Electoral Regimes Research Articles

Modeling Electoral Coordination: Voters, Parties and Legislative Lists in Uruguay

During each electoral period, the strategic interaction between voters and political elites determines the number of viable candidates in a district. In this paper, we implement a hierarchical seemingly unrelated regression model to explain electoral coordination at the district level in Uruguay as a function of district magnitude, previous electoral outcomes and electoral regime. Elections in this country are particularly useful to test for institutional effects on the coordination process due to the large variations in district magnitude, to the simultaneity of presidential and legislative races held under different rules, and to the reforms implemented during the period under consideration. We find that district magnitude and electoral history heuristics have substantial effects on the number of competing and voted-for parties and lists. Our modeling approach uncovers important interaction-effects between the demand and supply side of the political market that were often overlooked in previous research.

Politically Allocated Land Rights and the Geography of Electoral Violence

Large literatures in political theory and political economy argue that private property regimes help support liberal electoral regimes by constraining majoritarian politics, lowering the stakes of elections, and protecting “fundamental” or minority rights. This article probes implications of this argument for elections in sub-Saharan Africa, a mostly rural continent where only about 2% to 10% of all rural property (by country) is held under private title. Do Africa’s rural property regimes shape electoral dynamics and, if so, which ones, and how? This article examines the case of Kenya, focusing on 1991-1992 electoral dynamics in rural zones in which the state itself has exercised direct prerogative over land allocation. We show that in these zones, politicians manipulated land rights to mobilize supporters and punish opponents. They did so in ways that contributed directly to widespread land-related violence at election time. References to other African cases help generalize and set scope conditions on the argument.

Electoral regimes and party-switching

This article presents an inquiry into the causes of party-switching under two different electoral regimes. It exploits a natural experiment in South Africa, where a large number of local legislatures are elected using the same mixed system, to examine how the party-switching behaviours of legislators elected under proportional representation (PR) rules may differ systematically from those of legislators elected from single-member districts. It confirms the findings of other single-legislature studies in concluding that PR legislators are more likely, ceteris paribus, to defect. It highlights several characteristics of legislative bodies and legislative districts that influence defection rates for legislators in South Africa. In so doing, it uncovers evidence that, despite the young age of South Africa’s post-1994 party system, the unexpectedly large volume of party-switching that occurred there was neither a simple party realignment nor an opportunistic scramble, but rather a highly organized, structured and strategic market for parties.

Tax Assignment: Does the Practice Match the Theory?

This paper builds on the existing literature to better explain the tax assignment choices made by countries in different economic circumstances. In particular, we explain why the degree of tax autonomy given to subnational governments is significantly greater in industrial than in developing countries, even when adjustment is made for differences in income level. We consider several arguments for this disparity. First, electoral regimes are not in place for the accountability gains to be fully captured. Second, tax decentralization may result in unacceptable fiscal disparities, and, third, tax administration costs are higher for subnational governments and there is not enough incentive to take steps to lower them. Finally, and contrary to expectations, we do not find empirical evidence that giving more discretionary powers to subnational governments in developing countries will lead to a crowding out of central revenues, but we do find this result for industrial countries.

From local to national: Explaining the formation of the Australian Green Party

The rise of green parties in Australia follows a path that is well documented in the literature; the inability of other parties to accommodate environmental concerns, the increasing salience of green issues for governments and an electoral regime that permits party insurgency. This article examines how these factors have operated in Australia, and the extent to which a distinctive federal structure and federal electoral regulation of parties served to modify the emergence of a national green party.

Subnational electoral regimes and crisis recovery in Argentina and Mexico

The confluence of Latin America's volatile economic development patterns and transition to democracy has given rise to a proliferation of work on the national-level political causes and consequences of economic shocks and recovery rates. We explore the subnational electoral determinants of crisis recovery through analysis of growth rates in Mexico's thirty-one states and Argentina's twenty-three provinces following their economic declines of 2000–2002. Consistent with a theory that views intra-national variations in democracy as critical to understanding broader development patterns, we find that subnational electoral “regimes” significantly affect provincial recovery rates. Provinces that have an established electoral legitimacy prior to the onset of an economic shock, and those in which the governor enjoyed a substantial margin of victory, had significantly stronger recovery rates than those provinces stuck in a subnational regime transition with a sitting executive who lacked any claim to an electoral mandate.

The Stakes of Losing Office, Term Limits and Democracy

Some presidents facing term limits attempt – often successfully – to scrap tenure restrictions, while others step down when constitutionally required. Whether democratic, partly democratic or non-democratic, there is considerable variation among electoral regimes as to whether presidents respect term limits. This article focuses on what is at stake for a president required to leave the highest political office. It argues that for a given level of executive constraints, the value of holding political office in polities with large public sectors and prevalent corruption, combined with the probability of retaining assets and immunity after leaving office, influences whether presidents attempt to overstay their tenure.

Malaysia's Electoral System: Government of the People?

This article seeks to examine the constitutional and legal aspects of Malaysia's election laws (within its first-past-the-post electoral system) seen within the broader socio-political context of Malaysia's plural society and ethnic-based political representation to evaluate if they conform to democratic principles and equitable standards. In particular, this article seeks to: (i) explore how the growth of the dominant political elite has had direct implications for the development of Malaysia's electoral regime and arrangements for the holding of democratic elections; (ii) survey the implementation and enforcement of the election laws, including the Elections Act, Election Offences Act, Election Commission Act, Election Petition Rules and Elections (Conduct of Elections) Regulations; (iii) examine the need of immunity for the Election Commission; (iv) examine the role of the judiciary; and (v) highlight the areas for urgent electoral reforms to restore public confidence in the electoral system and ensure the legitimacy of the political system.

Malaysia's Electoral System: Government of the People?

AbstractThis article seeks to examine the constitutional and legal aspects of Malaysia's election laws (within its first-past-the-post electoral system) seen within the broader socio-political context of Malaysia's plural society and ethnic-based political representation to evaluate if they conform to democratic principles and equitable standards. In particular, this article seeks to: (i) explore how the growth of the dominant political elite has had direct implications for the development of Malaysia's electoral regime and arrangements for the holding of democratic elections; (ii) survey the implementation and enforcement of the election laws, including the Elections Act, Election Offences Act, Election Commission Act, Election Petition Rules and Elections (Conduct of Elections) Regulations; (iii) examine the need of immunity for the Election Commission; (iv) examine the role of the judiciary; and (v) highlight the areas for urgent electoral reforms to restore public confidence in the electoral system and ensure the legitimacy of the political system.

The Effective Number of Parties

The Laakso—Taagepera index of the effective number of parties, while satisfying most of the requirements of this aggregate quantity, tends to produce unrealistically high scores for party constellations in which the shares of the largest parties exceed 50 percent, and can produce misleading results in several other situations. After reviewing the structural properties of the Laakso—Taagepera index and supplements or alternatives to it proposed in the literature, this article proposes a new index that eliminates several problems inherent in the mathematical form of indices using the Herfindahl—Hirschman measure of concentration as computational core. The proposed index is tested on a set of party constellations from recent elections in new democracies and non-democratic electoral regimes. The results confirm that the new index works better than earlier proposed alternatives in measuring the effective number of components in highly fragmented and highly concentrated party systems.

Electoral Laws and Turnout: 1972-2008

In this paper we examine the impact of electoral laws on overall turnout, and class bias in the electorate. Using turnout in each state in each year we use cross sectional time series analysis to estimate the impact of electoral reforms on turnout, with particular attention to the discriminatory impact of legal changes on persons at different segments of the income distribution. This gives us much more powerful estimates of these effects than were previously available. We do not suffer from the problems of cross-sectional analyses which rely on the assumption that the choice of electoral regime is independent of the likelihood of voting. And by using all presidential elections from 1972 thru 2008 we have much more statistical power than has been provided by previous analyses simply looking at difference of means tests across two elections. We consider the impact of: the number of days prior to election day that registration closes; the availability of election day registration; the availability of no-excuse early voting, and the availability of no-fault absentee voting. We show the net effects of these reforms on the probability of individuals voting, and we calculate the effect on at-risk votes and show that more poorly educated voters are not necessarily those more likely to take advantage of electoral reforms.

The Philippines: predatory regime, growing authoritarian features

Over the past decade, and especially over the past few years, political corruption, fraud and violence in the Philippines have reached such alarming levels that many Filipinos have grown despondent, even cynical, about their country's political system. Exploring the suitability of the concepts of ‘predatory state’ and ‘patrimonial oligarchic state’ to the Philippines, I find that the regime rather than the state is the more appropriate unit of analysis. I argue that the predatory regime, controlled by a rapacious elite, that held sway during the years of the dictator Marcos, has made a comeback in the Philippines. Under the governments of President Joseph Estrada and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, traditional clientelism has given way to pervasive corruption, a systematic plunder of government resources and the rapid corrosion of public institutions into tools for predation. Instead of just being a throwback to the ‘old corruption’ of the Marcos era, however, the current predatory regime represents a ‘new corruption’ adapted to the ways of economic and political liberalization. While not as authoritarian as Marcos' regime, it has growing authoritarian tendencies: centralization of power in the executive; heightened repression; rigged elections; a much weakened rule of law; numerous political appointees in the bureaucracy; and increased influence of the military. A shift to naked authoritarianism, however, cannot be ruled out. As forces for democratic reform are much too weak, the predatory regime may be around for some time or it could give way, at best, to a more traditional clientelist electoral regime. Prospects for democratic consolidation in the Philippines in the near future appear bleak.

The Competitive Road to Proportional Representation

One of the most noteworthy political regularities in the early twentieth century was the shift away from majoritarian electoral rules in Western Europe. The conventional wisdom suggests that proportional representation (PR) was introduced by elites who believed that under the existing majoritarian rules (simple plurality, block-vote, two-ballot rules) they would soon lose power to rapidly growing socialist parties. But this does not explain why many electoral reforms were carried out in countries with weak or nonexistent socialist parties. The author shows that increasing the number of parties distorts the seat-vote properties of electoral rules to a larger degree than previously anticipated. Under increasing party competition, electoral regimes display larger partisan biases than those observed in two-party races and crowd out minority parties that have territorially dispersed constituencies in favor of minority parties that have territorially concentrated constituencies. Using a dynamic Bayesian model for seats and votes, the author measures the partisan biases brought about by the expansion of voting rights in the late nineteenth century to explain the drive to reform majoritarian electoral systems.

Location equilibrium with endogenous rent seeking

This thesis consists of three essays in the fields of the political economy of international trade.Location Equilibrium with Endogenous Rent Seeking:This paper analyzes the location of manufacturing activities when regional policy is determined by endogenous rent seeking. Once lobbying for government transfers to regions is included in an economic geography framework with size asymmetries, the standard prediction that the larger region becomes the core when trade barriers are reduced no longer holds. The establishment of manufacturing production in the economically smaller region is increasing in the level of regional integration once trade becomes freer than a certain threshold value. When free trade prevails, the relocation of industry takes place up to the point where there are as many firms operating in the South as in the North. Furthermore, lobbying slows down the agglomeration process, whereas the home market magnification effect (Baldwin, 2000) becomes weaker.Endogenous Tariff Formation and the Political Economy of Trade Retaliation:This paper extends the notion of endogenous tariff formation under representative democracy by allowing for strategic interaction between governments. The model developed suggests that the ideological distribution in the electorate within a country affects the tariff setting behavior among its trading partners. The equilibrium tariffs in a country depend on the trade policy preferences of the ideologically neutral voters among such partners as well as on the distribution of their sector-specific factor ownership. Ideological shifts in the population which systematically alter the political power of different voter groups, or types of factor owners, in one country thus influence the tariff setting behavior in competing trading nations.On the Indeterminacy of Trade Policy under Different Electoral Rules:Current research has found ambiguous results with respect to the effects of the type of electoral regime on trade policy. The present paper proposes a solution to this indeterminacy. It is shown that the equilibrium level of trade protection can be relatively higher, as well as lower, under a majoritarian electoral rule compared to proportional representation. The framework developed in this paper thus includes as special cases earlier models reported in the literature. The equilibrium outcome is shown to depend on the number of voters in swing districts who own a factor specific to the exporting industry in relation to those who possess claims to the specific input employed by the import-competing sector. Using a cross section of countries, empirical evidence is consistent with this hypothesis.

Exchange Rate Regime, Central Bank Independence, and Political Business Cycles in Brazil

This article examines policy consequences of electoral cycles and exchange rate regime choices in Brazil. The literature on opportunistic political business cycles maintains that governments adopt expansionary economic policies before elections to mobilize voters’ support. However, research findings in Latin America based on the theory has been inconclusive. I argue that the lack of conclusive evidence in Latin America stems from measurement errors common in the use of cross-national aggregate data. Using Brazil’s monthly data from 1985 to 2006, this article shows that there are electorally induced fiscal cycles under fixed and crawling peg exchange rate regimes and electorally induced monetary cycles under floating exchange rates only when the nation’s central bank is not independent. Indeed, accounting for Brazil’s unique economic contingencies and longitudinal variations in the de facto central bank independence, its public policy behavior remarkably resembles that of the more affluent, economically stable OECD countries.

Constitutional Revision and the City: The Enforcement Acts and Urban America, 1870–1894

Congressional enactment of the Enforcement Acts in 1870 and 1871 marked an unprecedented federalization of voting rights. The various election laws aimed to make real the promise of the recently enacted Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the constitution. A complex duality characterized this new departure in the constitutional understanding of democratic suffrage. On one hand, Republican leadership looked to secure the rights of freedmen in the Reconstruction-era South. At the same time, from the outset, northern Republicans strategically worked to strengthen the party in all regions with a particular interest in urban America. From the immediate postwar years down to the early 1890s, congressional committees regularly investigated the problematic and deeply partisan politics of enforcement. Often, House and Senate investigators were more concerned with developments in northern cities than with the state of African American voting across the rural South. This urban story of the consequences of constitutional revision illuminates the often-obscured national dimensions of Reconstruction and its aftermath, while also alerting us to shifting visions of the vote across the final third of the nineteenth century. This essay explores this nationalization of Reconstruction in the wake of the Fifteenth Amendment's enactment by first documenting the central place of New York City in the emerging postbellum electoral regime and then expanding out from Manhattan to look at broader patterns of urban experience with enforcement.

Popular Sovereignty and the Democratic Threat

Democracy is defined generally as some form of popular rule, but popular rule alone does not legitimize itself or the institutions intended to facilitate it. Democracy can be a normative imperative because of the benefits of democratic citizenship, typically assessed in terms of personal autonomy or freedom. Irrespective of how these benefits are conceived in alternative theories of democracy, there is an enormous gap between ideal and reality in open electoral regimes purporting to be democracies. Granted, only a small minority of the citizens in these societies enjoy theoretically envisioned benefits of democratic citizenship. However, this article suggests it is not only possible, but likely that genuinely open electoral institutions achieve a meaningful element of popular control. Moreover, while popular control in itself does not legitimize these institutions, those who call attention to the gap between ideal and reality cannot dismiss popular sovereignty as a complete myth, nor should they ignore the importance of the myth itself.

Electoral Laws and Turnout, 1972-2004

In this paper we examine the impact of electoral laws on overall turnout, and class bias in the electorate. We look at the impact of changes in registration laws on who votes, with particular attention to the discriminatory impact of legal changes on persons at different segments of the income distribution. By aggregating turnout for different demographic groups - persons with different levels of education and income - by state, and then pooling those state level turnout rates over time, we can use cross sectional time series analysis to estimate the impact of electoral reforms. This gives us much more powerful estimates of these effects than were previously available. We do not suffer from the problems of cross-sectional analyses which rely on the assumption that the choice of electoral regime is independent of the likelihood of voting. And by using all presidential elections from 1972 thru 2004 we have much more statistical power than has been provided by previous analyses simply looking at difference of means tests across two elections. We consider the impact of: the number of days prior to election day that registration closes; the availability of election day registration; the availability of early voting, and the availability of absentee voting.

Campaign Finance Reform as Institutional Choice

If the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002 banned the use of soft money—the only source of funds in which Democrats approached parity with Republicans—why did the Republican congressional leadership revile the bill and the Democratic congressional leadership embrace it? We address this puzzle by modeling competing electoral, partisan, and policy motives that guided members’ decision making on the vote for final passage of this bill. Our solution lies in the fact that members believed that BCRA would reduce the role of the national parties in congressional elections. Although the parties may behave similarly under a fixed electoral regime, we find that the BCRA vote is consistent with two parties that prefer different sets of electoral rules. Specifically, Democrats appear more sympathetic to changes that enhance the role of candidates and outside groups, whereas Republicans appear to prefer stronger national parties.

Book Review: Christian Democracy in Latin America: Electoral Competition and Regime Conflicts

Book Review: Christian Democracy in Latin America: Electoral Competition and Regime Conflicts