Suchergebnisse

Intencionales o no, las anomalías en los resultados de votación a menudo generan escepticismo e inquietud en las democracias en desarrollo. Este trabajo evalúa la prevalencia de estas irregularidades antes y después de la introducción del sistema de registro biométrico de votantes en Bolivia. En específico, utilizaré diferentes pruebas forenses para identificar inconsistencias en los resultados del referéndum revocatorio de 2008 y el referéndum constitucional sobre los límites de mandato de 2016. El análisis de estos dos referendos permite comparar diferentes patrones en los resultados antes y después de la implementación de esta tecnología. Las pruebas forenses se centran en dos de las preocupaciones planteadas en su momento por observadoras y observadores internacionales y partidos de oposición: (1) incrementos artificiales en el número de votos a favor del partido oficial y (2) aumento irregular del padrón de electores. Los resultados sugieren que el nuevo sistema de registro disminuye las oportunidades de encontrar irregularidades y que, cuando existen, cada una de las irregularidades observadas es el resultado de la capacidad de monitoreo y prevención de la oposición.

This paper investigates the opportunities for non-democratic regimes to rely on fraud by documenting the alteration of vote tallies during the 1988 presidential election in Mexico. In particular, I study how the alteration of vote returns came after an electoral reform that centralized the vote-counting process. Using an original image database of the vote-tally sheets for that election and applying Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to analyze the sheets, I find evidence of blatant alterations in about a third of the tallies in the country. This empirical analysis shows that altered tallies were more prevalent in polling stations where the opposition was not present and in states controlled by governors with grassroots experience of managing the electoral operation. This research has implications for understanding the ways in which autocrats control elections as well as for introducing a new methodology to audit the integrity of vote tallies.

Previous research has shown that presidential debates have "minimal effects" on aggregate electoral preferences because they mainly reinforce people's pre-existing political preferences. However, most of what we know about the behavioural effects of debates comes from research conducted in the United States and other institutionalised democracies. We re-evaluate the effects of debates on electoral preferences by focusing on Latin American elections. Given higher levels of electoral volatility, weaker partisan brands, lower partisanship, and more personalised voter linkages, we expect that debates play a significant role in shaping vote choice in Latin America. We test these expectations by conducting an analysis of presidential debates on aggregated vote preferences in thirty-two elections across fourteen Latin American countries from 2002 to 2019. Our results show that presidential debates shape electoral preferences in countries with weakly institutionalised party systems.

AbstractElectoral systems affect vote choice. While a vast literature studies this relationship by examining aggregate-level patterns and focussing on the interparty dimension of electoral rules, the convenience of analyzing this phenomenon by emphasizing the role played by the incentives to cultivate a personal vote generated by the system and matching voters with the party they vote for has been traditionally overlooked. In this article, we offer new evidence that documents the impact of the intraparty dimension of electoral systems on the levels of ideological voting registered in a democracy. Using spatial models of politics and employing data from the five waves of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, we find that ideological voting in proportional representation systems is higher when lists are either closed or flexible. Moreover, the results suggest that this effect is slightly amplified in the case of high numbers of district-level candidates.

ABSTRACTThe literature on comparative partisanship has demonstrated the low rates of party identification in Latin America. Such low rates are commonly interpreted as a sign of citizens' disengagement with parties and democracy in the region. This article revisits this interpretation by considering voters' adverse affection toward a party, or negative partisanship. It shows that examining the negative side of partisanship can help us develop a clearer perspective on the partisan linkages in the electorate. To support this claim, this study analyzes an original conjoint experiment in Argentina and Mexico, as well as two other public opinion surveys fielded in Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador. The study presents empirical evidence indicating that negative partisanship helps voters without an attachment to a party to distinguish themselves from nonpartisans, is independent of positive partisanship, and is different from a general distrust of the democratic system.

AbstractWe provide an introduction of the functioning, implementation, and challenges of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to classify visual information in social sciences. This tool can help scholars to make more efficient the tedious task of classifying images and extracting information from them. We illustrate the implementation and impact of this methodology by coding handwritten information from vote tallies. Our paper not only demonstrates the contributions of CNNs to both scholars and policy practitioners, but also presents the practical challenges and limitations of the method, providing advice on how to deal with these issues.

AbstractThe publication of electoral results in real time is a common practice in contemporary democracies. However, delays in the reporting of electoral outcomes often stir up skepticism and suspicion in the vote-counting process. This issue urges us to construct a systematic test to distinguish delays attributable to manipulation to those resulting from a limited administrative capacity. This paper proposes a method to assess the potential sorting of the electoral results given the moment at which polling stations publish their vote totals. To do so, we model the time span for a polling station to report its electoral results, to identify those observations whose reported times are poorly explained by the model, and to assess a potential bias in the candidates' vote trends. We illustrate this method by analyzing the 2006 Presidential Election in Mexico, a contest that aroused suspicion from opposition parties and public opinion alike regarding how the electoral results were reported. The results suggest that polling stations' time logs mostly respond to their specific geographic, logistic, and sociodemographic features. Moreover, those observations that took longer than expected to report their returns had no systematic effect on the electoral outcome. The proposed method can be used as an additional post-election audit to help officials and party representatives evaluate the integrity of an election.

This article explores the determinants of the allocation of parliamentary posts to specific legislators. Using an original data set of biographical information and committee assignments for almost 10,000 legislators in five non-presidential democracies (i.e. Finland, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, and Spain), we provide evidence that distributive posts are more likely to be allocated to electorally vulnerable members of parliament, mainly under candidate-centered electoral rules. We also show that posts in high-policy committees are usually assigned to prominent legislators within the parties. Contrary to what one could expect based on the literature on candidates' incentives to cultivate a personal vote, we find that the effect of district magnitude on the distribution of legislative posts does not depend on the type of list.