Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Malfeasance in local governments is common in developing democracies. Electoral accountability could mitigate such malfeasance, but may require media market structures that incentivise profit-maximising local media to report on incumbent malfeasance. We test this claim in Mexico, leveraging plausibly exogenous variation in the pre-election release of municipal audits revealing misallocated spending and access to broadcast media. We find that each additional local media station amplifies voter punishment (rewards) of high (zero) malfeasance by up to 1 percentage point. Local media's accountability-enhancing effects are greater when there are fewer non-local competitors and where local outlets' audiences principally reside within their municipality.

Most estimates of the incumbency advantage and the electoral benefits of previous officeholding experience do not account for strategic entry by high‐quality challengers. We address this issue by using term limits as an instrument for challenger quality. Studying US state legislatures, we find strong evidence of strategic behavior by experienced challengers. However, we also find that such behavior does not appear to significantly bias the estimated effect of challenger experience or the estimated incumbency advantage. More tentatively, using our estimates, we find that 30–40% of the incumbency advantage in state legislative races is the result of "scaring off" experienced challengers.

Many articles use regression discontinuity designs (RDDs) that exploit the discontinuity in 'close' election outcomes to identify various political and economic outcomes of interest. One of the most important types of diagnostic tests in an RDD is checking for balance in observable variables within the window on either side of the threshold. Finding an imbalance raises concerns that an unobservable variable may exist that affects whether a case ends up above or below the threshold and also directly affects the dependent variable of interest. This article shows that imbalance in RDDs exploiting close elections are likely to arise even in the absence of any type of strategic sorting. Imbalance may arise simply due to variation in the underlying distribution of partisanship in the electorate across constituencies. Using both simulated and actual election data, the study demonstrates that the imbalances driven by partisanship can be large in practice. It then shows that although this causes a bias for the most naive RDDs, the problem can be corrected with commonly used RDDs such as the inclusion of a local linear control function. Adapted from the source document.

Many articles use regression discontinuity designs (RDDs) that exploit the discontinuity in "close" election outcomes to identify various political and economic outcomes of interest. One of the most important types of diagnostic tests in an RDD is checking for balance in observable variables within the window on either side of the threshold. Finding an imbalance raises concerns that an unobservable variable may exist that affects whether a case ends up above or below the threshold and also directly affects the dependent variable of interest. This article shows that imbalance in RDDs exploiting close elections are likely to arise even in the absence of any type of strategic sorting. Imbalance may arise simply due to variation in the underlying distribution of partisanship in the electorate across constituencies. Using both simulated and actual election data, the study demonstrates that the imbalances driven by partisanship can be large in practice. It then shows that although this causes a bias for the most naive RDDs, the problem can be corrected with commonly used RDDs such as the inclusion of a local linear control function.

This article tests several hypotheses about distributive politics by studying the distribution of federal spending across US states over the period 1978–2002. It improves on previous work by using survey data to measure the share of voters in each state that are Democrats, Republicans and Independents, or liberals, conservatives and moderates. No evidence is found that the allocation of federal spending to the states is distorted by strategic manipulation to win electoral support. States with many swing voters are not advantaged compared to states with more loyal voters, and 'battleground states' are not advantaged compared to other states. Spending appears to have little or no effect on voters' choices, while partisanship and ideology have large effects.

Does control of patronage jobs significantly increase a political party's chances of winning elections in U.S. states? We employ a differences-in-differences design, exploiting the considerable variation in the dates that different states adopted civil service reforms. Our evidence suggests that political parties in U.S. states were able to use state-level patronage to increase the probability of maintaining control of state legislatures and statewide elective offices. We also find that an "entrenched" party, in power for a longer time, can use patronage more effectively. We consider several alternative hypotheses that might plausibly account for the patterns in the data, but find no evidence to support them.

What would happen if the current U.S. campaign finance system, mostly based on private donations, were replaced by a public funding scheme of the same magnitude? Some argue that public funding would deprive voters of useful information, but this can only be true if private donations are somehow targeted to 'better' candidates. In this paper, we ask what voters can learn about the 'effectiveness' of a legislator from the amount and pattern of contributions received during the campaign. We find that the total amount that a candidate receives is a positive, but weak, predictor of that candidate's effectiveness. Small contributions provide a strong and positive signal of effectiveness, while large contributions are a negative signal of effectiveness. Contributions from organizations also provide a positive signal, while contributions from individuals, parties, and candidates themselves do not. Adapted from the source document.

A venerable supposition of American survey research is that the vast majority of voters have incoherent and unstable preferences about political issues, which in turn have little impact on vote choice. We demonstrate that these findings are manifestations of measurement error associated with individual survey items. First, we show that averaging a large number of survey items on the same broadly defined issue area—for example, government involvement in the economy, or moral issues—eliminates a large amount of measurement error and reveals issue preferences that are well structured and stable. This stability increases steadily as the number of survey items increases and can approach that of party identification. Second, we show that once measurement error has been reduced through the use of multiple measures, issue preferences have much greater explanatory power in models of presidential vote choice, again approaching that of party identification.

We studied an underutilized source of data on legislative effectiveness and exploited its panel structure to uncover several interesting patterns. We found that effectiveness rises sharply with tenure, at least for the first few terms, even when we control for legislators' institutional positions, party affiliation, and other factors. Effectiveness never declines with tenure, even out to nine terms. The increase in effectiveness is not simply due to electoral attrition and selective retirement, but to learning‐by‐doing. We also found evidence that a significant amount of "positive sorting" occurs in the legislature, with highly talented legislators moving more quickly into positions of responsibility and power. Finally, effectiveness has a positive impact on incumbents' electoral success and on the probability of legislators moving to higher office. These findings have important implications for arguments about term limits, the incumbency advantage, and seniority rule.

We study newspaper endorsements in state & federal elections, using a new data set with two samples. One sample focuses on big-city newspapers in the United States from 1940 to 2002. A second sample examines 92 newspapers, representing all regions of the country, over the period 1986 to 2002. We document two important features of newspaper endorsements. First, newspapers have shifted from strongly favoring Republicans in the 1940s & 1950s, to dividing their editorial endorsements roughly equally between the parties. Today, Democratic candidates are about 10% more likely to receive an endorsement than Republican candidates. Second, newspaper editorials have come to favor heavily those already in office. Incumbents today receive the endorsement about 90% of the time. In the 1940s, incumbents received endorsements only about 60% of the time. Tables, Figures, References. Adapted from the source document.