Showing papers in "Research & Politics in 2014"

Is international election observation credible? Evidence from Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe missions

Abstract: While international election observations missions often aim to present generalizable claims about the quality and integrity of an election, their findings are rarely based on a representative sample of observations, undermining the credibility of the missions. Bias in the selection of polling stations, among other things, can inflate or deflate the percentage of polling stations where observers find significant flaws. This article uses original data from Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) election observation missions to illustrate the nature of the problem of selection bias in international election observation, and show how the percentage of ‘bad’ polling stations (in the absence of selection bias) can be estimated through a weighting procedure. The article finds that, while there is a strong degree of selection bias, this does not significantly impact the overall percentage of ‘bad’ polling stations that is reported by OSCE observation missions.

Anchoring the experts: Using vignettes to compare party ideology across countries

Abstract: Expert surveys are a valuable, commonly used instrument to measure party positions. Some critics question the cross-national comparability of these measures, though, suggesting that experts may lack a common anchor for fundamental concepts such as economic left–right. Using anchoring vignettes in the 2010 Chapel Hill Expert Survey, we examine the extent of cross-national difference in expert ideological placements. We find limited evidence of cross-national differences; on the whole, our findings further establish expert surveys as a rigorous instrument for measuring party positions in a cross-national context.

The consequences of political innumeracy

Abstract: The prevalence of political innumeracy – or ignorance of politically relevant numbers – is well-documented. However, little is known about its consequences. We report on three original survey experiments in which respondents were randomly assigned to see correct information about the racial composition of the US population, median income and educational attainment, and the unemployment and poverty rates. Although estimates of these quantities were frequently far from the truth, providing correct information had little effect on attitudes toward relevant public policies.

Are public opinion polls self-fulfilling prophecies?

Abstract: Psychologists have long observed that people conform to majority opinion, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as the ‘bandwagon effect’. In the political domain people learn about prevailing public ...

Using machine-coded event data for the micro-level study of political violence

Abstract: The introduction last year of the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT; Leetaru and Schrodt, 2013) has caused a stir in academic and policy communities alike. With a quarter of a billion observations, a 35-year temporal span, and daily updates through automated coding, the advantages are manifold. Using automatic geo-referencing routines, event data not only come with temporal coordinates, but are also tagged with geographic coordinates. As compared to the previous generation of machine-coded event datasets, this makes the new generation of event data suitable for the micro-level, geo-spatial analysis of political events. In this paper, we assess the use of these datasets for micro-level studies, focusing in particular on political violence where spatial analysis has become a widely used approach. While there has been earlier work attesting to the validity of machinecoded events, our focus in this paper is the quality of geolocalization. In other words, we ask whether machine-coded event datasets can approximate the spatial pattern of a

Welfare migration? Free movement of EU citizens and access to social benefits

Abstract: This article analyzes the political impact of the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) case law concerning the free movement of EU citizens and their cross-border access to social benefits. Public debates about ‘welfare migration’ or ‘social tourism’ often fluctuate between populist hysteria and outright denial, but they obscure the real political and legal issues at stake: that ECJ jurisprudence incrementally broadens EU citizens’ opportunities to claim social benefits abroad while narrowing member states’ scope to regulate and restrict access to national welfare systems. We argue that legal uncertainty challenges national administrations in terms of workload and rule-of-law standards, while domestic legislative reforms increasingly shift the burden of legal uncertainty to EU migrants by raising evidentiary requirements and threatening economically inactive EU citizens with expulsion. We illustrate this argument first with a brief overview of the EU’s legal framework, highlighting the ambiguity of core concepts from the Court’s case law, and then with empirical evidence from the UK, Germany and Austria, analyzing similar domestic responses to the ECJ’s jurisprudence. We conclude that EU citizenship law, while promising to build the union from below on the basis of equal legal entitlements, may, in fact, risk rousing further nationalism and decrease solidarity across the union.

A partisan gap in the supply of female potential candidates in the United States

Abstract: A partisan disparity in women representatives in the US House emerged in the 1980s and has continued to grow in magnitude. We show that this pattern closely mirrors the emergence of a partisan disparity in the proportion of women in the US public with the typical characteristics of high-level officeholders. Our analysis indicates that the proportion of women in the Democratic pool of potential candidates is now two to three times larger than in the Republican pool of potential candidates. Given the current association of party identification with gender and other characteristics, this gap is more likely to increase than decrease over the coming decade, with potential consequences for the descriptive and substantive representation of women in American politics.

Flying under the radar: A study of public attitudes towards unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, have become a central feature of American foreign policy, with over 400 strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen in the last decade. Despite criticisms that have arisen about ethics and legality of this policy, polls have registered high levels of public support for drone strikes. This article shows that the standard formulation of poll questions takes as a given the government’s controversial claims about combatant status and source of legal authorization. I conduct a survey experiment that evaluates how varying the terms of the debate –in particular whether the strikes are compatible with international humanitarian law (IHL) and have legal authorization – affects public support for the drone policy. Treatments that incorporated contested assumptions about IHL meaningfully decreased public support while the public was less moved by questions about domestic or international legal authorization.

Ensemble forecasting of irregular leadership change

Abstract: Using updated Archigos Data, as well as structural and event data, we construct a split-population duration model of irregular leadership changes. These are leadership changes that occur outside of the normal, legal framework for leadership transitions. Our model was estimated in March 2014 and produced probability estimates of leadership changes in many countries in the world. We used a wisdom-of-the-crowds approach to combining estimates from various different models. Ukraine and Thailand are among those in which we had the highest predictions for irregular change of leaders.

Candidate geolocation and voter choice in the 2013 English County Council elections

Abstract: The degree of ‘localness’ of candidates, including their residential location, has long been theorised to influence voters at election time. Individual-level tests of distance effects in the 2010 British general elections demonstrated that, controlling for standard explanations of vote, the distance from a voter’s home to that of the candidate was negatively associated with the likelihood of voting for that candidate. To test this theory in a sub-national electoral context more likely to produce distance effects than a national election, this paper builds upon previous analysis by using the 2013 English County Council elections. It improves upon the previous analysis in a number of ways, analysing an election where ‘localness’ effects would be expected to be stronger; combining a bespoke YouGov survey of voters with more precise locational data; including United Kingdom Independent Party candidates in its specification; and considering more closely how voters construe distance. It finds that distance does matter, not only as a linear measure but also in terms of candidates living in the same or different electoral division to voters. Finally, the paper simulates the effect of distance on candidate performances in this type of election to measure its real-world strength.

Intended and unintended consequences of democracy promotion assistance to Georgia after the Rose Revolution

Abstract: What are the political consequences of democratization assistance to regimes transitioning from authoritarian rule? By exploiting the downstream effects of a field experiment designed to encourage citizen monitoring of Georgia’s 2008 parliamentary elections, we evaluate the political consequences of one type of democracy promotion aid. The intervention increased citizen activism, but it also had the unanticipated effect of suppressing overall voter turnout by approximately 5%. We hypothesize that the civic education campaign was interpreted as a sign of increased political attention to a selected voting precinct, which suppressed opposition turnout. Two additional experiments provide additional evidence for the hypothesis.

Gerrymandering or geography? How Democrats won the popular vote but lost the Congress in 2012

Abstract: This article assesses whether the antimajoritarian outcome in the 2012 US congressional elections was due more to deliberate partisan gerrymandering or asymmetric geographic distribution of partisans. The article first estimates an expected seats–votes slope by fitting past election results to a probit curve, and then measures how well parties performed in 2012 compared to this expectation in each state under various redistricting institutions. I find that while both parties exceeded expectations when controlling the redistricting process, a persistent pro-Republican bias is also present even when maps are drawn by courts or bipartisan agreement. This persistent bias is a greater factor in the nationwide disparity between seats and votes than intentional gerrymandering.

Syria in the Arab Spring: The integration of Syria’s conflict with the Arab uprisings, 2011–2013:

Abstract: How did Syria’s conflict interact with the broader wave of regional protest known as the Arab Spring? This article uses a unique, complete Twitter dataset of tweets including the word “Syria” in En...

Forecasting military expenditure

Abstract: To what extent do frequently cited determinants of military spending allow us to predict and forecast future levels of expenditure? The authors draw on the data and specifications of a recent model on military expenditure and assess the predictive power of its variables using in-sample predictions, out-of-sample forecasts and Bayesian model averaging. To this end, this paper provides guidelines for prediction exercises in general using these three techniques. More substantially, however, the findings emphasize that previous levels of military spending as well as a country’s institutional and economic characteristics particularly improve our ability to predict future levels of investment in the military. Variables pertaining to the international security environment also matter, but seem less important. In addition, the results highlight that the updated model, which drops weak predictors, is not only more parsimonious, but also slightly more accurate than the original specification.

Immigrant threat and national salience: Understanding the "English official" movement in the United States

Abstract: The passage of (and debate over) immigration laws in Arizona highlights the increasing linguistic diversity of the US. To date, 31 states have passed an English-official bill. In this paper, we test several hypotheses concerning the adoption of such legislation across the states. Using data spanning the past three decades, we present event history models on the timing of adoption since the start of the modern movement in 1980. Like previous works, we find that the timing of adoption in states is structured by immigrant population and the initiative process. However, we find a conditional story that has been overlooked to date: the effects of immigrant threat only increase the likelihood of English-official legislation adoption when the issue of immigration is nationally salient.

Public and private beliefs of political leaders: Saddam Hussein in front of a crowd and behind closed doors:

Abstract: We ask if the public speech of political leaders is diagnostic of their private beliefs, and investigate through content analysis of the rhetoric of Saddam Hussein, the former president of Iraq. We collected Saddam’s public speeches and interviews on international affairs from 1977–2000, producing a data set of 330,000 words. From transcripts of Saddam speaking in private, we garnered a comparison corpus of 58,000 words. These text-sets were processed to locate markers of conflict, control and complexity. We find that Saddam’s hostile, conflict-oriented worldview and his perception of himself as a significant political actor was consistent across public and private domains. The major difference between these spheres was his more complex private view of international affairs compared to his more definitive public stance. Our evidence supports the notion that private beliefs can be inferred from the public speech of political leaders.

Who participates in communal violence? Survey evidence from South Africa

Abstract: Little is known about the thousands of people who take part in communal violence. Existing research is largely based on interviews, impressionistic accounts and government records of arrestees. In contrast, this paper examines data from a novel survey of a representative sample of residents of Alexandra, a township in South Africa where a 2008 nation-wide wave of anti-immigrant riots began. Data on participation in the attacks were collected using a method ensuring the privacy of responses, thus potentially reducing response bias. In contrast to the conclusions of existing research, which emphasize the participation of young males, the survey data reveal that a significant number of participants were female and participants were not particularly young, being 34 years old on average. Participants are more likely to support an opposition party, attend community policing meetings and have a high-school education.

What Makes a Prime Minister Great?: A Leadership Trait Analysis of the effectiveness of British Prime Ministers from 1902 to 2004

Abstract: What role do the Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA) criteria projected by a British Prime Minister (PM) have on the perceived effectiveness of their time in office? In this paper, the analysis of 20th-century British PMs utilized automated at-a-distance content analysis and the LTA coding system to determine the conceptual complexity, ability to control events, and need for power scores projected by PMs. The impact these traits had on the perceived effectiveness of the totality of the PMs’ tenure in office, as measured by the 2004 MORI/University of Leeds survey, was then examined via one-tailed ordinary least squares regression.This project provides evidence that British PMs who project traits associated with the LTA measure regarding strong power motivation are significantly viewed as more effective while in office. These findings provide more than a novel historical profile of British PMs. The relationship between effective leadership and LTA traits could be utilized by political campaigns, especially giv...

Societal implications of antidiscrimination policy in Europe

Abstract: The enactment and implementation of European Union Directives on antidiscrimination have received substantial scholarly attention. However, there is little knowledge about whether and how antidiscrimination measures influence citizens’ experiences and perceptions of discrimination. This study investigates the relationship between antidiscrimination policies, citizens’ knowledge in this policy area, and their handling of discrimination. Using data from a standardized policy indicator and repeated cross-sectional survey waves of EU countries, I first examine the relationship between antidiscrimination policy and societal levels of knowledge about victims’ rights. Subsequently, multilevel models test how differences in policy and knowledge levels predict individuals’ reported levels of experienced and perceived discrimination. The results show that people who live in countries with effective antidiscrimination laws know more about their rights to equal treatment than those from countries with less effective policies. For the most part, policy differences across countries are unsystematically related to discrimination-related outcomes. However, an increase in knowledge levels over time is associated with higher reports about witnessed discrimination, lower sociotropic perceptions of discrimination, and less individual self-identification with a discriminated group. The findings suggest that, to the extent that antidiscrimination policies foster knowledge of the law, they contribute to citizens’ awareness and empowerment against discrimination.

Democracy is good for the poor: A procedural replication of Ross (2006)

Abstract: Here I propose procedural replication as a method for diagnosing errors and omissions and identifying research artifacts in published studies. The goal of procedural replication is not to make substantive contributions so much as improve research practice, or how scientists go about doing science. This is accomplished by generating checklists of lessons learned that scholars can use to assess the reliability of new or existing studies, guide editorial reviews, and make scientific knowledge production more reliable. I demonstrate the method by implementing a procedural replication of Michael Ross’s controversial finding that democracy has no effect on child mortality. I find this null finding is an artifact of the way five-year averages were computed and the static nature of the preferred model. I demonstrate, using causal diagrams, how concerns about listwise deletion and selection bias affecting previous studies may have been overstated. I also provide a checklist with lessons learned.

A call of duty in hard times: Duty to vote and the Spanish Economic Crisis

Abstract: Although scarce, the literature addressing the effects of the economy on voter turnout and political attitudes has yielded mixed results. By using individual, longitudinal data from Spain—a country devastated by the Great Recession—our study illuminates how the latest economic crisis has impacted citizens’ perceptions of voting. We analyze how economic conditions and perceptions of the economy have transformed the belief that voting is a civic duty, which is one of the strongest attitudinal predictors of turnout. Our results suggest that hard times slightly weaken citizens’ sense of civic duty, particularly among the youngest. However, the adverse effects of the economic crisis are compensated by the positive effects of the electoral context, and as a consequence there is no aggregate decline in civic duty during the period examined (2010–2012).

Neoliberal reform and protest in Latin American democracies: A replication and correction

Abstract: 1. Frederick Solt[1][1] 2. Dongkyu Kim[1][1] 3. Kyu Young Lee[1][1] 4. Spencer Willardson[2][2] 5. Seokdong Kim[3][3] 1. 1University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA 2. 2Nazarbayev University 3. 3Sungkyunkwan University 1. Frederick Solt, University of Iowa, 341 Schaeffer Hall, Iowa City, IA 52245, USA. Email: frederick-solt{at}uiowa.edu Do neoliberal economic reforms in Latin American democracies mobilize citizens to overcome their collective action problems and protest? A recent addition to the scholarship on this crucial question of the relationship of markets and politics, Bellinger and Arce (2011), concludes that economic liberalization does have this effect, working to repoliticize collective actors and reinvigorate democracy. We reexamine the article’s analyses and demonstrate that they misinterpret the marginal effect of the variables of theoretical interest. Thus, the article’s optimistic claims about the consequences for democracy of economic liberalization in the region are not supported by its own empirical results. It is argued here that its results suggest instead that protests became more common in autocracies when they moved away from markets. Rather than speaking to how people have mobilized to protest against liberal reforms in Latin America’s democracies, the work’s analyses illuminate only when people protested against the region’s dictatorships. [1]: #aff-1 [2]: #aff-2 [3]: #aff-3

Predicting the duration of the Syrian insurgency

Abstract: While there were several relatively short uprisings in Northern Africa and the Middle East during the Arab Spring, the dispute between the rebels and government forces in Syria has evolved into a full-scale civil war. We try to predict the length of the Syrian insurgency with a three-stage technique. Using out-of-sample techniques, we first assess the predictive capacity of 69 explanatory variables for insurgency duration. After determining the model with the highest predictive power, we categorize Syria according to the variables in this final model. Based on in-sample approaches, we then predict the duration of the Syrian uprising for three different scenarios. The most realistic point prediction is 5.12 years from the insurgency’s start, which suggests an end date between the end of 2016 and early 2017.

Regression to causality: Regression-style presentation influences causal attribution

Abstract: Humans are fundamentally primed for making causal attributions based on correlations. This implies that researchers must be careful to present their results in a manner that inhibits unwarranted causal attribution. In this paper, we present the results of an experiment that suggests regression models – one of the primary vehicles for analyzing statistical results in political science – encourage causal interpretation. Specifically, we demonstrate that presenting observational results in a regression model, rather than as a simple comparison of means, makes causal interpretation of the results more likely. Our experiment drew on a sample of 235 university students from three different social science degree programs (political science, sociology and economics), all of whom had received substantial training in statistics. The subjects were asked to compare and evaluate the validity of equivalent results presented as either regression models or as a t-test of two sample means. Our experiment shows that the su...

Civil war and the severity of militarized interstate disputes

Abstract: Previous work has suggested that civil wars can increase the risk of militarized interstate conflict. This research note examines the severity of different suggested linkages between civil war and international conflict using data from 1946 to 2001. The results show that instances of direct intervention and interstate coercion are associated with more severe interstate disputes, comparable in magnitude to the severity of territorial disputes. By contrast, disputes that entail pursuit of rebels across international borders, efforts to deter externalization and spillover events tend to have lower severity. The results underscore the important potential role of internal war for interstate conflicts as well as what types of conflict linkages seem to go together with more severe disputes.

Order in chaos: Ballot order effects in a post-conflict election?

Abstract: Ballot order effects are well documented in established democracies, but less so in newly democratizing countries. In this research note we analyze ballot order effects in the 2010 parliamentary election in Afghanistan. The election provides a first look at ballot order effects in a high stakes, post-conflict election. In this setting, we argue that limited cognitive skills and information are more likely explanations of potential ballot order effects than mechanisms of lacking effort or ambivalence of choice. However, we find no clear evidence of a positive effect on the vote share of a higher ballot position. This raises the broader question of how applicable anomalies found in political behavior are to post-conflict democracies.

What a world assembly could look like

Abstract: I identify some basic institutional features that can make a world assembly viable in terms of size and degree of complexity. The most potentially satisfactory model is a bicameral assembly formed by a lower chamber with about 2000 seats (of which about one-fourth would be elected in single-member districts and about three-fourths in multimember districts of proportional representation with moderate magnitude) and an upper chamber of territorial representation based on about 700 territorial units all across the world (basically corresponding to the nearly 200 currently independent states plus about 500 regional governments).

Regional integration and national social policies

Abstract: How does regionalization affect national social policies? Although there is an extensive literature on the effects of globalization on social protection, the literature on the impact of regional integration is much less developed. I argue that the distinctive nature of regionalization processes calls for rigorous empirical testing of the domestic policy effects of regional integration. To this end, using an innovative dataset that measures the degree to which countries are integrated into regional economic and political organizations, this article uses statistical analysis to consider the influence of regional integration on government social spending. The results are surprising: regionalization has a significant and positive relationship with government social spending, controlling for other factors, even when the European Union countries are excluded from the analysis. In fact, in the EU countries increasing regionalization is associated with lower social spending levels. These results suggest that regional economic and political integration does not necessarily lead to a “race to the bottom” of social spending. Instead, regionalization appears to accommodate wide divergence in national social policy commitments.