Lame Ducks Research Articles

Lame duck law enforcement

Election losses for incumbent sheriffs result in lame ducks who oversee local law enforcement for as long as 10 months before the next sheriff takes office. Monthly arrest rates decline 11% subsequent to a primary election loss and 20.3% after losing a general election; violent crime arrests drop 24.8% in the two months following a general election loss. Our results demonstrate the costs of electoral turnover where day-to-day duties are sensitive to effort and conscientiousness.

Africa's Lame Ducks: Second-Term Presidents and the Rule of Law

AbstractThe vast majority of sub-Saharan countries have adopted constitutional clauses establishing that elected presidents cannot serve more than two mandates. While an extensive literature has examined why African leaders comply with or else try to manipulate term limits, the policy implications of the latter remain unexplored. Existing studies of other world regions suggest that setting a maximum number of terms presidents can serve tends to make them ‘lame ducks’ during their final mandate. We reconsider this argument, and posit and demonstrate empirically that constitutional limits can actually induce positive effects on second-term presidents' actions compared to their first terms. More specifically, the absence of electoral pressures, the concern for their post-presidential future and legacy-building motivations may lead to improvements in the rule of law, especially regarding the functioning of the judiciary. This article represents the first empirical investigation of the performance of Africa's second-term lame-duck presidents.

My Mother's Facelift

My Mother's Facelift

Whose Party is It?: Lame Ducks, Presidential Candidates, and Evaluations of the Party

Presidents and presidential candidates serve as an important source cue for the mass public’s attitudes toward and evaluations of the political parties. Our study evaluates these dynamics during the transition from a lame duck president, Barack Obama, to a new party standard-bearer, Hillary Clinton. Our analysis takes advantage of the fact that the 2014 and 2016 Cooperative Election Study (CES) and the 2012 and 2016 American National Election Study (ANES) surveys asked respondents to evaluate both Obama, Clinton, and the Democratic Party. These data allow us to examine whether the transition from Obama to Clinton changed the primary referent for public attitudes toward the Democratic Party. Our results provide mixed evidence about a change in the relative importance of attitudes toward Clinton and Obama when the former became the nominee, and the latter was a lame duck. While the public’s view of the connection between Obama and Democratic Party’s ideological profile remained constant across time, respondents did update their affective assessments of the party in the face of a new party leader once Clinton was the nominee.

Law-abiders, lame ducks, and over-stayers: the Africa Executive Term Limits (AETL) dataset

Besides elections, the sub-Saharan wave of political reforms of the 1990s led several countries to introduce limits to the number of terms that a chief executive can serve, even though several leaders managed to bypass them. While Africa’s executive term limits (ETLs) politics has gained scholarly attention, the literature mostly consists of in-depth small-N analyses. Systematic comparative research is rare. To contribute filling this gap, this article presents a new Africa Executive Term Limits (AETL) dataset. Covering 49 sub-Saharan polities throughout the 1990–2019 period, AETL represents the most complete and updated collection of data on Africa’s ETLs politics, and a versatile research tool to address several questions on the present and future of this continent. A preliminary assessment of the new data finds ETLs to be increasingly respected, and to have positive returns for government alternation and development. These findings point to new research avenues that AETL may help travel.

Of lame ducks, black sheep and family bonding

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The Great Recession as a ‘stress test’ of migrant incorporation in Europe. Are Southern European countries really lame ducks?

AbstractSouthern European countries are generally portrayed as lame ducks when it comes to migrant integration. In this article, I will analyse some of the reasons that have led to this outcome including potential biases in migration studies. I argue that Southern European countries in fact hold their own specific ways of incorporating migrants which may be equally or even more positive than those of older immigration countries. At the same time, I maintain that they appear rather heterogeneous in this regard, questioning the idea of a single Southern European model. I will test these hypotheses by comparing Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece with some Western European older immigration countries and by observing the trends of migrant incorporation during the Great Recession which started in 2008. The economic crisis is here regarded as both a factor of change and a ‘stress test’ of the actual robustness of migrant incorporation in the target countries. The empirical data are framed in a typology of migrant incorporation modes conceived of as a heuristic tool to conceptualise the processes occurring during deep economic downturns.

Lame Ducks and Local Fiscal Policy: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Portugal

Abstract I use the introduction of mayoral term limits in Portugal to identify how an exogenous variation in eligibility for office affects policy decisions. Relying on a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences approach, I find that term-limited incumbents pursue more conservative fiscal policies than those who are eligible for re-election. Heterogeneous effects show that the treatment effects primarily reflect the behaviour of right-leaning, term-limited incumbents. Results are in line with a model in which right-leaning officeholders try to maintain a good reputation by pleasing an electorate prone to redistribution while they are eligible, but adopt policies closer to their true preferences when term-limited.

Re-running Eligibility on Fiscal Spending Behavior: Evidence from Indonesian Municipalities

This study focuses on the difference in spending policy behavior between regions having re-running incumbents in the 2015 election and regions that have the last-period incumbent. Hypothetically, re-runner incumbents would try to enhance their re-election probability by increasing their targeted expenditures in the times leading to the election time; in contrary, the last-period incumbents will do the opposite. Ordinary Least Square (OLS) cross-sectional data has been used to analyze the politicians’ behavior on fiscal spending policy for 237 municipalities. The study result shows that there is no difference in behaviour between regions having re-running incumbent and regions that have a last-period incumbent. Compared to regions with lame ducks, grant expenditure tends to be higher on election year in regions having a re-running incumbent. There is also a tendency that the higher grant expenditure in the year prior to the election, the lower grant expenditure during an election year in those regions.

The Effects of Electoral Incentives on Fiscal Policy: Evidence from a Legislative Change at the Local Government Level

This paper analyzes how electoral incentives shape fiscal policy, focusing on the introduction of mayoral term limits in Portugal. Applying a difference-in-differences approach, we find evidence that when a municipality has a term-limited (TL) mayor, it experiences a fall in revenues and expenditures. The effect seems to be driven by lower effort of lame-duck mayors, relative to reelection-eligible ones, to implement new investments and to obtain conditional grants from the central government, especially in election years. Although lame ducks are less opportunistic in general, the results suggest that opportunism may not decrease in municipalities whose TL mayors resign before the end of their terms and are replaced by their (eligible) vice-mayors.

Lame ducks and divided government: How voters control the unaccountable

Electoral institutions interact through the incentives they provide to policy makers and voters. In this paper divided government is interpreted as the reaction of voters to a systematic control problem. Voters realize that term-limited executives (“lame ducks”) cannot credibly commit to a moderate electoral platform due to missing reelection incentives. By dividing government control voters force a lame duck to compromise on policies with an opposing legislature. Based on data from the US states, I present evidence showing that the probability of divided government is about 8 to 10 percent higher when governors are lame ducks.

Lame ducks might fly: genome editing, global consensus and geo-ethics

Lame ducks might fly: genome editing, global consensus and geo-ethics

Who Freed the Slaves? The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment by Leonard L. Richards

Reviewed by: Who Freed the Slaves? The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment by Leonard L. Richards Michael S. Green (bio) Who Freed the Slaves? The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment. By Leonard L. Richards. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. 306. Cloth, $30.00.) Long after his Senate tenure, discussing the Thirteenth Amendment’s passage, Lyman Trumbull would tell law students, “Gentlemen, this good right hand wrote this amendment to the Constitution.” More than a century later, people who marveled at the brilliance of Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as Lincoln (or was it Lincoln’s performance as Daniel Day-Lewis?) without having studied the amendment’s passage in depth might have believed that maneuvering and bribery by a few shrewd political operators ended slavery. In both cases, the story was far more complex. A few historians have tried to unpack what actually happened. Their interpretations range from Michael Vorenberg suggesting that War Democrats deserve far more credit than they have received, to James Oakes emphasizing that Republicans had long been more united on the goal of ending slavery than scholars have believed, to scholars of slavery arguing for the “self-emancipation thesis”—that slaves, acting on what they knew politicians ultimately would have to do, forced Lincoln’s hand. Leonard L. Richards has waded into the debate with a combination of narrative and analysis focusing mainly on the political players and factors that shaped the movement toward the amendment. Richards laments the popularity of the mistaken belief that the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery. Interviews with teachers led him to conclude that “few knew anything about the Thirteenth Amendment, and virtually no one knew that getting it through Congress was an uphill battle” (x). To explain that battle, Richards finds the pivot for his story in the efforts of James Ashley, a Radical Republican congressman from Ohio who had been a stalwart early opponent of slavery. Throughout the book, Ashley’s story unfolds, including the political difficulties he faced at home, the principles he upheld (and his regret when he failed to uphold them), and his support for and management of the Thirteenth Amendment in the House of Representatives. After the House rejected the amendment in 1864, Ashley became more strategic. The two chapters that Richards devotes to the radical congressman’s efforts to round up votes provide a valuable lesson in politics. Richards focuses on Ashley’s quest for border-state support from two political enemies, Frank Blair of Missouri and Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, bringing to life this “odd couple,” as he calls them, with the same verve with which he portrays Ashley. The border-state congressmen included lame ducks whose distaste for emancipation could be overcome with persuasion or patronage. Richards simply states that “Ashley got the [End Page 291] support of eighteen of the nineteen men that Blair and Davis helped him line up. Had three of those men voted no, the amendment would have gone down to defeat” (153). Similarly, Ashley looked for help from northern Democrats and got it, whether they voted yes or simply did not vote. Richards is unsparing in his description of their party’s willingness to play the race card, and his examination makes clear that northern Democrats were crucial to passage but had little genuine desire to end slavery and thereby, as Democrat-turned-Republican Montgomery Blair suggested, eliminate the issue that had deprived them of power. The elder Blair was utterly loyal to Abraham Lincoln, and Richards is judicious and thoughtful in parsing the president’s role. He tends to let Lincoln’s failures speak for themselves, subtly criticizing the border states for their obstinacy on compensated emancipation and Lincoln for sticking to that idea and colonization. He also demonstrates that these ideas were hardly original to Lincoln. He is fair in discussing Lincoln’s emphasis on keeping Kentucky in the Union at the expense of moving faster against slavery, as Ashley and his allies wished. Richards also assesses the charges that corruption helped ensure the amendment’s passage: “Although there is no proof ‘beyond a shadow of doubt’ that Lincoln himself made deals, there is ample reason to believe that he allowed others to do...

The Common Good As A Social Debt and Patrimony of the Person

Aristotle’s statement that the individual human being is a social or a political animal can be misguiding if we understand it as meaning that relationships between the individual and the society are natural and obvious. Individual’s dream of autonomy and ruthless struggle to access to scarce resources on one hand and liberal and competitive societies where there is no room for “lame ducks” on the other hand, can make relationships between the person and the society conflicting and violent. The consequences can be marginalization from the social order or rebellion against it.How can we strive to make person-society relationships more integrative and fecund? In other words, what skills, social ethics as a field of Christian theology and Catholic tradition does provide for the social integration of the person and the awakening of his or her social responsibility? This paper would like to suggest and defend that the concept of the common good is a common ground for the person and the society mutual flourishing. The paragraph 26 of Gaudium et Spes defines the common good as “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment.” Interestingly also, Laudato Si’ builds up on the common good and defines it as “belonging to all and meant for all.” (Paragraph 23) In a more complex way, Thomas Aquinas elaborates the common good and locates it at the junction of distributive justice and piety as one’s love of his or her country. In the light of his thought, the common good as a dynamic interaction between the person and the society, becomes the cement of what Thomas Aquinas calls “civil communion.”

Lame But Loyal Ducks

This paper analyzes the consequences of an electoral reform introducing mayoral term limits at the municipal level in Portugal. Relying on a difference-in-difference methodology and a novel method that accounts for anticipatory effects of reforms, this study explores variation between and within municipalities to capture the economic and political consequences of limiting the number of consecutive mayoral terms. In contrast to the usual lame duck effect in the literature, I find that term limited mayors decrease current expenditure and reduce both user charges and tax rates. Lame ducks send positive fiscal signals possibly in an attempt to maximize the electoral perspectives and re-election probability of their party in the coming elections. Still, political turnover significantly increases as a result of the electoral reform.

Presidents and Terminal Logic Behavior: Term Limits and Executive Action in the United States, Brazil and Argentina. By Genevieve M. Kehoe. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014. 231 pp.

Presidents and Terminal Logic Behavior: Term Limits and Executive Action in the United States, Brazil and Argentina. By Genevieve M. Kehoe. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014. 231 pp. Final-term presidents, writes Genevieve M. Kehoe, should more properly be termed 'soaring eagles' rather than 'lame ducks (p. 1). Moreover, she concludes, Everything points to the conclusion that in Obama we have the making of soaring eagle--not lame duck. Indeed, an end-of-tenure Obama may be the most aggressive end-of-tenure president that we have seen (p. 171). This is bold study that attempts to assess the incentives motivating in their last legacy-enhancing months in office. The author claims that significant policy decisions are pushed, especially in presidential executive orders and similar decrees, because presidents are free from re-election constraints and enthused by legacy to pursue bold projects--and they have the power to make it happen (p.1). This book challenges conventional thinking. Most presidency analysts believe that, with few exceptions, lose political capital and popular support as their term winds down. Advisors leave, people pay even less attention to what are saying, and Congress and the courts are more likely to be assertive. This seems to be the case for the one-termers, such as Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush, as well as for those in second terms, such as Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. In midterm congressional elections, most candidates in competitive races do not want their party's president to come and campaign with them. This was true for Presidents Lyndon Johnson in 1966, Ford in 1974, Bush in 2006, and Barack Obama in 2014. Ronald Reagan and Clinton were somewhat more popular in their second terms. But, with the one exception of Clinton's second midterm, there is remarkable pattern of what can be called a sixth-year pushback--in which the opposition party enjoys significant congressional and state political victories. (The midterm elections of 1966, 1974, 2006, and 2014 are illustrative.) These realities are generally thought to constrain rather than empower end-of-tenure presidents. Kehoe is motivated to study near the end of their terms because of concern that the two-term limit may encourage overreach or even irresponsible behavior. She cites the well-known literature about the perils of presidential versus parliamentary political regimes, yet does not develop this line of reasoning. Near the end of the book, she mentions favorably that some political scientists in the United States view Mexico's executive term as ideal or 'more perfect' than the U.S. executive term structure (p. 169). She footnotes Larry Sabato as her single source (A More Perfect Constitution: Why the Constitution Must Be Revised: Ideas to Inspire New Generation [Walker and Company, 2007]). …

Lame Ducks and the Media

Do media organisations turn on unpopular governments and, if so, why? I model a demand-side and supply-side explanation and derive testable implications that can be used to differentiate between them. I take these predictions to the data by examining whether British newspapers give more coverage to investigations into government members of parliament when the government is behind in the polls. Instrumenting for poll leads with plausibly-exogenous macroeconomic variables I find that a 1 SD increase in a government's poll lead leads to a 30-60% decline in coverage. I also find suggestive evidence that this effect is demand driven

How Lame are Lame Ducks?

A lame duck session of Congress occurs when legislators meet after an election has been held but before the next Congress has taken office. Lame duck sessions are often criticized by the victorious party in the election, and a common critique is that the lame duck members — undisciplined by electoral constraints — vote irresponsibly. There are subtle but statistically significant differences between voting patterns in regular and lame duck sessions, as revealed by analysis of over 50,000 House and Senate roll call votes.During a lame duck session, members are slightly less likely to side with their own parties and less likely to vote at all. These patterns persist in very lame duck sessions — those that take place following the loss of majority status within a single house. In these sessions, however, a new pattern emerges: House members become more likely to cast bipartisan votes and Senators become less likely to do so. Beyond these voting patterns, it is difficult to say whether members vote more or less “responsibly” during lame duck sessions of Congress. Our analysis supports the primary findings of the existing literature on lame ducks. Past studies have found lame duck legislators to be less likely to indulge most special interests, but others suggest they may be more likely to indulge one particular special interest: their next employers. In this study, we explain how incentives change for lame duck legislators, briefly review past research on lame ducks, and present our statistical findings that support and add to the existing literature.

The Myth of Coup-proofing

This article argues that coup-proofing does not necessarily reduce the general propensity among military officers to stage coups d’état against authoritarian incumbents. Sophisticated coup-proofing terminates coup cascades and buys incumbent rulers time in office, but general coup risk remains high even if they maintain power for long periods of time. The article uses a new data set on coups in the Middle East and North Africa covering the period 1950–2013. The data reveal that the number of coup instances has decreased over time, but the risk for incumbents of falling to a coup during their extended time in office remains constant, even in coup-proofed autocracies. When autocrats apply coup-proofing measures, timing and agency become increasingly important. Plotters attempt coups either immediately after power turnovers or when incumbents turn into lame ducks after excessively long periods of rule. Success rates increase when coup plotters are supported by central military leaderships.

‘Lame ducks’ in the time of HIV/AIDS? Exploring female victimhood in selected HIV/AIDS narratives by Zimbabwean female writers

This article argues that HIV/AIDS narratives written by Zimbabwean women represent a partial view which positions women at the receiving end of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Women are portrayed as ‘innocent’ and naïve recipients of a disease which finds its sustenance in the way Zimbabwean institutions such as culture, family and the law condone male sexual victimisation of women. Such a view echoes Maureen Kambarami's (2006) ‘women-as-lame-ducks’ thesis. By focusing on two narratives, Tendai Westerhorf's Unlucky in love (2005) and Nancy Mahachi-Harper's Echoes in the shadows (2004), the researcher explores the ways in which female victimhood is entrenched in Zimbabwean women's writings about HIV/AIDS. These narratives limit the sexual options available to women in and out of marriage, and stereotype men as callous agents of the disease. By failing to recognise that both men and women can be the victims as well as the perpetrators of abuse, these narratives perpetuate misconceptions about male and female sexuality on the one hand, and HIV/AIDS on the other. Furthermore, portraying female characters as perpetual victims robs women of individual and group agency. Such representations render identities permanent and project the role of women as destined for immanence.