When growth is not enough: inequality, economic gains, and executive approval

A robust economy is assumed to bolster leaders' standing. This ignores how benefits of growth are distributed. Extending the partisan models of economic voting, we theorize executives are more likely rewarded when gains from growth go to their constituents. Analyses of presidential approval in 18 Latin American countries support our pro-constituency model of accountability. When economic inequality is high, growth concentrates among the rich, and approval of right-of-center presidents is higher. Leftist presidents benefit from growth when gains are more equally distributed. Further analyses show growth and inequality inform perceptions of personal finances differently based on wealth, providing a micro-mechanism behind the aggregate findings. Study results imply that the economy is not purely a valence issue, but also a position issue.

Separation of powers with ideological parties

Separation of powers with checks and balances (SP) is usually regarded as a key institution complementing elections in the control of elected officials. However, some analysts and many politicians also warn that excessive checks on the executive in the presence of polarization may lead to political inaction. We analyze the interaction between elections and SP, and study under what circumstances they complement each other. We first introduce a political agency model with ideological parties where citizens and politicians care about rents (a valence issue) and policy (a positional issue). Then, we analyze the impact of SP on the effectiveness of elections to discipline and select politicians. We demonstrate that SP unambiguously raises a majority of voters’ welfare in highly polarized non-competitive political environments, because it strengthens both discipline and selection without causing political gridlock. SP also raises voters’ welfare if elections are very effective at disciplining first period incumbents. Nevertheless, SP may reduce voters’ welfare if most rents go undetected and reform is not a first-order issue.

Social Assistance, Electoral Competition, and Political Branding in Malawi

Whilst partisan competition has fuelled the expansion of social assistance across much of Africa, social assistance has generally been a valence issue. In Malawi, unusually, the competing presidential candidates and their parties in the 2014 election staked out starkly contrasting positions on social assistance as part of their attempted supra-regional and supra-ethnic political ‘branding’. The incumbent president, Joyce Banda, championed social assistance for women, children, and the poor, whilst her rivals denounced ‘handouts’ and emphasized instead economic growth and support for peasant farmers. Banda’s defeat suggests that there are limits to the efficacy of social assistance for political branding. Nonetheless, the fact that she used this brand at all suggests that social assistance has grown in political significance as an expression of pro-poor priorities.

Voting for Victors: Why Violent Actors Win Postwar Elections

Why do citizens elect political actors who have perpetrated violence against the civilian population? Despite their use of atrocities, political parties with deep roots in the belligerent organizations of the past win postwar democratic elections in countries around the world. This article uses new, cross-national data on postwar elections globally between 1970 and 2010, as well as voting, survey, archival, and interview data from El Salvador. It finds that belligerents’ varied electoral success after wars can be explained not by their wartime levels of violence or use of electoral coercion, but by the distribution of military power at the end of conflict. It argues that militarily stronger belligerents are able to claim credit for peace, which translates into a reputation for competence on the provision of security. This enables them to own the security valence issue, which tends to crosscut cleavages, and to appeal to swing voters. The stronger belligerents’ provision of security serves to offset and justify their use of atrocities, rendering their election rational. This article sheds light on political life after episodes of violence. It also contributes to understanding security voting and offers insights into why people vote in seemingly counterintuitive ways.

What explains variation in parties’ climate change salience?

The article explains the variation of climate change salience in party manifestos, examining the effects of party characteristics. Creating a novel measure of parties’ climate change salience based on Comparative Manifesto Project data, the article finds that parties have broadly not made climate change a salient issue, though significant differences remain. Left–right ideology significantly helps explain these differences and is more important than any other party characteristic in explaining the variation. This underlines the importance of ideology over economic and policy preferences, size and strategic incentives and incumbency constraints and points towards the partisan (as opposed to the valence) nature of the climate change issue. These results contrast to those of an identical analysis of environmental salience where ideology is found to have no effect, underlining how the two issues should be treated differently and lending further support to the argument that climate change is not a valence issue.

Pocketbook vs. Sociotropic Corruption Voting

The article examines the relationship between corruption and voting behavior by defining two distinct channels:pocketbook corruption voting, i.e. how personal experiences with corruption affect voting behavior; andsociotropic corruption voting, i.e. how perceptions of corruption in society do so. Individual and aggregate data from Slovakia fail to support hypotheses that corruption is an undifferentiated valence issue, that it depends on the presence of a viable anti-corruption party, or that voters tolerate (or even prefer) corruption, and support the hypothesis that the importance of each channel depends on thesalienceof each source of corruption and that pocketbook corruption voting prevails unless a credible anti-corruption party shifts media coverage of corruption and activates sociotropic corruption voting. Previous studies may have underestimated the prevalence of corruption voting by not accounting for both channels.

The Compleat Economic Voter: New Theory and British Evidence

Almost all the prolific work done on economic voting has been based on the classic reward–punishment model, which treats the economy as a valence issue. The economy is a valence issue, but it is much more than that. This article explores two other dimensions of economic voting – position and patrimony. Investigating a 2010 British survey containing relevant measures on these three dimensions, the authors estimate their impact on vote intention, using a carefully specified system of equations. According to the evidence reported, each dimension of economic voting has its own independent effect. Moreover, together, they reveal a ‘compleat’ economic voter, who wields considerable power over electoral choice in Britain. This new result confirms and extends recent work on American and French elections.

Unemployment and the Democratic Electoral Advantage

This article calls into question the conventional wisdom that incumbent parties are rewarded when unemployment is low and punished when it is high. Using county-level data on unemployment and election returns for 175 midterm gubernatorial elections and 4 presidential elections from 1994 to 2010, the analysis finds that unemployment and the Democratic vote for president and governor move together. Other things being equal, higher unemployment increases the vote shares of Democratic candidates. The effect is greatest when Republicans are the incumbent party, but Democrats benefit from unemployment even when they are in control. The explanation for these findings is that unemployment is a partisan issue for voters, not a valence issue, and that the Democratic Party “owns” unemployment. When unemployment is high or rising, Democratic candidates can successfully convince voters that they are the party best able to solve the problem.