Why does vote buying persist under the secret ballot? We argue initiating vote-buying transactions allows politicians to undermine voter confidence in the secret ballot, and thus to induce voter compliance. Our analysis consists of three parts. First, we present evidence from a survey experiment in Mexico that shows receiving material goods from a candidate diminishes voter confidence in ballot integrity. Next, we introduce an informational theory of vote buying that explains this phenomenon. Specifically, we develop a model of vote buying as a signaling game, in which a voter who is ex ante uncertain about a politician's capacity to monitor voter behavior learns new information from the politician's actions. Finally, we test the key insights from the model in a lab experiment. Our results suggest that, under certain conditions, offering material goods to voters is sufficient to erode their confidence in ballot secrecy, making vote buying effective.

Can democracies attract and elect politicians who are both high-ability and from diverse backgrounds? Using data covering the entire Danish population, including every candidate for local and national elections in 1990–2015, we explore the selection of political candidates. We show that Danish candidates and elected politicians have higher ability than the voters they represent, that selection on ability reflects individual skills rather than social background, that politicians are selected from economically diverse backgrounds, and that there is no substantial trade-off between ability and representation. Furthermore, we utilize a major structural reform, which significantly reduced the number of municipalities in Denmark, to show that increased political competition did not affect politicians’ ability, economic background, or the trade-off between the two.

Technological change often increases demand for high-skilled jobs, with low-skilled losers turning to the populist right in response. The political effects of technological change that increases demand for low-skilled workers are largely unknown. The growth of the salmon fish-farming industry in rural Norway improved the labor-market situation for low-skilled workers, and we find that support for the populist right-wing party increased in municipalities that benefitted from the industry growth. The electoral change is due to a right-wing shift on the economic, but not the cultural dimension. Our results support political economy frameworks that point to lower demand for state interventions after positive labor market shocks, but raise the question of in what contexts support for populism will decline.

We study the effect of compulsory civic duty on turnout. We take advantage of a natural experiment in Spain, where electoral officers are selected through a lottery and being an electoral officer is compulsory for those drafted. We analyze whether acting as an officer changes turnout and attitudes in subsequent elections. Our findings show that compulsory civic duty has a strong short-term and positive effect on electoral participation, but has no impact on political attitudes. The positive effect of the civic duty treatment, however, fades after a few months. Our results have implications for theories about civic duty and the formation of political habits.

Oil discoveries, paired with delays in production, have created a new phenomenon: sustained post-discovery, pre-production periods. While research on the resource curse has debated the effects of oil on governance and conflict, less is known about the political effects of oil discoveries absent production. Using comprehensive electoral data from Uganda and a difference-in-differences design with heterogeneous effects, we show that oil discoveries increased electoral support for the incumbent chief executive in localities proximate to discoveries, even prior to production. Moreover, the biggest effects occurred in localities that were historically most electorally competitive. Overall, we show that the political effects of oil discoveries vary subnationally depending on local political context and prior to production, with important implications for understanding the roots of the political and conflict curses.

While a number of high-level figures around the world have been prosecuted and even jailed for corruption in recent years, we know little about how such anticorruption efforts shape public opinion and patterns of political engagement. To address this question, we examine evidence from Argentina and Costa Rica involving the unprecedented sentencing of two former Presidents on corruption charges. Exploiting the coincidence in timing between these cases and fieldwork on nationally representative surveys, we find that citizens interviewed in the aftermath of these events expressed lower trust in institutions and were less willing to vote or join in collective demonstrations. Overall, these findings suggest that high-profile efforts to punish corrupt actors may have similar effects as political scandals in shaping citizens’ relationship to the political system.

The rise of populist forces in Western democracies is often linked to representation failures. However, to date we lack causally identified evidence for the effect of parties’ representation on populist attitudes. We address this lacuna through a survey experiment conducted in 12 European Union countries involving 23,257 subjects. Our experiment manipulates citizens’ perceptions of being represented by national parties in the 2019 European elections campaign, and identifies the effect of perceived representation on populist attitudes. The results reveal that poor representation increases populist attitudes in respondents that did not express such attitudes pretreatment, but has no effect among those who were already populist. We demonstrate that this effect is primarily due to parties’ representation failures triggering citizens’ anti-elite sentiment.

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.

The COVID-19 pandemic is an unparalleled global crisis. Yet, despite the grave adversity faced by citizens, incumbents around the world experienced a boost in popularity during the onset of the outbreak. In this study, we examine how the response to the COVID-19 outbreak in one country affected incumbent support in other countries. Specifically, we leverage the fact that the first country-wide lockdown on European soil, in Italy on 9 March 2020, happened during the fieldwork of surveys conducted in four other European countries, France, Germany, Poland and Spain. This allows us to examine how an event abroad that alerted citizens to an imminent crisis—prior to a similar domestic government response—influenced incumbent support. Our results indicate a crisis signal effect of Italy's COVID-19 lockdown, as support for the incumbent increased domestically in other European countries after the lockdown. Importantly, these findings suggest that incumbents can benefit from a crisis unfolding in other countries, even when their own performance in response to the same crisis is not yet fully clear. They illustrate the importance of developments abroad for incumbent approval and the difficulty facing citizens seeking to disentangle performance signals from exogenous shocks.

Are individuals in violent contexts reluctant to tackle corruption for fear of future violence? Or does violence mobilize them to fight corruption? We investigate these questions looking at the effects of fear and violence stemming from the Mexican Drug War on attitudes toward corruption. We conducted two surveys before the 2012 Mexican presidential election. First, as part of a nationally representative survey, we find a positive correlation between fear of violence and willingness to accept corruption in exchange for lower levels of violence. To disentangle causal effects, we conducted a follow-up survey experiment in Greater Mexico City where we manipulated fear over the Drug War. We find that individuals within this context are not easily scared. Those who received a common fear-inducing manipulation do not report higher levels of fear and are less willing to tolerate corruption. Conversely, we find strong evidence that individuals who have been victims of crime are more likely to report both higher levels of fear and willingness to accept corruption if it lowers violence. Our findings suggest that voters are more strategic and resilient in the face of violence than many extant theories of political behavior suggest.

Why do so many voters in African countries vote for minor ethnic parties instead of unifying into a powerful multi-ethnic opposition coalition? I present a model that demonstrates that as the incumbent devotes more resources to programmatic goods, which voters can access regardless of how they voted, the opportunity cost of voting for a sincerely preferred, but losing, candidate decreases. I provide experimental and cross-national observational evidence that voters are more likely to support a minor party as they perceive more or more valuable goods being distributed programmatically. Those who perceive poor distribution, or only clientelist distribution, instead vote strategically for a major opposition party. In general, support for minor parties increases along with positive outcomes and approval of the incumbent.

Does political office cause worse or better longevity prospects? Two perspectives in the literature offer contradicting answers. First, increased income, social status, and political connections obtained through holding office can increase longevity. Second, increased stress and working hours associated with holding office can have detrimental effects on longevity. To provide causal evidence, we exploit a regression discontinuity design with unique data on the longevity of candidates for US gubernatorial office. The results show that politicians winning a close election live 5–10 years longer than candidates who lose.

In this study we focus on party organizational characteristics as key determinants of party congruence. We examine how the horizontal and vertical integration of parties is linked to representation in comparative perspective. We further focus on how congruence is achieved by detailing our expectation regarding effects on the uncertainty versus bias in the estimates of party constituents' opinion. Exploiting a comparative database on political parties and data from Comparative Studies of Electoral Systems, we show that having a complex organizational structure and being leadership dominated makes parties less representative of their constituencies. These findings carry important implications for the study of political representation but also for the literature on political parties in crisis.

This contribution starts by presenting the three main approaches that political scientists use to analyze labor market vulnerability. We proceed to discuss various operationalizations of labor market vulnerability. We examine how they relate to the three theoretical approaches and we evaluate the consistency between theory and measurement. Finally, we recommend three measures that political scientists should deploy when analyzing the effect of labor market vulnerability on political preferences. We point out what each of these variables captures and what methodological challenges should be taken into account when using them.

Why do left parties lose vote shares in times of economic crisis and hardship? Why do right-wing governments implement seemingly left-wing policies, such as labor market activation? Why is representation becoming more and more unequal? And why do workers vote for right-wing populist parties? Several political science theories propose meaningful and important answers to these key questions for comparative politics, focusing on identity politics, programmatic convergence of parties or exogenous constraints. However, there is an additional and distinct approach to all of the questions above, which emphasizes socio-structural transformations in the labor market: most of the processes above can be understood with reference to increasing labor market inequality and its political implications. The relevance and explanatory power of labor market inequality for mass politics have not been fully acknowledged in comparative political science and this is the reason for this symposium. Labor market inequality affects political preferences and behavior, electoral politics, representation, and government strategies. The main purpose of our symposium is to make broader comparative politics research aware of the crucial structural changes that labor markets have undergone in the advanced capitalist democracies of the OECD, and of the tremendous implications these changes have had for politics.

The growing research on post-industrial labor market inequality bears a strong—yet widely misunderstood—relevance for the literature on electoral realignment. In this contribution, I contend that the assumption of “labor market outsiders” being equal to “globalization/modernization losers” is largely mistaken. Rather, atypical work and unemployment is most widespread among service workers, whose primary electoral choice is to abstain from voting. This implies that the ongoing reconfiguration of European party systems—through the rise of right-wing populist parties—is driven by skilled and routine workers in the manufacturing sector (the traditional “insiders”). Hence, the rise of right-wing populist parties reflects a political mobilization of the formerly well-protected industrial working class, rather than of labor market outsiders.