Suchergebnisse

AbstractAlthough partisan bias – when an authority transfers discretionary public resources to a politically aligned receiver − has been extensively studied, less is known about how this practice is affected by the voting regime − compulsory or voluntary voting. In this article, I study partisan bias in Chile, using administrative data of transfers from the central authority to local governments, highlighting two relevant scope conditions: the electoral cycle, and electoral uncertainty caused by the adoption of voluntary voting. I found strong evidence of partisan bias, especially in election years and in electorally riskier municipalities. This suggests that the uncertainty introduced by this electoral reform induced politicians to allocate a large share of resources to risky municipalities, because such resources would play a more significant role in the electoral outcome. Overall, these results imply that voluntary voting has a large impact on the way that resources are allocated across subnational units.

AbstractAlthough the advantage that incumbents may have over challengers has been extensively studied, less is known about how incumbency advantage is affected by the adoption of voluntary voting. In this paper, I study incumbency advantage in Chile, a country that adopted voluntary voting in 2012. I find that incumbency advantage substantively decreases with voluntary voting. The primary mechanism explaining such reduction was the entry of high-quality challengers, who invested their campaign resources much more efficiently compared to office-holders. Overall, this paper contributes to the literature on electoral accountability by identifying how sensible is incumbency advantage to voluntary voting and the entry of high-quality challengers. Indeed, as incumbency advantage decreases when capable challengers compete for office, it suggests that "scaring-off" skilled candidates is one of the drivers of such advantage.

It has been argued that close elections lead to policy convergence, as legislators elected by a small margin are more likely to adopt moderate policy positions (Downs 1957). However, Lee, Moretti, and Butler (2004) find that electoral competition does not affect legislators' policy preferences in the United States, questioning the median voter paradigm. To help to discern this paradox, we estimate the effect of close elections on legislators' subsequent policy positions under different electoral rules. With Chile's two-seat open-list proportional representation system, we exploit the dynamics of within-coalition competition to test both hypotheses. Using the margin of victory in 383 races in four different parliamentary elections and 3,741 roll-call votes for the 120-seat Chamber of Deputies from 1998 to 2014, we find that electoral competition did not lead to policy convergence under either the center-left Concertación coalition or the rightist Alianza coalition. We contend that policy convergence responds to electoral incentives but is also conditioned by the nature of the political regime (presidential or parliamentary) and government–opposition dynamics.

Herd immunity by mass vaccination offers the potential to substantially limit the continuing spread of COVID-19, but high levels of vaccine hesitancy threaten this goal. In a cross-country analysis of vaccine hesitant respondents across Latin America in January 2021, we experimentally tested how five features of mass vaccination campaigns—the vaccine's producer, efficacy, endorser, distributor, and current population uptake rate—shifted willingness to take a COVID-19 vaccine. We find that citizens preferred Western-produced vaccines, but were highly influenced by factual information about vaccine efficacy. Vaccine hesitant individuals were more responsive to vaccine messengers with medical expertise than political, religious, or media elite endorsements. Citizen trust in foreign governments, domestic leaders, and state institutions moderated the effects of the campaign features on vaccine acceptance. These findings can help inform the design of unfolding mass inoculation campaigns.