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Monitoring democracy
In recent decades, governments and NGOs--in an effort to promote democracy, freedom, fairness, and stability throughout the world--have organized teams of observers to monitor elections in a variety of countries. But when more organizations join the practice without uniform standards, are assessments reliable? When politicians nonetheless cheat and monitors must return to countries even after two decades of engagement, what is accomplished? Monitoring Democracy argues that the practice of international election monitoring is broken, but still worth fixing. By analyzing the evolving interaction between domestic and international politics, Judith Kelley refutes prevailing arguments that international efforts cannot curb government behavior and that democratization is entirely a domestic process. Yet, she also shows that democracy promotion efforts are deficient and that outside actors often have no power and sometimes even do harm.
Analyzing original data on over 600 monitoring missions and 1,300 elections, Kelley grounds her investigation in solid historical context as well as studies of long-term developments over several elections in fifteen countries. She pinpoints the weaknesses of international election monitoring and looks at how practitioners and policymakers might help to improve them.
eBook
Conducting quantitative studies with the participation of political elites: best practices for designing the study and soliciting the participation of political elites
Conducting quantitative research (e.g., surveys, a large number of interviews, experiments) with the participation of political elites is typically challenging. Given that a population of political elites is typically small by definition, a particular challenge is obtaining a sufficiently high number of observations and, thus, a certain response rate. This paper focuses on two questions related to this challenge: (1) What are best practices for designing the study? And (2) what are best practices for soliciting the participation of political elites? To arrive at these best practices, we (a) examine which factors explain the variation in response rates across surveys within and between large-scale, multi-wave survey projects by statistically analyzing a newly compiled dataset of 342 political elite surveys from eight projects, spanning 30 years and 58 countries, (b) integrate the typically scattered findings from the existing literature and (c) discuss results from an original expert survey among researchers with experience with such research (n = 23). By compiling a comprehensive list of best practices, systematically testing some widely held believes about response rates and by providing benchmarks for response rates depending on country, survey mode and elite type, we aim to facilitate future studies where participation of political elites is required. This will contribute to our knowledge and understanding of political elites’ opinions, information processing and decision making and thereby of the functioning of representative democracies.
Journal Article
Voting Online
In an attempt to reverse declining rates of voter participation,
governments around the world are turning to electronic voting to
improve the efficiency of vote counts, and increase the
accessibility and equity of the voting process for electors who may
face additional barriers. The Covid-19 pandemic has intensified
this trend.
Voting Online focuses on Canada, where the technology
has been widely embraced by municipal governments with one of the
highest rates of use in the world. In the age of cyber elections,
Canada is the only country where governments offer fully remote
electronic elections and where traditional paper voting is
eliminated for entire electorates. Municipalities are the
laboratories of electoral modernization when it comes to digital
voting reform. We know conspicuously little about the effects of
these changes, particularly the elimination of paper ballots.
Relying on surveys of voters, non-voters, and candidates in
twenty Ontario cities, and a survey of administrators across the
province of Ontario, Voting Online provides a holistic
view of electronic elections unavailable anywhere else.
eBook
Transnational solidarity among political elites: what determines support for financial redistribution within the EU in times of crisis?
As a consequence of the European Economic Crisis, the European Union (EU) has implanted mechanisms to assist fellow member states facing economic difficulties. Despite an increasing academic interest in public preferences for such intra-EU solidarity measures, research has so far largely ignored individual characteristics that could possibly influence politicians’ views. In this paper, we look at politicians’ preferences for transnational solidarity and argue that these preferences depend on attitudes regarding socioeconomic issues as well as attitudes related to the EU. Moreover, we hypothesize that the relationship is moderated by responsibility attribution and the economic situation in a country. Using survey data of about 4000 politicians running for office in nine EU countries, we find that transnational solidarity is more common for socioeconomically left-wing and pro-EU politicians. Yet, attitudinal differences only cease to matter when the beneficiary state is perceived responsible for the crisis and economic problems at home are low.
Journal Article
The Instrumentalisation of Mass Media in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes
Focusing on the case of Russia during Putins first two presidential terms, this book examines media manipulation strategies in electoral authoritarian regimes.Which instruments and approaches do incumbent elites employ to skew media coverage in favour of their preferred candidate in a presidential election?.
eBook
Perceiving Political Polarization in the United States: Party Identity Strength and Attitude Extremity Exacerbate the Perceived Partisan Divide
An important component of political polarization in the United States is the degree to which ordinary people perceive political polarization. We used over 30 years of national survey data from the American National Election Study to examine how the public perceives political polarization between the Democratic and Republican parties and between Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. People in the United States consistently overestimate polarization between the attitudes of Democrats and Republicans. People who perceive the greatest political polarization are most likely to report having been politically active, including voting, trying to sway others' political beliefs, and making campaign contributions. We present a 3-factor framework to understand ordinary people's perceptions of political polarization. We suggest that people perceive greater political polarization when they (a) estimate the attitudes of those categorized as being in the \"opposing group\"; (b) identify strongly as either Democrat or Republican; and (c) hold relatively extreme partisan attitudes— particularly when those partisan attitudes align with their own partisan political identity. These patterns of polarization perception occur among both Democrats and Republicans.
Journal Article
Twitter and Facebook are not representative of the general population: Political attitudes and demographics of British social media users
A growing social science literature has used Twitter and Facebook to study political and social phenomena including for election forecasting and tracking political conversations. This research note uses a nationally representative probability sample of the British population to examine how Twitter and Facebook users differ from the general population in terms of demographics, political attitudes and political behaviour. We find that Twitter and Facebook users differ substantially from the general population on many politically relevant dimensions including vote choice, turnout, age, gender, and education. On average social media users are younger and better educated than non-users, and they are more liberal and pay more attention to politics. Despite paying more attention to politics, social media users are less likely to vote than non-users, but they are more likely to support the left leaning Labour Party when they do vote. However, we show that these apparent differences mostly arise due to the demographic composition of social media users. After controlling for age, gender, and education, no statistically significant differences arise between social media users and non-users on political attention, values or political behaviour.
Journal Article