Suchergebnisse

Experiments are now common in political science. They are an excellent methodological tool to estimate the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome. In this article, I review the use of lab experiments in political science. After a brief report on their popularity and advantages, I distinguish two ideal-types (economics-based and psychology-based) and outline the main lines of division between them. In the final section, I discuss the main challenges that lab experimentalists are facing today.

Experiments are now common in political science. They are an excellent methodological tool to estimate the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome. In this article, I review the use of lab experiments in political science. After a brief report on their popularity and advantages, I distinguish two ideal-types (economics-based and psychology-based) and outline the main lines of division between them. In the final section, I discuss the main challenges that lab experimentalists are facing today.

It is often taken for granted that parties support electoral reform because they anticipate seat payoffs from the psychological and mechanical effects of the new electoral system. Although some studies point out that elements related to values and the willingness to achieve social goals are also relevant to explaining party preference in those situations, a general model of how these considerations influence support for electoral reform is still missing. To fill this gap, I develop in this article a policy-seeking model accounting for values-related factors and operationalize it using one of the most firmly established effects of electoral systems in the literature: The degree of inclusiveness and its consequences for the representation of social groups in parliament. The empirical relevance of this model is then tested using an original dataset reporting the actual position of 115 parties facing 22 electoral reform proposals in OECD countries since 1961. The results show that willingness to favour the electoral system most in line with a party's electoral platform has a unique explanatory power over party support for a more proportional electoral system. In turn, values appear to be as crucial as party self-interest in explaining the overall electoral reform story.

AbstractA long-lasting question in comparative politics is whether the number of candidates/parties increases turnout. Existing observational studies on the topic find mixed results. We thus apply a regression discontinuity design to data 13,910 legislative and cantonal electoral districts in France since 1978. In the two-round system used in these elections, the candidates who pass a certain vote threshold in the first round can participate in the second round. We use this discontinuity to estimate the causal effect of having a third candidate in the second round: it increases turnout by 3.5% points and the share of valid votes by 7.3% points. We confirm these findings with survey data from the 2012 legislative election. Further, we investigate the mechanism and find evidence supporting the alienation theory, according to which individuals whose preferences do not resonate with the preferences of any of the candidates are likely to abstain.

AbstractThere is a long tradition of imputation studies looking at how abstainers would vote if they had to. This is crucial for democracies because when abstainers and voters have different preferences, the electoral outcome ceases to reflect the will of the people. In this paper, we apply a non-parametric method to revisit old evidence. We impute the vote of abstainers in 15 European countries using Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM). While traditional imputation methods rely on the choice of voters that are on average like abstainers, and simulate full turnout, CEM only imputes the vote of the abstainers that are similar to voters, and allows to simulate an electoral outcome under varying levels of turnout, including levels that credibly simulate compulsory voting. We find that higher turnout would benefit social democratic parties while imposing substantial losses to extreme left and green parties.

"Strategic Voting Versus Sincere Voting" published on by Oxford University Press.

AbstractIn this article, we study how polarization affects the propensity of supporters of non-viable parties to cast a strategic vote. To do so, we rely on Canadian election panel surveys from the Making Electoral Democracy Work project that were specifically designed to identify strategic voting. We find that the polarization between viable parties increases the probability of a supporter of a non-viable party casting a strategic vote, because it increases how much she likes her favourite viable party, and decreases how much she dislikes her least favourite viable party. Polarization thus increases strategic voting because it alters partisan preferences.

Parties' attitudes about changing the electoral system are explained in various ways. The most common approach is based upon rational-choice models stating that parties are first and foremost strategic actors considering any change to the electoral system for its impact on the balance of power between and within parties (Boix, 1999). The dominant model was set up by Kenneth Benoit (2004) and considers that parties evaluate potential reform according to their expected impact on their future seat share (Benoit, 2004). But is this very simple logic really able to account for the positions of parties about changing the electoral system? No systematic empirical testing of the model has been offered yet. In this article, Benoit's model has been tested for 103 parties involved in 14 different electoral reform debates (Belgium, British Columbia, Canada, Israel, Italy 1993, Italy 2005, Japan, The Netherlands, New Brunswick, New Zealand, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Quebec, and the United Kingdom). The first element underlined by this paper is that Benoit's model has not proven to be very significant to account for the support or the opposition of political parties regarding electoral reforms. Parties appear to be more influenced by their previous performance under the electoral system in use (Shugart, 2008). The parties that have been the most disadvantaged in the translation of votes into seats and that are the most often in the opposition are the more likely to support a change in the electoral system. In other words, it is not so much the hopes (or fears) to gain (or to lose) power that is determining the attitudes about changing the electoral system, it is more the (dis)satisfaction about the rules in use that is decisive. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished