Elections as instruments for punishing bad representatives and selecting good ones

Many theories of democracy point out that voters make their choices based on two goals: the retrospective assessment of incumbents and the prospective choice between incumbents and challengers. Do voters react to malfeasance on the part of their elected representatives? If they abandon corrupt incumbents, are they able to select more virtuous replacements? In this paper, we assess the effects of corruption on voter loyalty and, conversely, of voter defection on subsequent malfeasance. We examine these relationships with data drawn from 169 elections across 72 countries. Our results show that malfeasance does indeed provoke voter defection, but that electoral volatility is not followed by lower levels of perceived corruption. We conclude by discussing the appropriate interpretation of our results, the future research they suggest, and their meaning for related, emerging literatures.     

Institutions,governmental performance and the rise of political newcomers

This article analyses the institutional and contextual factors that facilitate the election of political newcomers as heads of government in democratic regimes. Using data from 870 democratic elections between 1945 and 2015, it is found that political newcomers are more likely to be successful in presidential systems, in new democracies and when party systems are weakly institutionalised. The election of politically inexperienced candidates is also related to governmental performance. Political newcomers are more successful when the economic performance of the government is bad and when the government engages in high‐level corruption.     

“伊斯兰国”对中亚地区的安全威胁:迷思还是现实?

对于"伊斯兰国"是否会对中亚地区安全构成威胁以及这种威胁的程度如何,国内外学术界的看法存在诸多分歧。"伊斯兰国"通过招募中亚地区的人员和对各国的边界进行袭扰,并通过意识形态宣传扩大其价值观在中亚地区的影响力等方式,的确对该地区安全形势带来了一定的冲击。不过,"伊斯兰国"对中亚安全形势的影响是有限的。这主要是因为,"伊斯兰国"在国际反恐联盟的打击下,地面作战部队被限制在叙利亚一伊拉克境内,无法在中亚地区开展直接的攻击。此外,由于中亚伊斯兰特殊的发展经历,使"伊斯兰国"的意识形态在当地缺乏群众基础。这些因素,决定了"伊斯兰国"对中亚安全的影响主要体现在促进该地区部分极端势力思想的进一步激进化或激励部分恐怖分子发起"独狼式"恐怖活动等。随着"伊斯兰国"的战场失利,部分"圣战"分子回流中亚,需要对"伊斯兰国"与中亚安全之间的关联性予以更多关注,并尽早研究对策。     

Modeling unemployment volatility in America,Europe and Asia

Many government policies are being implemented to stabilize the economy. One of the policies necessary to achieve stabilization is full employment. However, the growth rate of unemployment in many countries is evident and seems more volatile in recent years. To counterattack the unemployment problem, the volatility of the growth rate of unemployment has to be known in order to launch appropriate policies correctly. Therefore, conditional volatility models are employed to estimate the volatility with symmetric and asymmetric effects. The monthly data on unemployment is downloaded to calculate the rate of change. The consistency and asymptotic normality of the QMLE are guaranteed by the moment conditions. The GARCH model shows that a shock to the growth rate of unemployment in most cases has long-run persistence, but relatively less for short-run persistence. The G JR model reports the asymmetric effects in 10 of 25 countries. The EGARCH model illustrates asymmetric effects in 12 of 25 countries, while 3 of them show leverage. VaR forecasts and counts of number of violations suggest that the univariate conditional models are practicable in most countries, and the G JR model seems to be preferable in cases with a large difference in the number of violations.     

Economic shocks and democratic consolidation: Historical evidence from party-level electoral volatility in France

The emergence of a stable party system is a central aspect of democratic consolidation. Building a novel historical dataset, we analyze how economic growth affected the party-level electoral volatility during the consolidation of the French democracy over the Third Republic (1870-1940). We document an asymmetric effect in that positive economic shocks produced electoral stability, while negative shocks had not the expected destabilizing effect. Moreover, a positive shock had a disproportionally stabilizing effect during economic prosperity, four times stronger than during an average economic conjuncture. As France experienced strong positive shocks over this period, our results imply that the party system consolidation may have been driven by a few exceptionally high growth episodes. We also find evidence suggesting that positive shocks developed voters’ support for institutionally stable parties.     

The more the better? Cumulative issue ownership and intra-campaign party switching

We contribute to the literature on short term changes in voters' party preferences (or intra-campaign party switching), by advancing a factor that has been neglected so far: Voters' perceptions about parties' issue competence. We develop a model of party switching that includes both classic predictors and issue ownership considerations. Moreover, in contrast to the usual single issue ownership conception focusing on the party deemed most competent to solve the most important problem, we argue that voters base their party choice on their perceptions of parties' competence on a variety of issues, i.e. on cumulative issue ownership. We test our model on panel data from the 2015 Swiss election study. The change in competence perceptions appears as a strong predictor of party switching: The higher the increase in the number of issues on which voters see a party as most competent during the campaign, the higher their likelihood to switch to that party.     

The Impact of Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect Program on the Volatility and Liquidity of the Stock Market

Based on the interaction between the trading mechanism and heterogeneous investors' behavior, using Shanghai stocks data, this paper studies the impact of the Shanghai-Hong Kong stock connect program on the volatility and liquidity of the stock market. The result shows that investors with long-term value investment philosophy carry international market risk to the A-share market, which causes excessive panic among medium and small investors. In the absence of derivatives for effectively avoiding risks, price volatility increases. With the increase of the investment risks, the costs of domestic institutional investors'frequent trading out of excessive speculation increase and the investors who are attracted by the international mature capital markets escape from the mainland. The medium and small investors are gradually becoming more prudent, which leads to the decrease of market liquidity.     

报复社会型个人极端暴力案件研究

报复社会型个人极端暴力犯罪是由单个行为人策划、筹备、实施,以报复社会制造公众恐慌为目的,企图伤害不特定多数人,在同一时空区域内突发,手段特别残忍,后果特别严重的暴力犯罪。通过对近期国内此类案件的整理与分析发现,犯罪人核心表现为仇恨情绪,情绪的背后是未被满足的缺失需要,由于扭曲的认知使得犯罪人提出了不正常的诉求,最终导致需要不能被满足,结果不断强化仇恨情绪,最终导致犯案。本研究根据犯罪人的作案特点提出对重点人员、时空的防控策略。     

Questioning generational replacement. An age,period and cohort analysis of electoral volatility in the Netherlands, 1971–2010

Political behavior has been changing all over Western Europe and electoral volatility is one of the facets of politics in which this change is apparent. Theories on stabilization of political attitudes and behavior in lifetime and the slow rate at which change in the electoral arena is found to proceed, have led to the assumption of generational replacement as the mechanism driving change. The Netherlands, however, provide a remarkably different case of this trend in electoral volatility. The country has shifted from an example of how cleavages stabilize politics to one of the most electorally volatile countries in Europe. The Dutch surge in electoral volatility thus contrasts with expectations of a slow process driven by generational replacement. Starting from this apparent contradiction between the evolution of volatility in the Netherlands and theories on generational replacement, this article investigates time effects of electoral volatility. The study is based on an age, period and cohort analysis on the repeated cross-sectional data of the Dutch Parliamentary Election Studies, 1971–2010. Based on characteristics of such repeated cross-sectional data, individuals are cross-classified in birth cohorts and election years respectively, which overcomes the identification problem inherent in cohort analyses. Results of a Cross-Classified Random Effects Model (CCREM) indicate that, contrary to the hypothesis of new generations causing the increase in volatility, the Dutch change can be attributed primarily to period effects. As such, the analyses indicate that a general shift in the Dutch electorate has caused the growth in volatility and that supply-side factors should probably be analyzed when trying to explain electoral volatility.     

Electoral Risk and Redistributive Politics in Mexico and the United States

What strategy does a rational party follow in allocating discretionary expenditure? This article conceives redistributive politics as an investment strategy where expenditure allocations respond to electoral risk. To show the effects of risk, it provides evidence from Pronasol in Mexico and an analysis of New Deal spending in the United States. The analysis finds that the federal administrations in both countries responded to systematic electoral risk. Spending diversification into risky voters was a rational response to chances of losing elections. The analysis hence connects electoral volatility with redistributive spending.