Biljana Bogičević, Navishti Das, Emma Davies, A. Dillon, S. Glazerman, M. Rosenbaum
A central challenge to telephone surveys is low response rates. This is particularly true for random digit dial (RDD) surveys, which have especially low response rates. For researchers designing RDD survey protocols, there is a clear tradeoff between effort and composition, where surveys can achieve a higher response rate by calling fewer numbers repeatedly or by calling more numbers less intensively. This brief explores this tradeoff by measuring the effects of (i) repeated attempts per case, and (ii) rescheduling a call, on completion rates and sample composition. Using data from nine low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), we find that repeated and rescheduled attempts result in lower completion rates than new attempts, on average. However, the respondents who complete the survey in later attempts or after rescheduling have statistically significant differences in observable characteristics. This suggests that more call attempts may be needed to adequately represent the respondents who are harder to interview, even if those call attempts produce fewer completions per case.
{"title":"Assessing Repeated and Rescheduled Attempts in Random Digit Dial Surveys","authors":"Biljana Bogičević, Navishti Das, Emma Davies, A. Dillon, S. Glazerman, M. Rosenbaum","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3929628","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3929628","url":null,"abstract":"A central challenge to telephone surveys is low response rates. This is particularly true for random digit dial (RDD) surveys, which have especially low response rates. For researchers designing RDD survey protocols, there is a clear tradeoff between effort and composition, where surveys can achieve a higher response rate by calling fewer numbers repeatedly or by calling more numbers less intensively. This brief explores this tradeoff by measuring the effects of (i) repeated attempts per case, and (ii) rescheduling a call, on completion rates and sample composition. Using data from nine low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), we find that repeated and rescheduled attempts result in lower completion rates than new attempts, on average. However, the respondents who complete the survey in later attempts or after rescheduling have statistically significant differences in observable characteristics. This suggests that more call attempts may be needed to adequately represent the respondents who are harder to interview, even if those call attempts produce fewer completions per case.","PeriodicalId":365899,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal","volume":"249 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133734773","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Habit formation theory and the transformative voting hypothesis both imply that voting has downstream consequences for turnout and political involvement. Although several studies have applied causal research designs to study this question, the long-run evidence is extremely limited, especially for potentially transformative effects. We jointly examine the short- and long-term impact of earlier voting eligibility on subsequent turnout and political involvement using rich panel data from the UK. Exploiting the eligibility cut-off for national elections within a regression discontinuity design, our precise estimates document a short-run increase in voting–for those able to vote earlier–alongside a contemporaneous increase in several measures of political involvement. However, we show that these short-term effects fade away quickly and do not translate into permanent changes in turnout propensity or political involvement. Our results imply that, in a setting with low institutional barriers to vote, the transformative effects of voting are short-lived at most.
{"title":"Is Voting Really Habit-Forming and Transformative? Long-Run Effects of Earlier Eligibility on Turnout and Political Involvement from the UK","authors":"Jonas Jessen, Daniel Kuehnle, Markus Wagner","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3924800","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3924800","url":null,"abstract":"Habit formation theory and the transformative voting hypothesis both imply that voting has downstream consequences for turnout and political involvement. Although several studies have applied causal research designs to study this question, the long-run evidence is extremely limited, especially for potentially transformative effects. We jointly examine the short- and long-term impact of earlier voting eligibility on subsequent turnout and political involvement using rich panel data from the UK. Exploiting the eligibility cut-off for national elections within a regression discontinuity design, our precise estimates document a short-run increase in voting–for those able to vote earlier–alongside a contemporaneous increase in several measures of political involvement. However, we show that these short-term effects fade away quickly and do not translate into permanent changes in turnout propensity or political involvement. Our results imply that, in a setting with low institutional barriers to vote, the transformative effects of voting are short-lived at most.","PeriodicalId":365899,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127740891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract (English): The performance of polls in the 2019 Argentine elections reached its lowest point since democratic restoration in 1983. Their errors were much greater than those observed in recent years in mature democracies, where there is talk about a crisis of this type of surveys. In the primaries, Argentine pollsters widely underestimated the advantage of the Everyone's Front opposition alliance over the governing Together for Change. But after adjusting their methods, in the general election they overestimated that advantage by similar margins. We analyze both failures in an international comparative perspective. Vote intention data for president was used to calculate error indicators and compare them with current international averages and those of past decades, and with errors in several electoral cycles in the US and the UK. We examine ongoing changes in the survey industry, falling response rates, and causes of error identified by new academic studies and work commissioned by professional associations in the field of public opinion research. This literature shows that pre-election polls are no more inaccurate today than in the past and underlines the importance of "non-sampling" errors, particularly those produced by non-response bias, when the probability of participating in a poll is lower for certain groups, such as people with little interest in politics or low social or institutional trust. These types of errors and their causes are now better understood and procedures can be designed to improve the accuracy of estimations. We also discuss the impact of inaccurate polls on political strategies and the media narrative of elections, as well as the difficulty for pollsters, journalists and political actors to acknowledge and communicate the levels of uncertainty associated with electoral predictions. Our analysis highlights basic limitations of the polling industry and public opinion research in Argentina, such as the lack of a professional association and the incipient development of electoral behavior studies. Pollsters were surprised when voters punished the government because of the economic crisis, even though it was the most likely scenario according to a not very large but significant set of empirical studies on economic voting in Argentina and Latin America. The substantial errors in 2019 have implications for the reliability of issue polling, which may show a distorted picture of opinions in Argentine society.
摘要:2019年阿根廷大选的民意调查表现达到1983年民主恢复以来的最低点。他们的错误比近年来在成熟民主国家观察到的要大得多，在这些国家，人们谈论这类调查的危机。在初选中，阿根廷民意调查机构普遍低估了反对党“人人阵线”(Everyone’s Front)相对于执政党“团结变革”(Together for Change)的优势。但是在调整了他们的方法之后，在大选中他们高估了这一优势。我们从国际比较的角度来分析这两种失败。总统选举的投票意向数据被用来计算误差指标，并将其与当前的国际平均水平和过去几十年的平均水平，以及美国和英国几个选举周期的误差进行比较。我们研究了民意调查行业正在发生的变化、不断下降的回复率，以及由民意调查领域的专业协会委托进行的新的学术研究和工作确定的错误原因。这些文献表明，选举前的民意调查今天并不比过去更不准确，并强调了“非抽样”误差的重要性，特别是那些由非反应偏差产生的误差，当某些群体参与民意调查的可能性较低时，例如对政治不感兴趣的人或社会或机构信任度较低的人。这些类型的错误及其原因现在得到了更好的理解，并且可以设计程序来提高估计的准确性。我们还讨论了不准确的民意调查对政治策略和选举媒体叙事的影响，以及民意测验专家，记者和政治行动者承认和沟通与选举预测相关的不确定性水平的困难。我们的分析强调了阿根廷民意调查行业和民意研究的基本局限性，例如缺乏专业协会和选举行为研究的初步发展。当选民因为经济危机而惩罚政府时，民意调查人员感到惊讶，尽管根据一组对阿根廷和拉丁美洲经济投票的不太大但重要的实证研究，这是最有可能的情况。2019年的重大错误对问题民意调查的可靠性产生了影响，这可能会显示出阿根廷社会意见的扭曲情况。
{"title":"La Falla de las Encuestas en las Elecciones Argentinas de 2019. Un Análisis en Perspectiva Comparada Internacional (The Failure of the Polls in the 2019 Argentine Elections. An Analysis in International Comparative Perspective)","authors":"Jose Eduardo Jorge, Ernesto Marcelo Miró","doi":"10.31235/osf.io/en2f9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/en2f9","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract (English): The performance of polls in the 2019 Argentine elections reached its lowest point since democratic restoration in 1983. Their errors were much greater than those observed in recent years in mature democracies, where there is talk about a crisis of this type of surveys. In the primaries, Argentine pollsters widely underestimated the advantage of the Everyone's Front opposition alliance over the governing Together for Change. But after adjusting their methods, in the general election they overestimated that advantage by similar margins. We analyze both failures in an international comparative perspective. Vote intention data for president was used to calculate error indicators and compare them with current international averages and those of past decades, and with errors in several electoral cycles in the US and the UK. We examine ongoing changes in the survey industry, falling response rates, and causes of error identified by new academic studies and work commissioned by professional associations in the field of public opinion research. This literature shows that pre-election polls are no more inaccurate today than in the past and underlines the importance of \"non-sampling\" errors, particularly those produced by non-response bias, when the probability of participating in a poll is lower for certain groups, such as people with little interest in politics or low social or institutional trust. These types of errors and their causes are now better understood and procedures can be designed to improve the accuracy of estimations. We also discuss the impact of inaccurate polls on political strategies and the media narrative of elections, as well as the difficulty for pollsters, journalists and political actors to acknowledge and communicate the levels of uncertainty associated with electoral predictions. Our analysis highlights basic limitations of the polling industry and public opinion research in Argentina, such as the lack of a professional association and the incipient development of electoral behavior studies. Pollsters were surprised when voters punished the government because of the economic crisis, even though it was the most likely scenario according to a not very large but significant set of empirical studies on economic voting in Argentina and Latin America. The substantial errors in 2019 have implications for the reliability of issue polling, which may show a distorted picture of opinions in Argentine society.","PeriodicalId":365899,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114806397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
D. Acemoglu, Nicolás Ajzenman, C. Aksoy, Martín Fiszbein, Carlos A. Molina
Using large-scale survey data covering more than 110 countries and exploiting within country variation across cohorts and surveys, we show that individuals with longer exposure to democracy display stronger support for democratic institutions. We bolster these baseline fi?ndings using an instrumental-variables strategy exploiting regional democratization waves and focusing on immigrants' exposure to democracy before migration. In all cases, the timing and nature of the effects are consistent with a causal interpretation. We also establish that democracies breed their own support only when they are successful: all of the effects we estimate work through exposure to democracies that are successful in providing economic growth, peace and political stability, and public goods.
{"title":"(Successful) Democracies Breed Their Own Support","authors":"D. Acemoglu, Nicolás Ajzenman, C. Aksoy, Martín Fiszbein, Carlos A. Molina","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3914843","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3914843","url":null,"abstract":"Using large-scale survey data covering more than 110 countries and exploiting within country variation across cohorts and surveys, we show that individuals with longer exposure to democracy display stronger support for democratic institutions. We bolster these baseline fi?ndings using an instrumental-variables strategy exploiting regional democratization waves and focusing on immigrants' exposure to democracy before migration. In all cases, the timing and nature of the effects are consistent with a causal interpretation. We also establish that democracies breed their own support only when they are successful: all of the effects we estimate work through exposure to democracies that are successful in providing economic growth, peace and political stability, and public goods.","PeriodicalId":365899,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122598393","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Following an increasingly large corpus of literature championing blockchain-based voting systems, this paper disentangles the issues that are blockchain specific and those that belong to the larger scope of e-voting. I provide a political economics analysis of e-voting under different constitutional settings. Using analytical tools from the fathers of Public Choice, I argue that switching to e-voting without modifying the institutions is unlikely to modify choice mechanisms. I then extend the analysis to Liquid Democracy and find that, while it can be well suited to small scales communities, it faces major limitations at large scale because it fails to provide a framework for bundling. All along the paper, examples based on blockchains are discussed to illustrate the analysis and link it with recent literature.
{"title":"Majority and Representation: A Political Economy Analysis of It-Enabled Democracy","authors":"Philémon Poux","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3880337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3880337","url":null,"abstract":"Following an increasingly large corpus of literature championing blockchain-based voting systems, this paper disentangles the issues that are blockchain specific and those that belong to the larger scope of e-voting. I provide a political economics analysis of e-voting under different constitutional settings. Using analytical tools from the fathers of Public Choice, I argue that switching to e-voting without modifying the institutions is unlikely to modify choice mechanisms. I then extend the analysis to Liquid Democracy and find that, while it can be well suited to small scales communities, it faces major limitations at large scale because it fails to provide a framework for bundling. All along the paper, examples based on blockchains are discussed to illustrate the analysis and link it with recent literature.","PeriodicalId":365899,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal","volume":"151 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124022042","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Joseph Engelberg, Jorge Guzmán, Runjing Lu, William Mullins
Republicans start more firms than Democrats. Using a sample of 40 million party-identified Americans between 2005 and 2017, we find that 6% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats become entrepreneurs. This partisan entrepreneurship gap is time-varying: Republicans increase their relative entrepreneurship during Republican administrations and decrease it during Democratic administrations, amounting to a partisan reallocation of 170,000 new firms over our 13 year sample. We find sharp changes in partisan entrepreneurship around the elections of President Obama and President Trump, and the strongest effects among the most politically active partisans: those that donate and vote.
{"title":"Partisan Entrepreneurship","authors":"Joseph Engelberg, Jorge Guzmán, Runjing Lu, William Mullins","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3821106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3821106","url":null,"abstract":"Republicans start more firms than Democrats. Using a sample of 40 million party-identified Americans between 2005 and 2017, we find that 6% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats become entrepreneurs. This partisan entrepreneurship gap is time-varying: Republicans increase their relative entrepreneurship during Republican administrations and decrease it during Democratic administrations, amounting to a partisan reallocation of 170,000 new firms over our 13 year sample. We find sharp changes in partisan entrepreneurship around the elections of President Obama and President Trump, and the strongest effects among the most politically active partisans: those that donate and vote.","PeriodicalId":365899,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115490747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper addresses the theoretical question of how competing models of social and economic solidarity shape patterns of economic governance in periods of economic crisis. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a signal case, we seek to understand how changes in public opinion in response to similar social and economic shocks are informed by deeper ideational structures among citizens relating to their capacity for empathy, mutual support, and willingness to support and trust public policy interventions. Drawing on scholarly literatures related to moral economies and the social embeddedness of economic relationships, we undertake an empirical study of how the COVID-19 pandemic has shaped patterns of support for social and economic policies. We focus on Germany and the United States, countries with widely divergent modes of integration of capitalist markets and, therefore, potentially different levels of support for particular kinds of policy responses. We trace American and German policy responses since March 2020 across a number of domains, complemented by a systematic analysis of public opinion in the two countries, drawing from fifteen different sources of public-opinion data, in order to assess the pandemic’s effects on public support for individualized and collectively-oriented policy responses.
{"title":"Solidarities, Fairness, and Economic Governance in Advanced Capitalism: The Cases of COVID-19 Responses in Germany and the United States","authors":"Achim Goerres, Mark I. Vail","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3868185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3868185","url":null,"abstract":"This paper addresses the theoretical question of how competing models of social and economic solidarity shape patterns of economic governance in periods of economic crisis. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a signal case, we seek to understand how changes in public opinion in response to similar social and economic shocks are informed by deeper ideational structures among citizens relating to their capacity for empathy, mutual support, and willingness to support and trust public policy interventions. Drawing on scholarly literatures related to moral economies and the social embeddedness of economic relationships, we undertake an empirical study of how the COVID-19 pandemic has shaped patterns of support for social and economic policies. We focus on Germany and the United States, countries with widely divergent modes of integration of capitalist markets and, therefore, potentially different levels of support for particular kinds of policy responses. We trace American and German policy responses since March 2020 across a number of domains, complemented by a systematic analysis of public opinion in the two countries, drawing from fifteen different sources of public-opinion data, in order to assess the pandemic’s effects on public support for individualized and collectively-oriented policy responses.","PeriodicalId":365899,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133963970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
E. Ogbonna, Eleazar Enyioma Ufomba, Abolaji Solomon
Money politics and poverty are intertwined ordeals that stand against democracy in most African countries. In the case of the Nigerian state, the effort of avoiding the practice of vote buying and vote selling remains an effort that continually beckons for serious and conservative attention. Several studies have been carried out on how best the process of true democratisation that is devoid of politicians wooing the electorate to surrender their votes to them as a result of economic exchange. The study utilised existing relevant literature combined with brief exegesis of the biblical passage (Genesis 25: 29-34) talking about how Jacob’s hunger and survivalist strategy to undo Esau shares contiguous analytical frame in interrogating the practice of vote buying during elections in Nigeria. From its findings, the paper posits that vote buying in Nigeria is a woeful phenomenon that bedevils both the electorate and the struggle for democratisation. A market of poverty and ignorance where the political merchants woo the poor masses to surrender their civil rights as citizens in exchange for either few cups of rice scornful petty amount of money. The study therefore advocate that vote buying should be discourage at every quarter and the masses should educated on the perils of surrendering their votes to politicians and their agents on the premise of cash and carry.
{"title":"Linking Selling of Birth Right in Genesis 25:29-34 with Vote-Buying during Elections in Nigeria: the Onslaught of Poverty on the Citizenry","authors":"E. Ogbonna, Eleazar Enyioma Ufomba, Abolaji Solomon","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3866593","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3866593","url":null,"abstract":"Money politics and poverty are intertwined ordeals that stand against democracy in most African countries. In the case of the Nigerian state, the effort of avoiding the practice of vote buying and vote selling remains an effort that continually beckons for serious and conservative attention. Several studies have been carried out on how best the process of true democratisation that is devoid of politicians wooing the electorate to surrender their votes to them as a result of economic exchange. The study utilised existing relevant literature combined with brief exegesis of the biblical passage (Genesis 25: 29-34) talking about how Jacob’s hunger and survivalist strategy to undo Esau shares contiguous analytical frame in interrogating the practice of vote buying during elections in Nigeria. From its findings, the paper posits that vote buying in Nigeria is a woeful phenomenon that bedevils both the electorate and the struggle for democratisation. A market of poverty and ignorance where the political merchants woo the poor masses to surrender their civil rights as citizens in exchange for either few cups of rice scornful petty amount of money. The study therefore advocate that vote buying should be discourage at every quarter and the masses should educated on the perils of surrendering their votes to politicians and their agents on the premise of cash and carry.","PeriodicalId":365899,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114778799","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
To address economic inequality, proposals have emerged to expand democracy within firms. To evaluate these proposals, empirical researchers have examined European policies for worker representation. Yet without a baseline model against which to compare the results of these studies, we cannot know which elements derive from workplace democracy as such versus other institutional or contextual factors. To provide such a baseline model, we apply the electoral accountability framework to an economic context. With commonplace assumptions about preferences and information of economic actors, we show how voters increase their allocation at the official’s expense without affecting broader firm behavior. Since the sole democratic institution is electoral control over an official, we conclude that variation in firm behavior associated with existing worker representation policies results from institutional or contextual factors other than workplace democracy itself. Additionally, our analysis highlights the close conceptual connection between electoral accountability models and the Condorcet jury theorem.
{"title":"Electoral accountability in the workplace","authors":"D. Foster, J. Warren","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3864638","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3864638","url":null,"abstract":"To address economic inequality, proposals have emerged to expand democracy within firms. To evaluate these proposals, empirical researchers have examined European policies for worker representation. Yet without a baseline model against which to compare the results of these studies, we cannot know which elements derive from workplace democracy as such versus other institutional or contextual factors. To provide such a baseline model, we apply the electoral accountability framework to an economic context. With commonplace assumptions about preferences and information of economic actors, we show how voters increase their allocation at the official’s expense without affecting broader firm behavior. Since the sole democratic institution is electoral control over an official, we conclude that variation in firm behavior associated with existing worker representation policies results from institutional or contextual factors other than workplace democracy itself. Additionally, our analysis highlights the close conceptual connection between electoral accountability models and the Condorcet jury theorem.","PeriodicalId":365899,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125318347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Trade unions sponsored the political campaigns of candidates running for office in many countries throughout the 20th century. Yet little is known about the electoral consequences of these sponsorship arrangements. I study how union sponsorship affected the electoral performance of parliamentary candidates in Great Britain (1900-2019). On the basis of archival material, I collect new data on universe of union-sponsored candidates, and new data on all parliamentary candidates and their electoral campaigns. Employing a series of difference-in-differences designs, I examine how sponsorship affected candidate nominations and general elections. The results show that attaining a union sponsorship increases the probability that a candidate wins the nomination in an electorally attractive constituency. Second, sponsorship causes an inflow of financial and human resources into constituencies, engendering a professionalization of political campaigns and party organizations. Third, union sponsorship approximately causes a six-percentage-point increase in the average candidate's vote share, and two-thirds of this advantage is driven by nomination in better constituencies, while campaign spending account for the remaining boost in performance. Finally, heterogeneity in the treatment effect indicates that the electoral influence of unions is strongest in time periods and in industries where substantial government interventions affected the labor market.
{"title":"How Do Interest Groups Influence Elections? Evidence from British Trade Unions 1900-2019","authors":"Alexander Fouirnaies","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3771526","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3771526","url":null,"abstract":"Trade unions sponsored the political campaigns of candidates running for office in many countries throughout the 20th century. Yet little is known about the electoral consequences of these sponsorship arrangements. I study how union sponsorship affected the electoral performance of parliamentary candidates in Great Britain (1900-2019). On the basis of archival material, I collect new data on universe of union-sponsored candidates, and new data on all parliamentary candidates and their electoral campaigns. Employing a series of difference-in-differences designs, I examine how sponsorship affected candidate nominations and general elections. The results show that attaining a union sponsorship increases the probability that a candidate wins the nomination in an electorally attractive constituency. Second, sponsorship causes an inflow of financial and human resources into constituencies, engendering a professionalization of political campaigns and party organizations. Third, union sponsorship approximately causes a six-percentage-point increase in the average candidate's vote share, and two-thirds of this advantage is driven by nomination in better constituencies, while campaign spending account for the remaining boost in performance. Finally, heterogeneity in the treatment effect indicates that the electoral influence of unions is strongest in time periods and in industries where substantial government interventions affected the labor market.","PeriodicalId":365899,"journal":{"name":"Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125995259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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