Who gets represented in legislatures, and how does this depend on electoral institutions? Others have asked this question from the perspective of gender, race, and class. We focus on space, asking whether MPs disproportionately come from some places rather than others and how this depends on electoral rules. Using data on over 13,000 legislators in sixty-two democracies, we developed a new measure to determine whether the spatial distribution of MP birthplaces matched the spatial distribution of the citizens they represented. Contrary to received wisdom, single-member district systems do not have more geographically representative parliaments than multi-member district systems, while mixed-member systems perform significantly better than both. We attribute the higher spatial representativeness of mixed-member systems to the contamination effects in their single-member tier. We present evidence for this explanation from a within-country analysis of elections in Italy, the UK, and Germany.

Slowing the process of global warming will require sustained reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over decades, which in turn depends on public support for decarbonization. We are beginning to see evidence of success in cutting emissions. Will wider recognition of this “good news” strengthen or soften support for further action? In contrast to previous research showing a demotivating effect of good news about climate mitigation, our pre-registered survey experiment finds no average impact of factual reports of climate progress on Americans’ worries about climate change, perception of efficacy in fighting climate change, willingness to pay additional taxes, support for green industrial policy, or willingness to donate to a climate NGO, and no evidence of heterogeneous effects across relevant subgroups. Given the importance of sustained public support for decarbonization, these null results can be seen as good news for mitigation policy, but more research is needed to assess the impact of the perceived tractability of climate mitigation on support for mitigation efforts.

Advocates of the instant-runoff voting system (IRV) often argue that it is less susceptible to strategic voting than plurality. Is this true? More generally, how should we define and measure a voting system's susceptibility to strategic voting? Previous research in this area is unsatisfying, partly because it ignores the uncertainty voters face when they vote; we introduce a better approach. We find that, when beliefs are precise and other voters are expected to vote sincerely, more voters would benefit from voting strategically in IRV than in plurality (contrary to what advocates suggest). The anticipated benefit for these voters is small, however, and for the average voter the benefit of taking strategy into account is many times larger in plurality than IRV—especially when beliefs are imprecise or voters expect other voters to behave strategically. The methods we introduce can be used to study other properties of voting systems when voters are strategic.

Placebo tests are increasingly common in applied social science research, but the methodological literature has not previously offered a comprehensive account of what we learn from them. We define placebo tests as tools for assessing the plausibility of the assumptions underlying a research design relative to some departure from those assumptions. We offer a typology of tests defined by the aspect of the research design that is altered to produce it (outcome, treatment, or population) and the type of assumption that is tested (bias assumptions or distributional assumptions). Our formal framework clarifies the extra assumptions necessary for informative placebo tests; these assumptions can be strong, and in some cases similar assumptions would justify a different procedure allowing the researcher to relax the research design's assumptions rather than test them. Properly designed and interpreted, placebo tests can be an important device for assessing the credibility of empirical research designs.

Do some types of voters vote more strategically than others? We examine this question using a large survey in Canada that asked respondents to rate not just parties and party leaders but also local candidates. Using a new technique for combining multiple preference measures into a single utility estimate, we find that better educated voters and richer voters vote more strategically, as do women and older voters (although the latter two differences are smaller). Together with recent evidence from the United Kingdom, these results suggest that (at least in multicandidate first-past-the-post elections) the same types of voters who are more likely to turn out are also more likely to make their votes count.

AbstractWe use a natural experiment to study how the announcement of the UK COVID‐19 lockdown affected citizens' attitudes towards the pandemic and the government's response to it. On the day of the lockdown announcement, YouGov ran a survey that captured responses before and after the announcement. Comparison of these responses suggests that the lockdown announcement made people more supportive of the government's response to the crisis but also (perhaps surprisingly) more concerned about the pandemic. Analysis of heterogeneous treatment effects suggests that the announcement narrowed gaps in perceptions of the crisis, increasing support for the government's response especially among those who had been least supportive and increasing concern about the pandemic especially among those who had been least concerned. Overall, the findings highlight a tension inherent in governing during times of crisis: actions that increase people's confidence in government and induce compliance with government directives may also tend to increase anxiety among the population.

In a recent paper, 1 John Lott Jr. claims to find evidence of anti-Trump fraud in the absentee counting procedure in Fulton County, Georgia, and Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Using Lott’s own data, we show that his claims are utterly baseless. Lott uses an unusual estimation strategy that suffers from a subtle but fundamental flaw: his conclusions about fraud in Fulton and Allegheny counties are entirely dependent on the completely arbitrary order in which pairs of precincts in other counties are entered in the dataset. When we rerun Lott’s analysis using an alternative but equally justifiable coding rule, the evidence for anti-Trump fraud in these two counties entirely disappears. When we replace Lott’s unusual specification with a more standard estimation strategy, we find absolutely no evidence of fraud. In short, Lott’s (2020) analysis provides no evidence of anything distinctive or suspicious about the absentee ballot results in either Fulton County or Allegheny County. ∗ We thank John Lott for sharing his data on the same day we made the request. 1 John Lott Jr., “A Simple Test for the Extent of Voter Fraud with Absentee Ballots in the 2020 Presidential Election”. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract id=3756988.

After the 2020 US presidential election Donald Trump refused to concede, alleging widespread and unparalleled voter fraud. Trump's supporters deployed several statistical arguments in an attempt to cast doubt on the result. Reviewing the most prominent of these statistical claims, we conclude that none of them is even remotely convincing. The common logic behind these claims is that, if the election were fairly conducted, some feature of the observed 2020 election result would be unlikely or impossible. In each case, we find that the purportedly anomalous fact is either not a fact or not anomalous.

The convention in the news media is to announce a recession if a country experiences two consecutive quarters of negative growth. We exploit the arbitrary threshold implied by this practice to identify the economic impact of recession announcements through a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD). Estimation results show that news of a recession leads to a discontinuous fall in consumer confidence, consumption growth and final estimates of GDP growth in a panel of countries. The effect is large, robust and statistically significant.

Strategic voting is an important explanation for aggregate political phenomena, but we know little about how strategic voting varies across types of voters. Are richer voters more strategic than poorer voters? Does strategic behavior vary with age, education, gender, or political leaning? The answers may be important for assessing how well an electoral system represents different preferences in society. We introduce a new approach to measuring and comparing strategic voting across voters that can be broadly applied, given appropriate survey data. In recent British elections, we find that older voters vote more strategically than younger voters and that richer voters vote more strategically than poorer voters, even as strategic behavior varies little across the education level. The differences in strategic voting by age and income are smaller than observed differences in turnout by age and income, but they tend to exacerbate these better-known inequalities in political participation.

I introduce a diagram for describing and analyzing single-winner elections in which voters rank the candidates—a class of voting systems including positional methods (e.g. plurality, Borda count, anti-plurality), Condorcet methods, and instant-runoff voting (i.e. ranked-choice voting or the alternative vote). The diagram shows how the outcome of an election depends on each candidate’s share of top rankings as a function of the voting system and the pattern of lower rankings. Using as examples two Brexit polls, a mayoral election in San Francisco, and the US’s first instant-runoff congressional election (all since 2018), I show how the diagram can concisely present preferences and results under different voting systems, identify Condorcet cycles, highlight system properties such as join-inconsistency and the no-show paradox, and illuminate strategic voting incentives.

In many countries, important features of municipal government (such as the electoral system, mayors' salaries, and the number of councillors) depend on whether the municipality is above or below arbitrary population thresholds. Several papers have used a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to measure the effects of these threshold-based policies on political and economic outcomes. Using evidence from France, Germany, and Italy, we highlight two common pitfalls that arise in exploiting population-based policies (confounded treatment and sorting) and we provide guidance for detecting and addressing these pitfalls. Even when these problems are present, population-threshold RDD may be the best available research design for studying the effects of certain policies and political institutions.

Previous research suggests that female politicians face higher standards in public life, perhaps in part because female voters expect more from female politicians than from male politicians. Most of this research is based on observational evidence. We assess the relationship between accountability and gender using a novel survey vignette experiment fielded in the United Kingdom in which voters choose between a hypothetical incumbent (who could be male or female, corrupt or noncorrupt) and another candidate. We do not find that female politicians face significantly greater punishment for misconduct. However, the effect of politician gender on punishment varies by voter gender, with female voters in particular more likely to punish female politicians for misconduct. Our findings have implications for research on how descriptive representation affects electoral accountability and on why corruption tends to correlate negatively with women’s representation.

Previous researchers have speculated that incumbency effects are larger when voters have weaker partisan preferences, but evidence for this relationship is surprisingly weak. We offer a fresh look at the question by examining the United Kingdom's multiparty system. In general, the electoral value of incumbency should depend on the proportion of voters who are nearly indifferent between the parties competing for incumbency; in a multiparty system, that proportion may differ across constituencies depending on which parties are locally competitive. After first showing that UK voters in recent decades have stronger preferences between Conservatives and Labour than between Conservatives and Liberals, we show that incumbency effects are larger in close contests between Conservatives and Liberals than in close contests between Conservatives and Labour. By documenting how partisanship influences incumbency effects, our analysis shows that the comparative study of incumbency effects offers broader insights into electoral accountability across political systems.

Empirical studies of incumbency effects continue to accumulate, but progress in explaining these findings is modest. I introduce a simple framework that clarifies how differences in candidate characteristics (i.e., quality) could account for empirical findings of incumbency effects based on regression discontinuity designs (RDD). The key observation is that although RDD ensures that marginal winners and losers of close elections are comparable, the candidates who compete in the next election may differ for many reasons, of which "scare-off" (the tendency of incumbents to deter strong challengers) is just one. Using a simple model, I show that quality differences between marginal incumbent-party candidates and their opponents may persist even when incumbency is irrelevant to voters, incumbent retirement is random, and all new candidates are drawn from the same candidate pool. I conclude by showing how quality differences can help explain puzzling findings in prior empirical work.

This article considers the emergence of an informal institution vital to the functioning of Westminster polities: that the Shadow Cabinet is a ‘government in waiting’. It compares the evidence for two theoretical accounts of its timing: a ‘procedural’ theory wherein the Shadow Cabinet is a solution to internal organizational issues in the House of Commons prior to widespread working-class voting, and a ‘competition’ theory that predicts that suffrage extension acts as a key stimulus for Shadow Cabinet organization. Gathering a dataset of almost a million utterances in parliament between the First and Fourth Reform Acts, the study provides a novel method of identifying Shadow Cabinet members using the surges in term use from their speeches. It finds that the ‘competition’ hypothesis is the most plausible version of events, and that the opposition responded to the new ‘party-orientated electorate’ by strategically reorganizing in a way that mimicked the cabinet’s structure.

We show how to use multilevel modeling and post-stratification to estimate legislative outcomes under counterfactual representation schemes that, for example, boost the representation of women or translate votes into seats differently. We apply this technique to two research questions: (1) Would the U.S. Congress be less polarized if state delegations were formed according to the principle of party proportional representation? (2) Would there have been stronger support for legalizing same-sex marriage in the U.K. House of Commons if Parliament more closely reflected the population in gender and age?

Which parties benefit from open-list (as opposed to closed-list) proportional representation elections? This article shows that a move from closed-list to open-list competition is likely to be more favorable to parties with more internal disagreement on salient issues; this is because voters who might have voted for a unified party under closed lists may be drawn to specific candidates within internally divided parties under open lists. The study provides experimental evidence of this phenomenon in a hypothetical European Parliament election in the UK, in which using an open-list ballot would shift support from UKIP (the Eurosceptic party) to Eurosceptic candidates of the Conservative Party. The findings suggest that open-list ballots could restrict support for parties that primarily mobilize on a single issue.

Many studies find that voter turnout is higher in proportional representation (PR) elections than in plurality elections, but because the two systems differ in multiple ways and are used in different contexts it is difficult to know precisely why. I focus on municipal elections in France, where cities above a certain population threshold are required to use a PR system while those below use a type of plurality rule; this setting allows me to compare political outcomes across electoral systems while holding fixed a large set of social and political features. I find that the PR system noticeably increases turnout compared with plurality. I provide evidence suggesting that it does so in part by encouraging turnout in lopsided races and in part by inducing entry of new candidates. The findings highlight the importance of electoral proportionality in explaining cross-national differences in voter turnout.

In many countries, important features of municipal government (such as the electoral system, mayors’ salaries, and the number of councillors) depend on whether the municipality is above or below arbitrary population thresholds. Several papers have used a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to measure the effects of these threshold-based policies on political and economic outcomes. Using evidence from France, Germany, and Italy, we highlight two common pitfalls that arise in exploiting population-based policies (confounded treatment and sorting) and we provide guidance for detecting and addressing these pitfalls. Even when these problems are present, population-threshold RDD may be the best available research design for studying the effects of certain policies and political institutions. We would like to thank Charles Blankart, Peter Haan, Magnus Johannesson, Juanna Joensen, Henrik Jordahl, Erik Lindqvist, Christian Odendahl, Thorsten Persson, Janne Tukiainen, Tuukka Saarimaa, Viktor Steiner, and David Strömberg. Comments from seminars at Stockholm School of Economics, Potsdam University, Stockholm University, Bayreuth University, Marburg University, University of Bonn (Max-Planck Center), the University of Madgeburg, and the Midwest Political Science Association conference are also gratefully acknowledged. Federico Bruni, Helke Seitz, Sergej Bechtolt, and Moritz Schubert provided excellent research assistance. Some arguments for the exposition on the German case have earlier been circulated under the title: “When can we trust population thresholds in regression discontinuity designs?”. Freier gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Fritz Thyssen foundation (Project: 10.12.2.092). The usual disclaimer applies.