, E (Grofman, 1999a) of the size of a legislator's electoral constituency, rather than using district magnitude, m, as a proxy for a the size of a legislator's geographic constituency, as Carey and Shugart do. In the conclusion to the paper we argue that the degree of similarity between any two electoral systems will depend upon the research question at issue, and that the expected degree of proportionality of election results is only one of the many political consequences of electoral laws to which we ought to be paying attention.     

Poverty Among Small Farmers Under Frei and Pinochet, 1968–1986

Abstract — This paper draws on the results of a nation-wide panel study of small farm households interviewed in 1968 and 1986 to complement accounts of Chile's economic performance under the governments of President Frei (1964–1970) and General Pinochet (1973–1989). It is shown that in contrast to macroeconomic trends of increased inequality and impoverishment after 1973, the incidence of poverty in the sample declined slightly but significantly over the period. The result is robust both to the choice of poverty index and poverty line. It is all the more striking because the sample represented the poorest group in Chile during the 1960s. Nevertheless, the incidence of poverty in the sample remained extremely high. In 1967–1968, more than three-quarters of households could not meet their basic needs, while in 1985–1986 this proportion reached nearly two thirds. The fall in poverty may be attributed to a combination of increased coverage of the rural areas by targeted welfare programmes and the effects of the life cycle in increasing the proportion of panel household members eligible for, and dependent on public transfers between 1968 and 1986.