Accountable or Untouchable? Electoral accountability in Romanian local elections

While retrospective models of voting posit that voters should “vote the rascals out”, a wave of recent research has found that this is rarely the case. We investigate this question in a context in which many sitting politicians have recently been indicted on corruption charges – the municipal level in Romania, a surprisingly under-researched case in this sub-field. Romania provides a good case for electoral accountability. Not only do Romanians deeply detest corruption, the party system also contains many parties that would make it easy for voters to switch from a corrupt to a cleaner alternative. We collected an original data register of electoral and socio-political data on roughly 3200 localities together with all cases of corruption charges published by the Romanian anti-corruption agency, the Direcţia Naţională Anticorupţie (DNA), accounting for magnitude and timing of the scandal as well as the judicial outcome for the indicted mayor. In all, we find that 81 sitting mayors elected in 2012 were charged with corruption prior to the 2016 election. We test the electoral impact of corruption on the incumbent mayors on four outcomes indicating electoral accountability commonly used in the literature – retirement, vote share compared to the previous election, voter turnout, and reelection using difference and difference and a pairwise matching designs, inter alia. The results show that Romanians do punish their corrupt incumbent mayors to a quite high extent compared to the clean mayors. However, due to the large vote margins, the punishment is not severe enough to make them lose more often than similar “clean‟ mayors, although they tend to not run for re-election at much higher rates. Turnout is unaffected by corruption at the municipal level. In line with previous results, we thus find a certain amount of electoral accountability, but not to the extent that the ‘rascals are thrown out’.     

The effects of lawn signs on vote outcomes: Results from four randomized field experiments

Although lawn signs rank among the most widely used campaign tactics, little scholarly attention has been paid to the question of whether they actually generate votes. Working in collaboration with a congressional candidate, a mayoral candidate, an independent expenditure campaign directed against a gubernatorial candidate, and a candidate for county commissioner, we tested the effects of lawn signs by planting them in randomly selected voting precincts. Electoral results pooled over all four studies suggest that signs increased advertising candidates’ vote shares. Results also provide some evidence that the effects of lawn signs spill over into adjacent untreated voting precincts.     

Religious voting and moral traditionalism: The moderating role of party characteristics

One of the most important theoretical explanations for why religion is associated with party choice is that religion affects citizens' moral values, which in turn affect party preference. In this article, I first estimate the empirical importance of this mechanism. On average, about ten percent of religious voting is mediated by moral traditionalism. Secondly, I argue that the importance of this mechanism varies depending on party characteristics. The effect is indirect through moral traditionalism to the extent that parties emphasize moral issues such as abortion or euthanasia. Under these conditions, group belonging may provide useful cues for voters. Combining data on 50 parties with survey data on more than 10,000 citizens from 13 West European countries, this article provides empirical evidence of this proposition in the case of the religious cleavage. The findings may be of relevance also for other social structural variables, such as class or gender.     

Party identification in the Czech Republic: inter-party hostility and party preference

This study introduces basic models of voting behavior and describes in greater detail the findings and starting points of the model of party identification. It recapitulates findings related to the voting behavior in the Czech Republic throughout the nineties, as well as the reasons leading to the application of the party identification model to the analyses of voting behavior. The influence of positive feelings toward the elected party and negative feelings toward the other parties are tested here. The study explores in particular the influence of inter-party hostility on the voting behavior, and tests it both separately and in combination with the subjective social class and subjective political orientation.     

Back for the future: a client centred analysis of social welfare and family law provision

The landscape of legal advice provision is entering a period of significant change in England and Wales. Whilst there is a great deal of uncertainty about how the future landscape of advice service provision will evolve, there are lessons to be drawn from past delivery models.

This article first looks back at the period following the Access to Justice Act 1999, setting out a range of delivery models initiated following the Act, as well as research and evaluation conducted in the millennium decade. Findings are then presented from a comprehensive qualitative study on how people experience and deal with social welfare and family problems, and on facilitators and barriers to integrated advice provision, including inter-organisational working. This is explored through the lens of a delivery model which emphasised partnership and the pooling of resources and specialisms to meet client needs: the Community Legal Advice Centre model.     

The Timing of Split-Ticket Voting Decisions in Mixed Systems: Evidence from South Korea

Abstract

Although two-vote mixed legislative systems have proliferated globally, the factors contributing to split-ticketing in these cases remains poorly understood. Using survey data regarding South Korea's 2008 National Assembly election, this article addresses two questions: Is ticket-splitting in two-vote legislative systems influenced by the timing of one's vote decision and are late deciders more or less rational in their decision to ticket-split than early deciders? Empirical analysis finds that split-ticket voting under various specifications is more likely to be carried out by late deciders. Among split-ticket voters, however, late deciders are more likely to irrationally split their vote.     

The heterogeneity of consumer sentiment in an increasingly homogenous global economy

Recent investigations concerning consumer confidence in the U.S. have shed light on both the economic and political forces that contribute to its dynamics. And yet, as the recent financial crisis makes clear, the world economy is an increasingly interdependent place. This paper explores whether, in fact, consumer confidence responds differently to economic events in different political and institutional contexts. Our preliminary findings indicate that consumer confidence has shared variance in four countries for which we have data, but also unique variance with origins in national politics.     

Economic voting theory: Testing new dimensions

Classical economic voting theory has received considerable empirical support. Voters reward the incumbent for good times, punish it for bad. But the success of this paradigm, which views the economy as strictly a valence issue, has crowded out testing of other theoretical dimensions. In particular, positional and patrimonial economic voting have hardly been examined. The former concerns the different preferences voters have on economic policy issues, such as progressive taxation. The latter concerns the place of voters in the economic structure itself, not merely as members of a social class but as actual property owners. Through analysis of a special battery of economic items, from a 2008 US presidential election survey, we demonstrate that the economy was important to voters in three ways: valence, position, and patrimony. Taken together, these dimensions go far as an explanation of vote choice, at least with respect to the short-term forces acting on this political behavior.     

Assessing (and fixing?) Election Day lines: Evidence from a survey of local election officials

Despite recent studies that find few people face significant wait times when attempting to vote in U.S. elections, the 2012 election produced numerous anecdotal and journalistic accounts claiming otherwise. This study relies on a national survey of local election officials to systematically ascertain their views about the challenges and successes they had in administering the 2012 general election. Consistent with surveys of voters, most officials report that wait times and lines were minimal. Furthermore, the relative amount of money available to a jurisdiction for election administration was unrelated to the occurrence of these problems, while the presence of more poll workers—especially first-timers—may actually exacerbate them.     

Improving access to voting with optimized matchings

Research on political representation has traditionally focused on the design of electoral systems. Yet there is evidence that voting costs result in lower turnout and undermine voters’ confidence in the electoral system. Election administrators can selectively manipulate participation costs for different individuals and groups, leading to biased electoral outcomes. Quantifying the costs of voting and designing fair, transparent and efficient rules for voter assignment to polling stations are important for theoretical and practical reasons. Using analytical models, we quantify the differential costs of participation faced by voters, which we measure in terms of distance to polling stations and wait times to cast a vote. To estimate the model parameters, we use real-world data on the 2013 midterm elections in Argentina. The assignment produced by our model cut average voting time by more than 27%, underscoring the inefficiencies of the current method of alphabetical assignment. Our strategy generates better estimates of the role of geographical and temporal conditions on electoral outcomes.