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Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Economics, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Democracy depends upon the competition between candidates or ideas. However, practices or procedures sometimes preclude the consideration of the full range of options. Can campaign spending predict who wins elections? What explains why incumbent electoral security is only rarely threatened? Can committees or individuals in Congress stifle the will of a legislative majority? Essay #1. Politicians spend vast sums of money in order to win or retain a seat in Congress; does it predict who will win? In this essay I present a forecast model for elections to the US House of Representatives that specifically includes a measure of campaign spending.The advantages of the new model are that it relies on publicly available data, its results are easy to interpret, and the forecasts are comparable to other models.Essay #2. For a variety of reasons, incumbents expect to win reelection. There are few explanations for why that advantage occasionally seems to disappear. In this essay, I synthesize the literature on incumbency advantage, congressional redistricting, and voter behavior. I present evidence from the 2006-2010 election cycles suggesting that congressional districts drawn with the expectation of consistent partisan loyalty rates left incumbents susceptible to national tides brought about by temporary asymmetric departures from partisan voting norms. Essay #3. Although there is a large literature devoted to analyses of legislative committee gate keeping, Crombez, Groseclose, and Krehbiel (2006) argued that formal gate keeping is explicitly ruled out in most deliberative bodies. In this essay, I examine the historical development of rules and procedures in the US House of Representatives which explain the lack of formal gate keeping rules. I present evidence of non-majoritarian outcomes in the House despite it being a majoritarian body. I conclude the essay by suggesting a new definition of gate keeping based on the ability to alter the probability of proposal success on the floor instead of the formal ability to kill legislation. / Government

This paper measures the party incumbency advantage for the Democratic Party in state legislatures nationwide. To do so, this paper employs regression discontinuity design (RDD), following the structure laid out in Lee (2008). The results show a stronger incumbency advantage in state legislatures than the 8% figure found for U.S. House of Representative elections by Lee (2008), with a finding of a 14% advantage for lower houses nationwide and a 12% advantage for upper houses nationwide. Furthermore, this paper finds a strengthened incumbency advantage in states that hold their elections in off-years (34% in lower houses and 21% in upper houses). The paper concludes by suggesting that the boosted incumbency advantage for off-year states is a consequence of depressed voter turnout, testing this hypothesis using the Virginian lower house as a case study. Analysis suggests that the incumbency advantage drops substantially to 8% during years with a gubernatorial race and high voter turnout, and jumps substantially to 25% during years without a gubernatorial race and low voter turnout. However, large errors prevent these results from being statistically significant.

Why do voters change their political behavior after negative events such as natural disasters and crime victimization? The extant literature tends to focus on how citizens punish or reward the incumbent based on a model of (mis)attribution of responsibilities. This approach overlooks the fact that affected voters might change their political preferences after the negative shock. Departing from the existing literature, I argue that affected citizens, in addition to evaluating incumbent performance, are also selecting the political leader they believe can most enhance their well-being after the negative event. In particular, I hold that affected voters focus on improving their living conditions, which leads them to pay attention to the policy issues that can help them achieve that goal. As a consequence, victims are more likely to prefer candidates better able to address these new policy preferences. Under adverse conditions, these individuals will vote for political candidates whom they would not select under other circumstances. In each of the three chapters of this dissertation, I provide evidence to support different aspects of this main argument. In the first chapter, I study the political consequences of natural disasters. According to my theory, citizens affected by catastrophes seek to reduce the gap between their living conditions before and after the disaster. This leads them to focus on welfare and social policies – for example, the construction of new housing. Consequently, they are more inclined to vote for parties or persons associated with those measures, typically left-wing candidates. To test this argument, I use a natural experiment created by flash floods that occurred in Chile in 2015, which produced random variation in exposure to the natural disaster. I then measure voters’ political preferences using a conjoint survey experiment, and find that disaster victims are more likely to prefer left-wing candidates. In addition, grounded in two months of fieldwork in the affected area, I provide qualitative evidence that illustrates how disaster victims emphasize the importance of welfare policies that can improve their standard of living. In the second chapter, I show how disaster victims after the 2010 earthquake in Chile select housing and not infrastructure as a top priority after the catastrophe. These results help us better understand why disaster victims are more likely to vote for left-wing politicians: affected citizens are particularly concerned about the reconstruction of their houses, and in consequence, should be more likely to vote for candidates who can be linked with those specific welfare policies. To study how the earthquake modified victims’ political priorities, I rely on survey data before and after this negative event comparing exposed and unexposed counties. In the third chapter, I study how crime victims change their policy preferences. I show that affected citizens are more likely to support strong-handed measures to reduce crime, such as allowing state repression. These results reveal that exposure to crime can change what people think the state should be allowed to do, which can have important political implications. To study the impact of crime on victims’ preferences, I use panel data from Brazil and I implement strategies for reducing sensitivity to hidden biases, such as focusing on individuals who were not crime victims during a previous wave.

Elections are the engine that drives democracy. The central question of this dissertation relates to the speed of that engine: How long does it take for elections to reflect changing preferences in the electorate? The findings presented in this dissertation suggest that electoral change is the result of a gradual process of natural selection in which the political environment, rather than district service activity, is the key variable. Comparing elections data across different types of district environment, I find evidence that the environment affects levels of competition and electoral outcomes. Utilizing an event history statistical model to examine various risk factors for electoral defeat, I find that the political environment of the district is the most important factor influencing the risk of defeat even when controlling for district service behaviors. Over time, the district environment operates as a self-correcting mechanism, purging political misfits and replacing them with representatives who better reflect the ideology of the district. Electoral change typically results more from evolution than revolution – it may not occur quickly, and it may not occur in every district, but it does occur when and where it is needed.

This thesis comprises four empirical papers, each devoted to a specific topic in local political economics. Paper one and two evaluate the importance of the mayor position to the future electoral success of the mayor’s party. In the first paper, the focus is on the party’s electoral outcome in subsequent mayoral elections, while the second paper is concerned with the interdependencies between the mayor’s office and elections on other levels of government. The third paper investigates the causal effect of individual parties on policy in the context of German town council politics. The objective is to measure the impact of political representation in a proportional election system on core fiscal decisions of the municipalities. The final paper studies the specific concerns when using population thresholds in regression discontinuity designs for causal inference (in the German case). The analysis reviews the German evidence on the link between the size of the legislation and government spending. / <p>Diss. Stockholm :  Stockholm School of Economics, 2011. Introduction together with 4 papers.</p>

The study of electoral defence and its stated advantages are an integral part of American political science. Post-war, much academic literature has emerged in an attempt to identify and explain rising re-election rates of congressional incumbents and the political consequences of such a phenomenon (Mayhew 1974; Fiorina 1977; Cain, Ferejohn &amp; Fiorina 1987; Gelman &amp; King 1990; King 1991). Conversely, the study of political incumbency in Britain can be attributed to a handful of scholars who tend to consider the repercussions at parliamentary level (Williams 1967, King 1981, Cain, Ferejohn and Fiorina 1984, Norton 1990 &amp; 1994, Norris, Valance &amp; Lovenduski 1992). Consequently, incumbency advantage at the local level remains a relatively under-researched topic in England, confined to the sub-chapters of Rallings &amp; Thrasher (1997). The aim of this thesis is to research and present evidence in support of incumbency effects in English local elections and the extent to which they influence their outcome, in that, incumbent candidates fare better than less experienced candidates, to different degrees across the three major parties. It will do so using survey and electoral data collected by The Elections Centre at Plymouth University, drawing on established methods from the literature and demonstrating via a variety of data and methods, that incumbency advantage is indeed a real phenomenon effecting the outcomes of local elections in England. The research provides substantial evidence for Sophomore Surge and Retirement Slump effects throughout the period examined (1974-2010). These methods of estimation feature alongside a number of others, which are constructed to uncover the significance of defending, rather than challenging for a council seat. A number of influences on the advantage that defending councillors maintain are also presented, including district magnitude, ward size and rural/urban classification. Results reveal a modest advantage for Conservative and Labour incumbent candidates, whilst the effects are shown to be stronger for the Liberal Democrats, a finding that is in step with the existing literature on electoral trends and the local campaign strategy of the party (Dorling et al, 1998; McAllister et al, 2002; Russell &amp; Fieldhouse, 2005; Cutts 2006).

This doctoral dissertation examines whether incumbency affects democracy, and if it does, how re-election impacts on the political system. This thesis links and extends two theoretical traditions that hardly ever have been combined: political support theory and incumbency theory. Political support theory is used as a proxy to examine democracy from a multidimensional perspective. In this theoretical tradition, there has been a considerable concentration of studies on developed nations, and which take a comparative approach. Also, there is persistently inadequate attention given to measuring the form of a government, with a strong predominance of parliamentarian systems. Likewise, most of the research is focused at the individual level, in where the use of statistical techniques is prevailing, and the mixed methods are, nearly, non-existent. On the other hand, there are no studies that explain incumbency effects on democracy directly. Despite there being plenty of inferences which can be taken from incumbency analysis and its extrapolations about democracy and elections, there is a scarcity of studies that associate both political phenomena. In most cases, scholars analyse incumbency as an advantage in popular elections in developed countries, mainly the U.S. The main argument of this thesis proposes that incumbency has effects on democracy and that those impacts will have adverse consequences on the democratic system. Taking Chile as a case-study, a developing country with a presidential system and with similarities to Western party systems, this research seeks to respond three hypotheses. 1) The categories of support identified by Booth and Seligson in 2009 could, to an extent, be modified by including questions that gauge the role of the presidential institution in the Chilean political system. 2) It is expected that incumbency will be shown to have distinct impacts on democratic political legitimacy. 3) The effect of deputies' re-election on political legitimacy dimensions will depend on the composition of legislative pairs at the electoral district level in Chile: two newcomers, one newcomer and one incumbent, or two incumbents. This investigation uses a mixed method strategy. From a qualitative perspective, I characterise all law bills proposed to the NC to limit the re-elections of public authorities in Chile, between 11th March 1990 and 31st December 2016. In line with this doctoral dissertation's aims, a context analysis is used to analyse the content of draft laws related to incumbency. From a quantitative approach, I examine the legislative incumbency effects on political legitimacy dimensions in Chile, from 2008 to 2014. In line with this doctoral dissertation's aim, a series of statistical techniques are used to analyse the effects of incumbency on political support. The findings suggest that: 1) The effects of incumbency are distributed differently according to the component of political legitimacy. 2) The rotation of political elites (seniority and the circulation of elected deputies) is the most substantial incumbency dimension to explain political support in comparison with the competition dimension. 3) The three indicators based on the margin of victory are only related negatively to support for government management. 4) The HDI has effects on political support, but they were inconsistent. 5) The legislative pair composition produces a moderator effect on incumbency indicators. 6) Politics and ideology play a pivotal role in understanding and explaining political support theory. This research concludes that is necessary to keep expanding studies that relate incumbency and democracy by taking other countries with different electoral systems, that arguments hold by politicians should be adjusted considering evidence, and it is imperative to reduce the perception-facts gap in citizens.