We seek to better understand the demand side of vote buying: the conditions under which voters participate in, eschew, tolerate, or punish the exchange of targeted material benefits for votes. We ask whether voters perceive vote buying as substituting for local public goods provision in office, or whether they think that candidates who buy votes will excel at securing local public goods. Voters who place great value on future public goods may opt out of vote buying if they believe they are substitutes and punish vote‐buying candidates at the polls. We explore these issues in a nationwide survey in Nepal. Multiple survey experiments provide evidence that Nepali voters perceive vote buying and local public goods provision as substitutes. Voters who hold this view also express a preference for candidates who do not engage in vote buying, implying they prioritize public goods provision, although this latter result is not causally identified.

A growing literature posits that vote buying dynamics depend on characteristics of the context and its voters. We explore vote buying in Nepal using a multi-methods approach combining survey experiments, semi-structured interviews, and focus group discussions. We find that vote buying in Nepal aligns somewhat with other contexts. A list experiment reveals approximately 25% of Nepali voters receive a voter-buying offer and, in an unmonitored but contingent exchange, the same percentage vote for the offeror candidate or party. Cash and other private goods are the most common offers. In contrast to findings from other contexts, however, voter education level is the strongest predictor of refraining from vote buying in Nepal, and wealth is not a significant predictor. Our list experiment also finds that, in Nepal, clientelism appears to be a socially undesirable activity. Overall, our results support the increasingly dominant viewpoint that vote buying is highly context dependent.

Nonparametric statistical methods encompass a wide array of techniques that make no underlying assumptions about the distribution of the data in the population. These techniques are particularly useful for non-normal and/or categorical data. In this chapter, we identify several nonparametric statistical and data visualization techniques including, chi-square, bin graphs, spline regression, and regression discontinuity, and provide advice for introducing them in a graduate-level political science methods course.

The international community spends significant sums of money on democracy promotion, focusing especially on producing competitive and transparent electoral environments. In theory, aid empowers a variety of actors, increasing competition and government responsiveness. We argue that to fully understand the effect of aid on democratization one must consider how democracy aid affects specific country institutions. Building on theory from the democratization and democracy promotion literature, we specify more precise causal linkages between democracy assistance and elections. Specifically, we hypothesize about the effects of democracy aid on the implementation and quality of elections. Building on canonical work, we test these hypotheses, using V-Dem's detailed elections measures to examine the impact of democracy aid. Intriguingly, we find that there is no consistent relationship between democracy and governance aid and the improvement of disaggregated indicators of election quality, but aggregate measures still capture a relationship. We suggest that current evidence is more consistent with election-enhancing aid following democratization than with democratization following such aid.

This study assesses how political parties’ candidate selection strategies influence women’s descriptive parliamentary representation. Focusing on proportional elections, it explores what determines whether parties place women in viable list positions. Evaluating party rankings at the individual level, it directly examines a mechanism – party nomination – central to prevailing explanations of empirical patterns in women’s representation. Moreover, it jointly evaluates how incumbency and gender affect nomination. This study uses European Parliament elections to compare a plethora of parties, operating under numerous institutions, in the context of a single legislature. It finds that gender differences in candidate selection are largely explained by incumbency bias, although party ideology and female labor force participation help explain which parties prioritize the placement of novice women.

The internet provides a powerful tool to terror organizations, enhancing their public messaging, recruitment ability, and internal communication. In turn, governments have increasingly moved to disrupt terror organizations’ internet communications, and even democracies now routinely work to censor terrorist propaganda, and related political messaging, in the name of national security. We argue that democratic states respond to terror attacks by increasing internet censorship and broadening their capacity to limit the digital dissemination of information. This article builds on previous work suggesting this relationship, substantially improving measurement and estimation strategy. We use latent variable modeling techniques to create a new measure of internet censorship, cross nationally and over time, from internet firm transparency reports, and compare this measure to an expert-survey based indicator. Leveraging both measures, we use a variety of panel specifications to establish that, in democracies, increases in terror predict surges in digital censorship. Finally, we examine the posited relationship using synthetic control methods in a liberal democracy that experienced a large shock in terror deaths, France, showing that digital censorship ramped up after several large terrorist attacks.

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The expansion of digital interconnectivity has simultaneously increased individuals’ access to media and presented governments with new opportunities to regulate information flows. As a result, even highly democratic countries now issue frequent censorship and user data requests to digital content providers. We argue that government internet censorship occurs, in part, for political reasons, and seek to identify the conditions under which states censor. We leverage new, cross-nationally comparable, censorship request data, provided by Google, to examine how country characteristics co-vary with governments’ digital censorship activity. Within democracies, we show that governments engage in more digital censorship when internal dissent is present and when their economies produce substantial intellectual property. But these demand mechanisms are modulated by the relative influence that democratic institutions provide to narrow and diffuse interests; in particular, states with proportional electoral institutions censor less.

Students of party organization often rely on politicians' perceptions when measuring internal party institutions and organizational characteristics. We compare a commonly used survey measure of political parties' European Parliament candidate selection mechanisms to measures that the authors coded directly from parties' selection rules. We find substantial disconnect between formal institutions and survey respondent perceptions of selection mechanisms, raising questions about measure accuracy and equivalency. While this divergence may be driven either by distinctions between de jure and de facto selection procedures or by respondent error, we find the differences between the two measures are unsystematic. Our findings suggest that authors studying party characteristics must decide whether their research question calls for survey or formal institutional measures.

Although the internet is an indispensable part of everyday life as well as an essential medium of political discourse, governments may struggle to completely black out their repressive actions. Thus, the internet creates a channel through which domestic dissenters stigmatize their own government for its atrocities using political pressure. Given the potential role of the internet in facilitating negative publicity of state repression, we contend that high internet penetration rates have deterring effects on state repression, strongly conditioned on regime characteristics. We find that the antirepression effects of the internet are greater in democracies, particularly in countries with a high level of constraint on executive decision making and a competitive process of executive selection. Our results suggest that extending internet access to citizens will yield protective effects primarily in those countries with already existing institutional restraints on the government.

In many systems, legislators find themselves accountable to multiple principals. This article seeks to further answer how legislators decide between their principals and what factors condition legislators to choose one over the other. We argue that electoral uncertainty, operationalized as electoral volatility, pushes legislators towards the principal that has the greatest influence over their re‐election. Using European Parliament electoral results and roll‐call data from the second to the sixth European Parliaments (1984–2009), we show that increases in electoral volatility decreased European group cohesion and pushed legislators to side more with the positions of their national parties over their European group when the two disagreed.

Death and disease exacts a heavy toll on citizens in many democracies. I argue that the funding and distribution of health policy in democracies are subject to political economic distributive pressures. Patterns of partisanship, strategic importance, and quality of legislative representation condition the provision of public health funding within countries. In turn, public health spending alters district mortality outcomes. I assemble administrative district level data for late Third Republic France and model its health funding and mortality rates. Political importance, not need, plays a prominent role in determining who lives and dies in democracies. In an environment analogous to modern developing countries but absent international political pressures, my results demonstrate that poor health is not just a consequence of lack of funding but also domestic political economy incentives.

Parties in list systems must select candidates to best accomplish their electoral, organizational, and policy goals. In particular, parties must balance nominees' policy-making potential against other aspects of candidate quality, such as electoral viability. We exploit the unique variation in candidates and parties in European elections to study this trade-off. We develop a statistical ranking model to examine how parties facing varying strategic contexts construct electoral lists and apply it to a novel data set chronicling the political backgrounds of candidates in the 2009 European parliamentary elections. Parties that place high salience on the target legislature, are well positioned to influence policy once in office, and have less access to competing policy-making venues place particular emphasis on institution-specific policy-making experience relative to other types of candidate experience. This systematic variation in parties' candidate nomination strategies may fundamentally alter legislative output and partisan policy influence.

While a great deal of literature evaluates the existence of a resource curse or blessing with respect to democratic outcomes, only recently have scholars paid attention to the natural resource discovery process itself. What drives countries to search for and find resources? Building on recent work touching on this relationship, I model resource discovery effort, operationalized by wildcat oil wells, as a consequence of regime type differences. I examine the effect of autocracy/democracy on attempts to discover oil using event models, finding a robust relationship between drilling activity, autocracy, and oil reserve size. I then explore the effect of basic regime categories of autocracy and democracy, finding no predictable relationship between a rough proxy for regime centralization and wildcat drilling. ∗Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Texas Tech University. Email: stephen.meserve@ttu.edu The debate about the existence of a resource curse, or more recently, a resource blessing, on regime type currently rages. Does resource wealth cause autocracy, conflict, and war? The volume of literature on the subject has exploded in recent years, drawing contributions from both sides of the intersection of economics and political science (Ross 2001, Smith 2004, Dunning 2008, Haber & Menaldo 2011, Ramsay 2011, Ross 2012, Andersen & Aslaksen 2013). In general, newer research attempts to achieve cleaner causal inference with their models or seeks to add new data that could enlighten their cross-national panels, with some new work finding a reduced or non-existent role of resources on autocracy (Haber & Menaldo 2011). The specifics of that literature are beyond the scope of this paper, but it suffices to say that there is a huge amount of disagreement on the subject. By contrast, the resource discovery and exploitation process has, I suggest unjustly, attracted little interest in and of itself. The exception is work by Cotet & Tsui (2013), who use the determinants of resource discovery as an instrument in order to causally identify their equations predicting autocracy/democracy (See also Tsui 2011, Tsui 2013). They model resource discovery in the process, finding that “oil explorations seem to be more successful in more populated and less democratic countries” and that “oil drilling is more common in democracies and during times of peace,” and that both occur significantly more often in countries already generating significant oil wealth (Cotet & Tsui 2013, 68,73). The authors, however, are primarily concerned with the main plank of this debate, resource impacts on democracy and conflict. Answering questions about variables associated with resource discovery is largely a sideline. In particular, they find that discovery is in the main a random process generated by exogenous, geologically and world economy determined, country factors. Due to this focus, despite their impressive work and data collection, significant questions remain about the determinants of resource discovery. Why does the process of resource discovery matter, outside of its potential democWhen referring to this general literature in the rest of this paper, I will refer to it as the resource curse literature as a shorthand, while recognizing the possible existence of a research blessing. Ahmadov (2013) provides an excellent overview of the null and positive findings of this literature.

Previous articleNext article No AccessVeto Power: Institutional Design in the European Union. By Jonathan Slapin. (University of Michigan Press, 2011.)Stephen MeserveStephen MeserveaTexas Tech University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Politics Volume 74, Number 2April 2012 Sponsored by the Southern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0022381611001824 Views: 32Total views on this site Copyright © Southern Political Science Association 2012PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Party leaders decide the quality and order of candidates on their electoral lists. We argue that party ideology, electoral salience, and access to other electoral arenas condition list construction. To test this theory, we gather data on the demographic characteristics, career backgrounds, and political experiences of candidates in the 2009 European Parliamentary Elections. We develop a statistical ranking model that simulates how party leaders construct lists based on the availability of candidates and the electoral context. Political parties’ attitudes and emphases, their sizes, and the amount of attention that the national press pays to European elections predict the types of candidates that parties prioritize.

Using a Bayesian latent variable approach, we synthesize a new measure of democracy, the Unified Democracy Scores (UDS), from 10 extant scales. Our measure eschews the difficult-and often arbitrary-decision to use one existing democracy scale over another in favor of a cumulative approach that allows us to simultaneously leverage the measurement efforts of numerous scholars. The result of this cumulative approach is a measure of democracy that, for every country-year, is at least as reliable as the most reliable component measure and is accompanied by quantitative estimates of uncertainty in the level of democracy. Moreover, for those who wish to continue using previously existing scales or to evaluate research performed using those scales, we extract information from the new measure to perform heretofore impossible direct comparisons between component scales. Specifically, we estimate the relative reliability of the constituent indicators, compare the specific ordinal levels of each of the existing measures in relationship to one another and assess overall levels of disagreement across raters. We make the UDS and associated parameter estimates freely available online and provide a detailed tutorial that demonstrates how to best use the UDS in applied work.