Advanced Industrial Democracies Research Articles

Who Believes in Fraud in the 2006 Mexican Presidential Election? Election Denialism, Partisan Motivated Reasoning, and Affective Polarization

Abstract Why do some voters believe that there is electoral fraud when this belief contradicts the best available evidence? While the literature on public opinion has explored misperceptions’ pervasiveness and the factors that contribute to them in advanced industrial democracies, the present study analyzes motivated reasoning among voters in a young democracy, Mexico. This study highlights the important role that partisanship plays in voters’ likelihood to believe the allegations of electoral fraud in the 2006 presidential election in Mexico, which continues polarizing both political elites and the electorate even today. To understand the mechanisms at work, this research finds that it is not voters lacking information but rather voters with high levels of affective polarization and conspiratorial thinking who are more likely to believe that there was electoral fraud. The study also includes a survey experiment that fact-checked the belief in the alleged electoral fraud. Consistent with motivated reasoning theory, MORENA partisans resisted efforts to reduce their misperception. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of the conditions that make some voters hold misperceptions in young democracies.

Introducing the comparative study of electoral systems in Tunisia: populist attitudes, political preferences, and voting behavior

ABSTRACT Although public opinion research has gained prominence in the Middle East and North Africa region since 2011, data on electoral behaviour and political attitudes are scarce and rarely have a comparative focus. This research note introduces a new post-election survey conducted after the 2019 Tunisian elections. The project contributes to the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) database. In its 26-year history no country other than Israel was ever part of the CSES from the Middle East and North Africa region. Tunisia is the first Arab country to be covered in the CSES. We introduce this new research resource, its methodology, and its themes. We also provide some preliminary results from the main topic of the CSES between 2016 and 2021: populist attitudes. Using a three-dimensional model, we find that people who score high on the populist attitudes measures do not necessarily have a higher preference for populist parties or candidates. Contrary to consistent results from advanced industrial democracies, we also find that people who endorse nativism are more likely to support left-wing parties. This research note illustrates the importance of such datasets and how they contribute to a specific topic: understanding populism across multiple contexts.

Policy mood and thermostatic representation in developing democracies: taking the temperature in Uruguay

ABSTRACT The dynamics of aggregate public opinion – particularly James Stimson’s measure of policy mood – have long been used to explain electoral outcomes and government responsiveness in the United States. However, we still know little about policy mood outside the US and a few Western European countries. Understanding the relationship between policy and preferences outside the pool of advanced democracies is crucial as voters outside that context are often depicted as outcome oriented; that is, they are depicted as voting based on valence issues, where there is shared agreement on the preferred outcome, instead of on a set of coherent policy preferences. We argue that this depiction of voters is attributable to the absence of data in these countries and not to the absence of coherent policy preferences. We test our argument by analyzing nearly three decades of Uruguayan public opinion data including 78 different questions administered 295 times. Our analysis shows that policy preferences across related issues in Uruguay largely move in tandem, suggesting that a coherent policy mood indeed exists. Further, we provide evidence that this policy mood is distinct from symbolic political ideology and that it responds thermostatically to changes in government. This thermostatic responsiveness suggests that Uruguayans do not merely focus on whether the economy is good or bad but, rather, update their policy preferences in response to the direction of government policy. Together, these results offer a much more nuanced depiction of public opinion outside advanced industrial democracies than previous research suggests, with important implications for democratic accountability in Latin America and other developing economies.

The psychological partisan effect of electoral systems: How ideology correlates with strategic voting

Districted proportional systems give an edge to right-wing parties that are more popular in rural areas where district magnitude is small and large parties are mechanically advantaged. In this paper, we explore the role played by voters in this bias by looking at how ideology correlates with strategic voting. We analyze survey data from 44 elections in Western Europe and find that left-wing voters are more likely to support a party that is not viable ( p < 0.01), but once in this position they seem less likely to desert this party for one that is viable ( p < 0.1). Further, we find that this pattern is likely driven by the intensity of partisan preferences as left-wing voters are on average more attached to their favorite party and thus more reluctant to desert it ( p < 0.01). Our study thus demonstrates that the psychological effect of districted proportional systems amplifies the mechanical one in advanced industrial democracies.

What is the geography of trust? The urban-rural trust gap in global perspective

What is the geography of political trust? Influential studies point to a growing urban-rural cleavage between low-trust authoritarian populists in rural areas and higher-trust liberal pluralists in densely populated urban areas. We use data from the World Values Survey and European Values Survey, covering nearly 100 countries, to test whether development has a moderating effect on the urban-rural divide in political trust. Our results reveal that at high levels of development, there are similar levels of trust in government between people living in urban and rural areas, while at low levels of development we find higher levels of trust for rural populations compared to those residing in urban areas. These findings add an important caveat to the standard account of the ‘geography of discontent’ in advanced industrial democracies, while suggesting the need for further investigation of the trust gap in the developing world and its implications. How trust is spatially distributed matters for how polities are governed, and is consequential for electoral behaviour, trends and outcomes.

Perceptions of Intergenerational Inequality in Policymaking and Possible Responses: The Case of Australia

Evidence suggests that, on average, younger citizens in advanced industrial democracies tend to have different policy preferences to those aged 65 and over. Population ageing and relatively lower levels of electoral participation among young people amplify the political voice of older citizens and contribute to policymakers being more responsive to their preferences. This paper presents qualitative evidence on whether young adults and older Australians recognise a need to increase young people’s influence on policymaking in the context of intergenerational inequality. The paper considers possible responses to this need, such as voting age reform. Results indicate that there is reasonable support, including from the older participants, to enhance young people’s political voice and influence over policymaking. Growing awareness of intergenerational inequality in ageing democracies may make public opinion more favourable towards voting age reform and other measures to increase the political voice of young people.

A new cross-country index measuring the heterogenous effects of informal institutions

ABSTRACT Studies have identified two fundamentally different types of informal institutions: public and private informal institutions. Empirically, most studies have focused on public informal institutions such as social trust, since indexes measuring private informal institutions such as closed trust have been rare. This research introduces a new index of private informal institutions that captures whether private informal institutions hinder or enhance development by complementing, accommodating, competing, or substituting formal institutions. To this end, we introduce an empirical strategy to measure the four types of private informal institutions for more than 120 countries for the years 1990–2010 in a five-year interval. The extracted index reveals that advanced industrial democracies have complementing and accommodating private informal institutions, whereas post-communist and resource-rich countries have substituting private informal institutions, and countries with some experience of democratization and development display competing private informal institutions. The index also shows that private informal institutions can change rapidly, which can expedite and enhance institutional quality for some countries but deteriorate it for others.

Voluntary Sector Participation and Support for Redistribution: Evidence From 18 Advanced Industrial Democracies (1990–2013)

The governments of the advanced industrial democracies have long provided public policies that redistribute income, and public support for such redistribution has varied across countries and over time. “Who is likely to support these egalitarian policies?” is a perennial question. This article investigates individuals’ participation in voluntary sector organizations (VSO) to understand the relationship between VSO participation and support for public policies aimed at reducing inequalities. We use five waves of the World Values Survey across 18 advanced industrial democracies to examine this relationship. Our findings suggest that, in aggregate, the impact of VSO participation negatively influences support for redistribution. This pattern of support changes significantly, however, when we consider the type of VSO, suggesting that VSO participation is not homogeneous. Individuals’ support for redistribution is conditioned by where their VSO participation happens.

Anke Hassel, Bruno Palier (ur.): Growth and Welfare in Advanced Capitalist Economies − How Have Growth Regimes Evolved?

This extensive book is the result of longer ones research that began in 2014 and considers the main economic challenges facing advanced industrial democracies faced since the early 1990s and government responses on them. There are three clearly defined goals of the book: First, expand our understanding of how political economy has changed since the 1970s; second, to analyze the contribution of governments to these changes, looking at their growth strategies and third, to shed light on and analyze the role of reforms social policy systems in these transformations. In short, this book also shows gives a general understanding of the evolution of the regime growth in the advanced capitalist OECD countries.

Public Sector Employment, Quality of Government, and Well-Being: A Global Analysis

While a growing literature within the study of subjective well-being demonstrates the impact of socio-political factors on subjective well-being, scholars have conspicuously failed to consider the role of the size and scope of government as determinants of well-being. Where such studies exist, the focus is largely on the advanced industrial democracies of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development. In this study, we examine the size of the public sector as a determinant of cross-national variation in life satisfaction across a worldwide sample. Our findings strongly suggest that as the public sector grows, subjective well-being increases as well, conditional on the extent of quality of government. Using cross-sectional data on 84 countries, we show this relationship has an independent and separable impact from other economic and political factors.

Metamorphic Moment of the Indian Polity: Anatomizing the Evolution and Changing Dynamics of the Indian State against the Protean Nature of Cooperative Federalism

The elusive and paradoxical nature of Indian polity has been evident in the amalgamation of Western patterns of bureaucratic organization, participatory politics with indigenous practices and institutional framework that had an organic growth on the Indian soil. While post-colonial India was characterized by the incorporation of democratic political ethos and structural architecture, Westminster model of parliamentary government and representative legal institutions, it did not imply the exact replication of the British architectonic system of advanced industrial democracy. As the Indian political process is subjected to dramatic transmutations and cyclical changes, it has eventually acquired a mass character and vibrancy with the exuberant participation of marginalized and underprivileged political formations and social groups in the political arena, coupled with the regionalization of the polity, altering the terms of political domination and sowing the seeds of an increasingly complex mechanism of negotiation, competitive bargaining, alliance and coalition-building, in a cooperative federalist arrangement. The principle objective of this paper is to put an emphasis on the role of the Indian state, the transformation of Indian federalism and the political process, while holistically encapsulating the development and multidimensional patterns associated with the Indian political system, tracing the departure from the heyday of the Congress system and Nehruvian civic nationalism to the crystallization of a majoritarian edifice, propelled by Hindu Nationalism.

Voting for Populism in Europe: Globalization, Technological Change, and the Extreme Right

What are the political consequences of economic globalization? Since the 1990s, scholars of European party politics have noted the rise of extremist parties, especially right-wing populist ones, and the decline of mainstream left and right parties. This paper focuses on the association between globalization in terms of trade, capital and labor flows, technological change, and popular support for extreme right parties. I examine these relations at the regional and individual level in 15 advanced industrial democracies in Western Europe from 1990 to 2018. Globalization, especially in the form of trade, is associated with growing vote shares for extreme right parties. Technological change in the form of automation increases support for extreme right parties. The financial crisis enhanced support for populist right parties and strengthened the negative relationship between trade shocks and declining support for mainstream left parties. And the use of social welfare compensation seems unable to dampen these political trends.1

Dynasties and Democracy: The Inherited Incumbency Advantage in Japan by Daniel M. Smith

Reviewed by: Dynasties and Democracy: The Inherited Incumbency Advantage in Japan by Daniel M. Smith Arthur Stockwin (bio) Dynasties and Democracy: The Inherited Incumbency Advantage in Japan. By Daniel M. Smith. Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 2018. xviii, 359 pages. $65.00, cloth; $30.00, paper. In one particular aspect of its political system, Japan is an international outlier. The Japanese since 1945 have elected to their House of Representatives a higher proportion of members belonging to political "dynasties" than any other comparable democracy or semidemocracy. The nearest comparator is the Republic of Ireland, where political "families" are a widely recognized feature of the political landscape. Daniel Smith, in one of the most fully researched studies of Japanese politics to appear in recent years, combines close scrutiny of such Japanese "dynasties" with international comparison. His theory combines rational choice with historical institutionalism, and his methodology involves complex statistical analysis. Having many parliamentary representatives related to others from the same biological family has implications for democracy. This may be especially serious where a member of Parliament (MP) "inherits" a parliamentary seat, in other words where a close relative of the existing holder [End Page 145] (typically son or son-in-law in Japan's male-dominated society) is elected in his place for the same electoral district. Smith opens chapter 7 with a telling quotation from Tom Paine, who in 1776 declared that since hereditary succession in politics "opens a door to the foolish, the wicked and the improper, it hath in it the nature of oppression. … and when [hereditary politicians] succeed to the government [they] are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions" (p. 239). As a rational political scientist, Smith does not engage in such polemics, but he is concerned with the normative implications of hereditary succession in politics. His prime task, however, is to unearth the nature and causality of this phenomenon in Japanese politics. He uses the Japanese House of Representatives Elections Dataset (JHRED) and, for international comparison, the Dynasties in Democracies Dataset, which covers 12 advanced industrial democracies. Even though his research covers Japanese parties in general, he concentrates on the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has been politically dominant since 1955 and where dynasties have been most prominent. Following historical institutionalism, Smith examines Japanese episodes of institutional reform, especially the electoral reform to the House of Representatives that occurred in 1994. This reform replaced a system originating in the mid-1920s, but which operated in its mature form between 1947 and 1994, when it was referred to as "SNTV in MMDs" (single nontransferable vote in multimember districts). Nearly all electoral districts elected three, four, or five members of the Lower House. This meant that for the LDP, different candidates for the same district competed with each other as much as they did with candidates of other parties. Smith rightly argues that under that system, conservative electors were voting for a candidate rather than for the LDP as a party. This in turn privileged name recognition, giving the son of a previous candidate a distinct advantage over his rivals. The heyday of political dynasties came in the years leading up to 1994. Under the post-1994 system multimember districts were replaced by single-member districts plus a minority of seats decided by proportional representation (PR). However, the seats elected through PR provided a second chance for LDP candidates defeated in single-member first-past-the-post (FPTP) districts. In much-diluted form, this recreated competition between fellow LDP candidates in the same geographic area. The reform decreased the number of dynasties, but many of them still survived. Smith is inclined to explain this by path dependency, reinforced by the weakly counterbalancing element of the parallel PR districts. Moreover, leading politicians such as Koizumi Junichirō, Abe Shinzō, Fukuda Yasuo, and Asō Tarō were all members of family dynasties. He accepts that not only do dynasties remain, but that they are particularly numerous in the cabinet, where dynasty members in recent cabinets have touched 60 per cent. He admits on [End Page 146] page 215 that "keeping track of dynastic politics at the top levels of power is enough to make one's head...

The Myth of Global Populism

The “rise of global populism” has become a primary metanarrative for the previous decade in advanced industrial democracies, but I argue that it is a deeply misleading one. Nativism—not populism—is the defining feature of both radical right parties in Western Europe and of radical right politicians like Donald Trump in the United States. The tide of “left-wing populism” in Europe receded quickly, as did its promise of returning power to the people through online voting and policy deliberation. The erosion of democracy in states like Hungary has not been the result of populism, but rather of the deliberate practice of competitive authoritarianism. Calling these disparate phenomena “populist” obscures their core features and mistakenly attaches normatively redeeming qualities to nativists and authoritarians.

Electoral accountability, clarity of responsibility and labor market policy

Abstract Does the exercise of accountability in elections have palpable policy effects? Building on recent advances in the economic voting literature, we show that electoral accountability leaves an imprint on labor market policy when left-wing governments are in office. When responsibility for the economy is clear and elections offer an opportunity to claim credit for economic expansion, labor protections and benefits become more generous. However, when clarity of responsibility is low and incumbents can expect to veer electoral responsibility, left-wing governments are more likely to retrench labor market policy. These results hold for policies benefiting both labor market insiders and outsiders. Consistent with evidence that the labor market is the purview of the left, electoral accountability does not condition labor market policy under right-wing governments. We discuss the implications of these results in the context of growing party system fragmentation and weaker accountability across advanced industrial democracies.

Innovation through iteration: Policy feedback loops in China’s economic reform

• Policy feedback loops enabled China to successfully implement early market reforms in the state-owned economy. • Feedback loops linking organizations with the state ultimately reinforce or alter existing policies. • Iterative, overlapping processes of experimentation and implementation can facilitate adaptive policy-making. • Policy feedback exists beyond advanced industrial democracies in transitional, non-democratic states. How did China overcome information problems and institutional gaps to successfully implement early market reforms in its state-owned economy? When the Chinese government initiated economic reform in 1978, it needed to stimulate information sharing across hierarchical bureaucracies and incentivize adaptation to varying market and local conditions. Neither state design nor grassroots efforts alone could overcome these gaps. Instead, policy feedback loops—driven by flows of people, information, and ideas linking enterprises with the state—facilitated dual bureaucratic and economic transformation. Process tracing using qualitative and quantitative data reveal how policy feedback loops functioned for three reforms with varying degrees of success: contract responsibility system reform, cost control system reform, and procurement management system reform. This analysis extends the concept of policy feedback beyond advanced industrial democracies, suggests that overlap between policy experimentation and implementation can facilitate adaptive policy-making, and illuminates the centralization and exercise of state authority in China’s economic reform.

Variegated Anti-Austerity: Exploring the Demise and Rise of Class Struggle during the Crisis of Neoliberalism

This article maps important trends that mark a new stage in neoliberal capitalism since 2008, with a focus on class struggle and resistance in the advanced industrial democracies. New forms of collective action have arisen in response to austerity which has been imposed, in different forms, across most of the advanced industrial democracies, in a context in which established solidaristic institutions – trade unions, social democratic parties, welfare states – have already been eroded as a result of the preceding twenty five years of neoliberal reform. The article presents an overview of these trends, highlighting austerity policies and anti-austerity responses. The article accounts for the rise of new forms of resistance and collective action as they have emerged differently in different national contexts, focusing on developments in the UK, US, Spain, Japan and Germany.

Teaching the Military and Revolutions: Simulating Civil–Military Relations during Mass Uprisings

ABSTRACTDuring revolutions, strategic interactions among civilian policy makers, armed forces, and opposition groups shape political outcomes—most important, whether a regime stands or falls. Students from advanced industrial democracies frequently find these dynamics counterintuitive, even after completing readings and engaging in traditional instruction methods. We therefore sought to improve pedagogical outcomes by designing a simulation based on scenarios similar to those witnessed during the Arab Spring and Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution. We divided students into four teams representing the regime, the armed forces, and two distinct groups of anti-regime dissidents. Rules were designed to incorporate the best recent scholarship on each category of actors’ behavior, such as the probability of military units defecting to protesters and the ability of riot police to repress urban uprisings. By forcing student teams to make decisions under time pressure, we obliged them to wrestle with the uncertainties and fears of betrayal inherent in complex civil–military emergencies.

How Japan Stumbled into a Pandemic Miracle

While a number of nations have used high-tech surveillance, mass testing, contact tracing, and draconian stay-at-home laws to manage the ongoing pandemic, Japan’s official response has been less energetic. The country also faces tremendous challenges with an aging population, high population density, and broad use of public transportation systems. Yet it has managed to achieve strong COVID-19 outcomes, with far lower death rates than many other advanced industrial democracies. This article traces Japan's weak response and potential explanations for its pandemic miracle, focusing especially on the role of social ties and silver linings that have emerged during the pandemic.

Poverty and Social Rights Among the Working Age Population in Post-Industrial Democracies

AbstractThis article explores the determinants of relative market income poverty and poverty reduction among the working age population in 22 advanced industrial democracies. The article revisits Moller et al. (2003) but goes beyond the earlier study in four major ways. First, we are able to measure welfare state effort with social rights rather than expenditure. This allows us to separate the effect of policy from need, which jointly shape expenditure. Second, we bring the analysis up to date, covering some 10–15 more years, which allows us to compare our findings to those of the earlier study and to compare the periods before and after 2000. Specifically, we discuss the declining effectiveness of the welfare state in reducing poverty and the declining importance of partisan incumbency. Third, we pool data from three sources, the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and Eurostat Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (SILC), to almost triple the number of observations for analysis compared to past analyses. Fourth, we use newer estimation techniques that deal better with serial correlation. We show that the primary determinants of market income poverty are volume of work as a result of economic and demographic factors, as well as remuneration of work at the bottom of the income distribution driven by labor market institutions. We then show that the main determinants of poverty reduction are social rights; controlling for social rights, need variables are important for explaining poverty reduction as well.