Electoral Winners Research Articles

The Legacy of Thatcherism in Question : an Introduction

On 8th April 2013, Margaret Thatcher passed away at the age of 88. The controversy over her funeral is the occasion for us to consider the sensitive question of her legacy not only in the decade that followed her resignation from office in November 1990 but also in the decade that culminated in the formation of a Coalition Government led by the Conservatives in May 2010. The term ‘legacy’ was associated with Margaret Thatcher before her death, almost immediately after she left office in November 1990. However, it was really at the turn of the 21st century that it became popular especially with the specialists of New Labour and the Third Way. Thatcher’s influence however was not limited to party politics. It filtered into all reaches of the very society she had considered non-existent. The result was that the transformation, which had begun under Margaret Thatcher, was almost completed in the first decade of the 21st century. However, after three consecutive defeats, Thatcherism was no longer considered as an electoral winner by the Conservative Party, and the legacy was proving a cumbersome one. David Cameron’s election victory in December 2005 signalled the onset of what many specialists describe as a new faction within the party, i.e. not a Thatcherite one. What seemed to be a clear repositioning of the Conservative Party to the centre ground was likely to relegate an ageing Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism to history books and to the past.

Losers’ Consent or Non-Voter Consent? Satisfaction with Democracy in East Asia

How do electoral outcomes influence views on democracy among East Asian countries? A sizable literature assesses differences between electoral winners and losers, but few cover East Asian cases. Using cross-national survey data from the Asian Barometer (ABS), this article analyzes the extent to which losers are less satisfied with democracy. Unlike much of the literature, this analysis also addresses a third category: those that did not vote. Empirical analyses controlling for demographic and institutional factors find that both losers and non-voters consistently have lower evaluations of democracy than winners, while losers appear to have less satisfaction than non-voters.

Trust in Political Institutions: The Effect of Corruption, Electoral Winners, and the Post-Communist Legacy1

Abstract Trust in political institutions is an important issue in contemporary democracies, as it contributes to democratic regimes’ legitimacy and sustainability. This paper investigates what effects corruption, political allegiance, and the post-communist history of a country have on political trust. Political trust is measured as trust towards parliament, political parties, and politicians. Both individual-and country-level factors are included in the analytical model in order to account for the personal and contextual characteristics that might shape political trust. This research employs the multilevel modelling for empirical analysis. The results show that the winner effect and corruption perception impact are relatively strongly affecting political trust. Surprisingly, the post-communist history of a country seems to play no significant role in driving political trust. The concluding part links the findings of this study back to the theory and draws several implications not only for the future research but also the real world of policies and politics.

Winners, Losers, and Partisan News: The Effects of Political Parallelism on the Legitimacy Gap

Recent work has explored how individual and institutional factors affect the gap in perceptions of political legitimacy between electoral winners and electoral losers, but has ignored the role that the political information environment, in general, and partisan media, in particular, plays in exacerbating or diminishing this gap. By combining individual-level public opinion data in 28 countries, an expert survey on media systems, and a variety of country-level indicators, I find that higher levels of partisan media in a country is associated with a larger winner-loser gap in institutional trust and satisfaction with democracy. The effect of partisan media, in the case of newspapers, is contingent on whether or not people are actually exposed to said media. This research, which links the study of political communication with the study of comparative political behavior, indicates that the increasing availability of partisan news around the world is a cause for concern.

Responsiveness and the rules of the game: How disproportionality structures the effects of winning and losing on external efficacy

This paper investigates how casting a winning or losing vote affects perceptions of external efficacy across varying conditions of electoral disproportionality. I find that as a political system's electoral mechanisms become more disproportional—that is, when institutional rules produce an increasingly unequal ratio of votes cast to the percentage of seats won—individuals who voted for losing parties become significantly less efficacious than their winning counterparts. Under these conditions, electoral winners are more likely to perceive that it matters what party is elected, while losers' attitudes about the meaningfulness of electoral representation sour. However, when disproportionality is minimal, no significant difference between winners' and losers' perceptions of external efficacy is observed, suggesting that the winner-loser framework has context-specific utility. I conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of these findings.

From Elections to Accountability in Africa?

Competitive elections are becoming institutionalized in Africa. But elections have proven an uncertain mechanism for guaranteeing the accountability of political leaders. One reason is that political accountability has numerous attitudinal, behavioral and institutional requirements, of which popular participation in open elections is only one. Instead, we propose a framework of four elements that together comprise a holistic system of political accountability: (a) demand for vertical accountability; (b) supply of vertical accountability; (c) demand for horizontal accountability; and (d) supply of horizontal accountability.The article measures each of these elements using data from Afrobarometer Round 5 (2011–13). On one hand, we find that the weakest link in the chain of accountability remains the vertical one between largely passive electors and evasive legislative agents. On the other hand, we find that the African citizens surveyed think that elections strengthen the institutional autonomy of parliament, thus enabling a greater measure of horizontal accountability. But this pattern of accountability begs several lingering concerns. We wonder whether citizens have sufficient information to accurately monitor the relationship between president and parliament under a democratic constitution, and we find that the quality of elections, along with the partisan predispositions of electoral winners, condition the effect of elections on popular perceptions of accountability.

The Surprised Loser

People tend to predict their preferred political candidate will win an election. The resulting “surprised losers” are examined as playing a role in the established gap between electoral winners and losers on such important outcomes as trust in government and satisfaction with the electoral process and democracy. Exposure to Fox News programming can increase wishful thinking among Republican candidate supporters, but among surprised losers, it does not increase negative attitudes.

How Close is Too Close?: The 2012 Election in the Electoral College

While it is too soon to predict the 2012 presidential winner, it is not too early to know that the general election is likely to be a fiercely competitive contest that will, assuming no major unexpected events occur (e.g., another recession), come down to a few thousand votes in a few swing states, most probably including Ohio. When a presidential election is this close, there exists the possibility that the popular vote winner and the electoral vote winner will differ, which has happened four times before (1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000), but continues to be controversial. More ominously, there is also a small, but real chance of an electoral vote tie between the candidates, which would then place the selection of the president in the House of Representatives and the vice president in the Senate. Even though congressional selection is the constitutionally prescribed remedy and has historical precedents (1800, 1824), it seems unlikely that the Electoral College would long survive what would surely be a spirited public debate over who should choose the president. Thus, the 2012 election results may be too close to sustain the legitimacy of the presidential selection method.

Satisfaction with Democracy and the Winner/Loser Debate: The Role of Policy Preferences and Past Experience

Previous authors have found greater political support among electoral winners than losers, but they define winners and losers at a single time point, and employ a dichotomous categorization that neglects possible variations within each group. This study considers both the past history of winning or losing and the impact of ideological distance from the government on a political support indicator – satisfaction with democracy. Using a multilevel model covering thirty-one countries, the authors show that the relationship between winner/loser status and satisfaction with democracy has a marginal dynamic nature and a policy content. Among present losers, previous experience of victory assuaged dissatisfaction, while among those presenting a consolidated ‘winning’ record, only high ideological proximity to the current government boosted political support.

Wishful Thinking in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

In elections, political preferences are strongly linked to the expectations of the electoral winner—people usually expect their favorite candidate to win. This link could be driven by wishful thinking (a biasing influence of preferences), driven by a biasing influence of expectations on one’s wishes, or produced spuriously. To examine these competing possibilities in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, a longitudinal study assessed uncommitted young voters’ electoral expectations and preferences over four time points during the month before the election. The findings indicated clear support for wishful thinking: Over time, people’s preferences shaped their expectations, but the reverse was not the case. Moreover, these relations were larger among those more strongly identified with their political party and held even when perceptions of general candidate popularity were taken into account. Finally, changes in electoral expectations were consequential, as they shaped disappointment in the electoral results even after taking candidate preferences into account.

Strategic Voting and Legislative Redistricting Reform

Political elites are generally reluctant to alter the status quo unless a change will benefit them. Scholars have found that institutions, and the rules governing them, tend to evolve in ways that maintain equilibrium, preserving the status of winners. Are voters—when presented the opportunity—more likely than elites to alter political institutions? Using survey data, the authors explore mass support in the American states for changing how legislative districts are drawn. They find evidence that representational losers at statewide and district levels are more likely to vote for reforms to create nonpartisan redistricting in ballot issue contests, while electoral winners oppose reform. They argue that ordinary voters—like elected officials—may exhibit a similar instrumental rationale, using a self-interested calculus when serving as policy makers for a day. Beyond theorizing about conditions under which the mass public might engage in strategic voting, the analysis has implications for practical election reform efforts in the American states.

Satisfaction with Democracy: The Impact of Winning and Losing in Westminster Systems

Stable democracies must engender support for the political system among citizens. Satisfaction with democracy, as probed in election surveys, is often seen as the key measure of support. Seen as a measure of support for electoral outcomes, previous research (Anderson & LoTempio 2002, Banducci & Karp 2003) argues that electoral losers have lower levels of satisfaction than those who backed electoral winners. This paper explores satisfaction with democracy in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, three Westminster systems where winning or losing in local constituency contests might provide an independent impact on satisfaction. Using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems dataset it demonstrates that while winning at the local level is not an independent predictor of satisfaction, ideological distance from the national winner can negatively affect satisfaction. The paper also contributes to debates about the type of support tapped by the satisfaction question. It demonstrates that the measure taps both diffuse and electoral support, but that the predictors of satisfaction point to the mediating role of the rewards doled out by political institutions on citizens’ evaluations of their performance.

On Ackerman's Justification of Irregular Constitutional Change: Is Any Vice You Get Away With a Virtue?

In We the People: 2. Transformations, Bruce Ackerman makes a case for irregular change of the U.S. Constitution, as opposed to the amendment procedure stipulated in Article V. He argues that such irregular--even revolutionary--change has occurred in the past, most notably after the war of secession and during the New Deal era, and he proffers those episodes as suitable models for future constitutional change. In making his argument for moving “beyond formalism,” Ackerman misconstrues the meaning of ordinary electoral victories, employs misleading rhetorical flourishes, places unwarranted weight on the Supreme Court's “validation” of irregular constitutional change, and overlooks the capacity of electoral winners to rig subsequent elections.

Populist Redemption and the Unfinished Democratization of Latin America

The re-elections of Carlos Menem in Argentina and Alberto Fujimori in Peru, and the unstable and corrupt presidencies of Fernando Collor in Brazil and Abdala Bucaram in Ecuador, have brought back the discussion on Latin American populism. Contrary to the dominant views of populism as a phase in the region’s history, understood either as a transitory stage towards modernization, or as a political phenomenon linked to import substitution industrialization, the re-emergence of populist leaders poses again fundamental political problems. Continuing the unresolved issues raised by debates on classical populism, the questions that need to be addressed from an empirical and normative standpoint are: What is the relationship between Latin American populism and democracy? What is the pattern of incorporation of the popular sectors into the national political community, and how do they differ from the Western experience? And what are the specificities of really existing Latin American democracies? Differently from the Western pattern of inclusion through the progressive extension and deepening of citizenship rights, the Latin American masses were incorporated by populist appeals to “el pueblo” and weak citizenship rights. Citizenship is not the only, or the main, relationship between individuals and the state. The poor and the excluded have been incorporated through charismatic political movements. These movements have used clientelism and corporatism to give resources to the poor, not as citizenship rights, but as personal favors of politicians, or as corporatist concessions to privileged groups. The institutionalization of these two mediations between state and society – weak and incomplete citizenship and strong appeals to el pueblo – have produced a specific version of democracy. Guillermo O’Donnell has characterized these electoral regimes, which transform electoral winners into the nation’s savior, and which do not respect democratic procedures and civil rights, as “delegative democracies.” This essay is divided into two sections. The first reviews existent theories of Latin American populism, and presents a new approach to its study. This research strategy analyzes the institutionalization of different mediations between the state and society at the time of the transition from “the politics of notables” to “mass politics.” The second section studies recently re-established democracies in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru. These democracies do not respect civil rights, and/or liberal democratic procedures. Differently from the West,