Fixing failures of U.K. electoral management

Concerns about electoral malpractice have been raised in many democracies in recent years because of errors made in the administration of elections by local election officials (LEOs). This article argues that adopting appropriate policy instruments to manage LEOs is an under-explored method for improving election administration and reducing electoral malpractice. The article provides a case study of the use of performance benchmarking schemes in the UK 2008–2010. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 74 LEOs from 41 organisations subject to newly devised performance indicators. The research demonstrates that performance benchmarking can encourage learning amongst local electoral officials and strengthen central control over them.     

On arbitration,arbitrage and arbitrariness in financial markets and their governance: unpacking LIBOR and the LIBOR scandal

Abstract

Amongst a series of scandals to hit international financial markets in recent years, that surrounding the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) – a highly influential interest rate benchmark – has attracted particularly intense media scrutiny. This paper seeks to push beyond conventional understandings to unpack critically both LIBOR itself and the scandal involving its manipulation by major international banks. Envisioning LIBOR as a commodity beset by inherent contradictions, the paper mobilizes the tropes of arbitration, arbitrage and arbitrariness to illuminate, respectively: the market-making work performed by LIBOR; its role in enabling the transfer of financial risk, most notably when fraudulently manipulated; and the nature of the regulatory prosecution of such manipulation.     

Electoral Cycles And Local Government Debt Management

The literature provides both theories and empirical assessments that link national electoral cycles and opportunistic incumbents' behaviour. However, at the subnational level the literature is scarce. Using a panel of 238 Spanish municipalities over the period 1992–2005, this paper investigates for the first time in Spain whether electoral events contribute to shape municipal debt policies. We show that the electoral cycle influences the municipal debt per capita. Furthermore, both weak (no-majority) and wealthier municipal governments have higher levels of debt per capita. Finally, our data show that the 2001 Spanish Budgetary Stability Law (stemming from the European Stability and Growth Pact) appears to have reduced the electoral effect on municipal debt per capita.     

Evolution of the Japanese Political Scene: Toward a Non-Issue-Oriented Two-Party System?

This article examines the nature of the two-party system in Japan. The electoral reform of 1994 has finally led to an alternation of power, but contrary to the predictions of the reformers, the competition between two major Japanese parties is not based on any substantial differences in their political programs. The Liberal Democratic Party and the Democratic Party of Japan are mixtures of various groups rather than coherent parties and the main axes of struggle on the Japanese political scene run across party divisions. Both major parties are internally divided with regard to economic as well as defense policy. The most important factor of Democratic Party of Japan's identity has been the goal of achieving an alternation of power and abolishing the Liberal Democratic Party style of policymaking. Nevertheless, the discourse on political renewal has been undertaken also by the Liberal Democratic Party. While the struggle between the partisans and the opponents of Koizumi reforms continues in the Liberal Democratic Party, the Democratic Party of Japan is torn apart between the proponents of ‘big’ and ‘small’ government.     

Stuck in transition: electoral processes in Zambia 1991–2001

Zambia has held three multiparty elections since its restoration of democracy in 1991. This peaceful transition raised expectations of a smooth process towards democratic consolidation. But similar to experiences in other African countries and Eastern Europe, the Zambian democratic process has remained stuck in a ‘transitional zone’ between actual democracy and authoritarian systems. This article argues that Zambian elections fall short of the expectations of a democratic process due to the institutional uncertainty surrounding elections and the weakness of the Zambian Electoral Commission in particular. The continued uncertainty – of the rules and regulations guiding elections and electoral administration – has maintained the same party in power through three consecutive elections, despite an alarming economic record.     

Making them pay: Using the norm of honesty to generate costs for political lies

Recent literature finds that, although lies politicians spread to achieve partisan goals can be corrected, politicians who spread misinformation rarely pay a price for lying. We argue that the cost of lying should be greater when the norm of honesty is salient. Using three survey experiments that feature both a well-known politician (Donald Trump) and a fictitious member of Congress, we examine the cost politicians pay when they are caught in a lie. We find that many citizens, regardless of partisanship, will recognize a lie when one has been told. And although citizens punish unknown politicians for lying, they do not punish Trump similarly unless the norm of honesty is made salient. This effect, however, is limited to the narrower measure of situational approval; individual lies do not affect overall measures of job approval regardless of honesty salience. These results demonstrate the difficulty of getting citizens to update their views on well-known politicians, even when those politicians are caught in an obvious lie. Yet our findings suggest fruitful paths toward creating a disincentive for politicians to distort the truth.     

Coattails and spillover-effects: Quasi-experimental evidence from concurrent executive and legislative elections

Concurrent elections are widely used to increase turnout. We theorize and show empirically how concurrency affects electoral outcomes. First, concurrency increases turnout and thereby the participation of peripheral voters. Second, in combined elections, one electoral arena affects the other. In our case of majoritarian executive elections concurrent to proportional representation (PR) legislative elections, the centripetal tendency of majoritarian elections colors off to the concurrent PR race. Third, concurrency also entails spillovers of the incumbency advantage of executive officeholders to the concurrent legislative race. Drawing on quasi-random variation in local election timing in Germany, we show that concurrency increases turnout as well as council votes for the incumbent mayor's party and centrist parties more generally, with slightly more pronounced gains for the political left. As a consequence, concurrent elections consolidate party systems and political power by leading to less fragmented municipal councils and more unified local governments.     

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.     

Market structure and disempowering regulatory intermediaries: Insights from U.S. trade surveillance

Public agencies outsource a wide variety of tasks to nonstate actors, or what can be referred to as regulatory intermediaries. In certain circumstances, these agencies may seek to disempower those regulatory intermediaries by reclaiming, duplicating, or transferring the outsourced task. When will these disempowerment attempts be successful? This article presents the Market Structure Hypothesis, which contends that the level of competition between regulatory intermediaries will, all things equal, determine whether disempowerment attempts succeed. To test this hypothesis, this article examines the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's attempts to acquire the independent capacity to conduct nationwide trade surveillance in the 1980s (Market Oversight Surveillance System) and 2010s (Consolidated Audit Trail). Evidence derives from archival materials, a Freedom of Information Act Request, and 60 interviews in Oxford, London, Toronto, New York City, and Washington, DC. The empirical results corroborate the hypothesis' expectations, contributing to our understanding of public-private partnerships and shedding new empirical light on an understudied topic of securities regulation.