Suchergebnisse

AbstractDictatorships that use plebiscites – that is, referendums initiated by the executive – have a longer expected lifespan. A successful plebiscite sends a signal that makes coordination for collective action more difficult and induces the falsification of preferences. It also enhances the status of the dictator within the regime and against potential rivals through the use of agenda power. As a result, plebiscites are followed by decreased mobilization and a reduced risk of palace coups. This, in turn, adds years to the dictator's tenure. We have found evidence to support these propositions by utilizing data from various databases of autocratic regimes that span from 1946 to 2008.

AbstractThe comparative study of authoritarianism has neglected plebiscites, and the comparative study of referendums tends to see in them a form of direct democracy regardless of the regime. We conceptualize dictatorial plebiscites as a genuine authoritarian tool, as part of a repressive strategy with the objective of hindering internal regime rivals and discouraging the coordination of the external opposition. We provide empirical evidence from dictatorships for the period 1946–2008 that is compatible with our expectations.

Facing a prospective majority of socialists during the early third of the 20th century, some secular conservative and liberal parties pooled their votes to raise the majority threshold for the left, while others raised it by enacting some form of proportional representation. We use vote transfers, estimated by a new method of ecological inference, to explain those far-reaching choices. We provide a new conceptualization and measurement of the segmentation of the electoral market to test a proposition within the Boix-Rokkan framework: proportional representation reform was chosen when vote transfers foretold coalition failure. To substantiate our claim, we investigate two most similar cases, Denmark during 1910–1918 and New Zealand during 1928–1931, that diverged in the explanatory variable and in the response.

La mayor parte de los datos de encuesta disponibles para la investigación de la opinión pública y la prospectiva electoral mediante muestras representativas, en España y América Latina, se han obtenido con selección final de las personas entrevistadas mediante cuotas, un método no probabilístico. La fiabilidad de las estimaciones hechas a partir de estos datos es mal conocida y tiene poco respaldo teórico: se sabe bastante sobre sus sesgos, pero casi nada sobre su varianza y "margen de error". Esta investigación estudia con métodos empíricos la variabilidad de las muestras obtenidas en los barómetros periódicos del Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas de España (CIS), aprovechando la longitud y regularidad de algunas de sus series de estimación de parámetros estables. Los resultados muestran que el crecimiento de la varianza es moderado y está dentro de lo esperable en un diseño complejo.