Oil discoveries and political windfalls: Evidence on presidential support in Uganda

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-difference 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.

“What Are We?”: Latino Politics, Identity, and Memory in the 1983 Chicago Mayoral Election

The 1983 Chicago mayoral election, which polarized Black and white voters, left the nascent Latino electorate in an uncertain position. A reevaluation of this election clarifies the impact of Black mayoral candidate Harold Washington, whose candidacy laid bare significant political divisions and anti-Black sentiment among Latinos as they grappled with their relationship to whiteness. Divisions aside, Washington's effort to court the Latino vote helped legitimate a monolithic, panethnic label in Chicago politics, as evidenced by organizational records, campaign advertising, electoral data, and bilingual media coverage. Reframing the 1983 election as a dual process of race making and panethnic labeling bridges scholarship on Black mayors, Latino politics, and urban history, and questions an enduring political memory of 1983 that has obscured both Latino anti-Blackness and the fragility of Latino unity.

Bridging the Gap between Electoral and Participatory Democracy: The Electoral Motivations behind Participatory Budgeting in Chicago

This paper explores the electoral dynamics of participatory budgeting projects in Chicago, IL, a topic neglected in the participatory democracy literature. Combining qualitative fieldwork with electoral data, I argue participatory budgeting is more likely to be adopted by elected officials who identify as progressive, face strong electoral competition, and are non-incumbents. These officials mobilize support for participatory budgeting to enhance their democratic legitimacy and build their constituency networks. In contrast to research focused on participatory budgeting as a non-partisan deliberative initiative, I attribute the uneven emergence of participatory budgeting projects in Chicago to the strategic electoral interests of aldermen, suggesting explanations of participatory budgeting focused on the drivers of the process should assign a greater role to electoral interests. More broadly, this research suggests approaching policy transfer as a contextually embedded process that precludes normative assumptions about particular policies absent a consideration of the institutional and social environment.

Advertising of open data by the electoral high court: the case of the Electoral Data Repository

Article that aims to present the Electoral Data Repository, of the Superior Electoral Court, in the context of open government data. Based on literary texts on open data, open government and open data on the Federal Government and the Brazilian Electoral Justice. It adopts the Electoral Data Repository as the object of study, investigated as a descriptive research, using bibliographic techniques and action research for data collection, in a qualitative sense. It presents a repository resulting from a natural process of computerization of the electoral process, created by a specific sector of information technology and currently managed by the statistics center and updated periodically, respecting retotalizations. Offers information on candidates, abstention, electorate, parties, electoral polls, accountability, results, etc., while open electoral data collected by the Extract, Transform, Load process and made available, as raw data, of compressed way, containing, inside, a file with the electoral data themselves, in Comma Separated Values, and another in Portable Document Format, with the description of the available data. concluded that transparency is the guiding thread of the Superior Electoral Court, which fostered the development of the Electoral Data Repository, with the purpose of making available, based on specific technologies, open electoral data, which can be used in any electronic spreadsheet program and coming from the electoral process, from voter registration and management to the dissemination of votes, and thus contribute to ensuring the impartiality and legitimacy of electoral elections.

Advertising of open data by the electoral high court: the case of the Electoral Data Repository

Article that aims to present the Electoral Data Repository, of the Superior Electoral Court, in the context of open government data. Based on literary texts on open data, open government and open data on the Federal Government and the Brazilian Electoral Justice. It adopts the Electoral Data Repository as the object of study, investigated as a descriptive research, using bibliographic techniques and action research for data collection, in a qualitative sense. It presents a repository resulting from a natural process of computerization of the electoral process, created by a specific sector of information technology and currently managed by the statistics center and updated periodically, respecting retotalizations. Offers information on candidates, abstention, electorate, parties, electoral polls, accountability, results, etc., while open electoral data collected by the Extract, Transform, Load process and made available, as raw data, of compressed way, containing, inside, a file with the electoral data themselves, in Comma Separated Values, and another in Portable Document Format, with the description of the available data. concluded that transparency is the guiding thread of the Superior Electoral Court, which fostered the development of the Electoral Data Repository, with the purpose of making available, based on specific technologies, open electoral data, which can be used in any electronic spreadsheet program and coming from the electoral process, from voter registration and management to the dissemination of votes, and thus contribute to ensuring the impartiality and legitimacy of electoral elections.

Small versus Statewide Parties: How Subnational Contestation and Decentralisation Influence Presidential Elections in Europe and Latin America

Shugart and Carey were among the first scholars to recognise that there is a relationship between regional and local – or subnational – electoral forces and the presidential race. Yet because of a lack of subnational electoral data, this relationship has largely remained unexplored. We elaborate on Shugart and Carey’s theory to argue that the effects of decentralisation are conditional on a party’s presence in subnational elections for determining when and why parties enter the presidential race. Using an original dataset of subnational electoral results and presidential strategies in 17 countries in Europe and Latin America from 1990 to 2013, we find that parties with a small presence in subnational elections are more likely to compete for the presidency under more extensive decentralisation. Statewide parties, however, contest presidential elections regardless of level of decentralisation. These findings have important implications for understanding Shugart and Carey’s expectation that subnational contestation influences national party systems, presidential elections and democratic representation more generally.

Party, candidate, and voter incentives under free list proportional representation

Under free list proportional representation voters can: (a) cast preference votes for candidates; (b) cast multiple preferences; and (c) distribute preferences across multiple lists. Alternatively, they can cast a list vote. Our theory shows that office-seeking candidates face incentives to pursue the personal vote, while non-candidate partisans seek the party vote. Voters are in the cross-currents of these forces. Also, since preference voting is so cognitively and informationally demanding, voters have incentives to use shortcuts, especially (a) list voting; (b) casting fewer than their allotment of preferences; and (c) preference voting for well-known or highly placed candidates. We find support for our expectations using linear mixed-effects regression of the proportion of preference votes in candidate-level electoral data from Ecuador. Personal voting is more prevalent as magnitude increases, where the local party is strong, and for candidates that are incumbents, male, high on the list, and in the position of first loser.

Opening and Changes of the Firms TIC: Case of Cuts Internet in Political Matter in Democratic Republic of Congo

The cuts of Internet in political matter started with "Arab spring" and since then know a fast progression in Africa at the point to become an international public problem today putting in scene the modes in place, in certain African States, and their opponents. Indeed, in what appears as a battle for the control of information and the control of the public opinion, there are on a side the African governments which, to justify the interruption of Internet, propose the need for safeguarding of the law and order like act of sovereignty, in fact the right to prevent the misinformation and any illegal publication of the electoral data. On the other side, there are the oppositions which view this step as the violation of the principles of freedoms, in particular the freedom of expression, at ends of fiddle of the electoral data. The scientific stake of this analysis, starting from African case studies, and of the RDC in particular, is to reflect on the ambivalence of the decision to cut Internet, in order to as well show the consequences of these restrictions on the economy, the credibility of the elections, the social one and, by the same occasion, to carry a glance on the reaction of the international community.

Concentric Clientelism: A Case Study of Rural Saharanpur

In this article, we examine the role of intermediaries in sustaining political clientelism in rural Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh. Drawing from fieldwork and electoral data, we show that clientelism in Saharanpur is based around providing three specific guarantees to the voter—security from or by the police, facilitation in the tehsil and mediation in cases that would otherwise go to court—which we collectively refer to as guardianship. We explain how guardianship, more than most other forms of clientelistic exchange, requires intermediaries. In the case of Saharanpur, these intermediaries are usually individuals occupying formal positions of power within various circles of Panchayati Raj Institutions. Finally, we argue that it is the concentric nature of constituencies provided by the decentralized political structure which is ultimately responsible for the sustenance of intermediary networks as well as the perpetuation of clientelism in rural Saharanpur.