Suchergebnisse

This research note analyses the role that party manifestos play in El Salvador and Guatemala, two newer democracies. In recent elections, the importance of manifestos has increased in both systems. This study examines this development. It explores the ' why's' (purpose) and ' how's' (the method of production) of party manifestos to learn more about the internal workings of parties and their relationship with society. The findings from this study suggest that in new democracies, international party assistance programmes can play a crucial role in making manifestos relevant. Whether manifestos enhance democracy in the long term, however, depends on party system institutionalization. These results point to an opportunity for research in new and younger party systems.

As decentralisation reforms devolved greater responsibilities to local governments, improving local governance has become central to strengthening democracy. With the promise of increasing citizen representation and government transparency at the local level, in 2015 El Salvador implemented a new electoral system. The new system allowed for the election of opposition parties in municipal councils for the first time. In the context of El Salvador, we examine how opposition parties' numerical representation influences the views of governing and opposition party members about multi-party councils' effectiveness to improve local governance. To test our hypotheses, we rely on data from an original elite survey of 303 municipal councillors in 101 municipalities, which we complement with qualitative information. Contrary to what the literature suggests, we do not find evidence that a stronger opposition leads to more negative evaluations among members of governing parties, notwithstanding the country's polarised party system. (JPLA/GIGA)

ObjectiveThe objectives of this study were to parse the effect of ethnicity as a potential driver of public perception of immigrants from previous finding on the labor market competition hypothesis (e.g., Hainmueller and Hiscox, 2010; Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2015).MethodsWe rely on survey experiments to analyze the effect of ethnicity on attitude formation toward immigrants. In a first experiment, we test whether favoritism for high‐skilled immigrants diminishes when we add the Hispanic descriptor. In a second experiment, we examine whether public opinion toward undocumented immigrants is affected by region of origin.ResultsWe find that favoritism for high‐skilled immigrants drops when we add the Hispanic descriptor, but that legal status outweighs any possible anti‐Hispanic sentiment.ConclusionOur study provides a novel setup to study the interaction between economic factors and ethnicity as drivers of attitudes toward immigration among California's voters. We find some evidence that supports our hypothesis that anti‐Hispanic sentiment drives attitude formation toward immigrants and immigration.

La literatura reciente sobre congruencia se ha centrado en el desarrollo de indicadores que mejoren su medición. En este artículo metodológico contribuimos a esta literatura comparando las fortalezas y limitaciones de tres de estas nuevas medidas —Golder y Stramski (2010), Lupu et al. (2017) y nuestra medida— así como sus resultados una vez que se aplican a los casos de América Central para medir la congruencia ideológica y en políticas públicas. Estos casos son adecuados para la comparación, ya que las preferencias de los ciudadanos y de los representantes no siguen una distribución normal. La comparación evidencia las implicaciones que tienen las elecciones metodológicas en el estudio de la congruencia y la representación, así como la necesidad de desarrollar discusiones metodológicas más sólidas en esta literatura.