Governance Indicators: Some Proposals
In: Governance Challenges and Innovations, S. 188-220
In: Governance Challenges and Innovations, S. 188-220
In: American political science review, Band 106, Heft 3, S. 661-684
ISSN: 1537-5943
When the economy in a single country contracts, voters often punish the government. When many economies contract, voters turn against their governments much less frequently. This suggests that the international context matters for the domestic vote, yet most research on electoral accountability assumes that voters treat their national economies as autarkic. We decompose two key economic aggregates—growth in real gross domestic product and unemployment—into their international and domestic components and demonstrate that voters hold incumbents more electorally accountable for the domestic than for the international component of growth. Voters in a wide variety of democracies benchmark national economic growth against that abroad, punishing (rewarding) incumbents for national outcomes that underperform (outperform) an international comparison. Tests suggest that this effect arises not from highly informed voters making direct comparisons but from "pre-benchmarking" by the media when reporting on the economy. The effect of benchmarked growth exceeds that of aggregate national growth by up to a factor of two and outstrips the international component of growth by an even larger margin, implying that previous research may have underestimated the strength of the economy on the vote.
In: American political science review, Band 106, Heft 3, S. 661-685
ISSN: 0003-0554
In: European journal of political research: official journal of the European Consortium for Political Research, Band 50, Heft 3, S. 365-394
ISSN: 1475-6765
In: International studies quarterly: the journal of the International Studies Association, Band 55, Heft 4, S. 887-908
ISSN: 1468-2478
How does regime type affect the poor? Are certain types of regimes better at translating economic growth into consumption for the world's least privileged citizens? We propose an alternative measure of transfers to the poor that is nearly universally available and innately captures distribution: average daily calorie consumption. In sharp contrast to the consumption of material goods or the accumulation of wealth for which humans have shown no upper bound on their ability to achieve, biological limits make it impossible for a small number of individuals to consume most of a nation's calories. Democracies and hybrid regimes-which combine elements of autocracy and democracy-are better at translating economic growth into total calorie consumption than autocracies and perform strikingly similarly in this regard; democracies outperform both hybrid regimes and autocracies, however, in converting growth into higher quality calories from animal sources. Adapted from the source document.
In: European journal of political research: official journal of the European Consortium for Political Research, Band 50, Heft 3, S. 365-395
ISSN: 0304-4130
In: International studies quarterly: the journal of the International Studies Association, Band 55, Heft 4, S. 887-909
ISSN: 0020-8833, 1079-1760
In: International Studies Quarterly, Band 55, Heft 4, S. 887-908
In: Cambridge studies in comparative politics