Suchergebnisse

Examines the June 2000 municipal election campaigns, results, and voter turnout in Romania; includes the parties which participated in the 1996 elections, revision of the Nov. 28, 1991 local electoral law, the particularities of the Bucharest and Sibiu elections, and other issues.

This paper studies the effect of preregistration laws on government spending in the U.S. Preregistration allows young citizens to register before being eligible to vote and has been introduced in different states in different years. Employing a difference-in-differences regression design, we first establish that preregistration shifts state-level government spending toward expenditure on higher education. The magnitude of the increase is larger when political competition is weaker and inequality is higher. Second, we document a positive effect of preregistration on state-provided student aid and its number of recipients by comparing higher education institutions within border-county pairs. Lastly, using individual-level data on voting records, we show that preregistration promotes a de facto youth enfranchisement episode. Consistent with a political economy model of distributive politics, the results collectively suggest strong political responsiveness to the needs of the newly-enfranchised constituent group.

Do emotions affect the decision between change and the status quo? We exploit exogenous variation in emotions caused by rain and analyze data on more than 400 ballot propositions in Switzerland for the years 1958 to 2014 to address this question. The empirical tests are based on administrative ballot outcomes and individual postvote survey data. We find that rain decreases the share of votes for a change. Our robustness checks suggest that changes in the composition of the electorate or changes in information acquisition do not drive this result. In addition, we provide evidence that rain might have altered the outcome of several high-stake votes. We discuss the psychological mechanism and document that rain reduces the willingness to take risks, a pattern that is consistent with the observed reduction in the support of change.

AbstractPolitical representation should be a key issue for poverty scholars. Schattschneider said more than 30 years ago, "[t]he flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper‐class accent." How do election reforms affect the composition of the electorate? In 2005, Adam Berinsky made the argument that election reforms such as early voting magnify the existing socioeconomic bias in the electorate. This occurs because early voting may retain those who comprise the highest SES, rather than stimulating the turnout of new voters who may be of lower SES status. This paper advances a test of Berinsky's hypothesis by examining early voting in North Carolina in 2008 using the state's voter registration database. The analysis shows that despite on‐the‐ground mobilization efforts, those who voted early were primarily those of higher income who had been registered a long time, though they were not necessarily those who had voted habitually in the past. Normatively, this work raises questions about who has access to the franchise and who appears to be left behind.