(Un)Natural Disasters: Electoral Cycles in Disaster Relief

Emergency spending is often exempt from campaign period restrictions and procurement guidelines, making it attractive for opportunistic politicians, but natural disasters are seen as outside political business cycles. However, droughts are frequent but challenging to measure, so politicians can leverage discretion for electoral gain. This paper analyzes electoral cycles, term limits, and partisan targeting around municipal drought declaration in Northeast Brazil. Two sources of exogeneity (rainfall shocks, electoral calendar) isolate the effect of non-climatic factors on drought declarations. I find that drought declarations, which trigger relief, are more likely in mayoral election years. Incumbents are more likely to win re-election if they declare a drought in the election year, during below or even above average rainfall. The results are consistent with interviews suggesting voters reward competent mayors and mayors trade relief for votes. This study highlights the interaction between distributive and environmental politics, which has increasing consequences due to climate change.

Getting to the Future

This chapter makes three arguments in support of the claim that we need inclusive deliberative processes to shape the future in collectively intentional, mutually accommodating ways. First, inclusive collective decision-making processes are needed to avoid futures that favour the interests of some groups of people over others. Second, deliberative processes are needed to shape our shared futures in collectively intentional ways: we need to be able to talk to ourselves about what we are doing and where we want to get to in the future. Third, deliberative exchanges are needed to help collectivities avoid the policy oscillations that are (or may be) associated with the political dynamics of short electoral cycles. Effective processes of reciprocal reason giving can help collectivities maintain policy continuity over the long term—when continuity is justified—even as governments and generations change.

Introduction

This chapter outlines four interrelated but conceptually distinct claims that have been made by proponents of the democratic myopia thesis. It has been argued that democratic systems are functionally short-sighted because of (1) the myopic preferences of voters; (2) the political dynamics of short electoral cycles; (3) the fact that future others who will be affected by our decisions cannot be included in our decision-making processes; and (4) the reality that democratic processes are often captured by powerful actors with dominant short-term objectives. When taken together these four arguments make a persuasive case for why democracies might be functionally short-sighted. This chapter—and the book as a whole—argues that we do not need to choose between our normative commitments to democracy and the well-being of our future selves and future others, because there are democratic responses to each of these components of the democratic myopia thesis.

Congo’s electoral reform process will pose challenges

Significance After three successive electoral cycles (2006, 2011 and 2018) of decreasing legitimacy, one of the most sensitive issues on the new government’s agenda is electoral reform. Impacts The electoral reform debate may also strain the government’s relations with civil society actors whose support it needs in other domains. International partners will likely encourage electoral reforms but urge respect of the 2023 deadline for the next elections. Having senators and governors elected by popular vote could reduce corruption risks without greatly complicating the electoral format.

Informal institutions and gendered candidate selection in Brazilian parties

Six electoral cycles since the implementation of Brazil’s gender quota, just 15% of the 513 members of the Chamber of Deputies are women. We ask how parties’ use of informal institutions mediates the effectiveness of the gender quota. Drawing on data from more than 4,000 state-level party organizations, we show that parties employ informal practices that intentionally and non-intentionally interact with gender equity rules to affect women’s political representation: the intentional nomination of phantom candidates (“ laranjas”) allows parties to comply with the letter of the quota law, without effectively supporting women’s candidacies—to the detriment of women’s election; meanwhile, the extended use of provisional commissions to minimize oversight on candidate selection poses an obstacle to the quota and women’s candidacies and election more generally. Quota resistance characterizes an instance of both the likely inadvertent effects of informal institutions employed for non-gendered motivations and party leaders acting to preserve their own power.

Donor Support to Electoral Cycles

This rapid literature review explains the stages of an election cycle, and how donors provide support to electoral cycles. It draws mainly on policy guidance websites and papers due to the questions of this review and the level of analysis taken (global-level, donor-level). It focuses on publications from the last five years, and/or current/forthcoming donor strategies. The electoral cycle and its stages are well-established policy concepts for which there is widespread acceptance and use. Donor support to electoral cycles (through electoral assistance and electoral observation) is extremely widespread, and the dominant donors in this area are the multilateral organisations like the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU), and also the United States (US). While almost all bilateral donors also carry out some work in this area, “almost all major electoral support programmes are provided jointly with international partners” (DFID, 2014, p.5). Bilateral donors may provide broader support to democratic governance initiatives, which may not be framed as electoral assistance, but may contribute to the wider enabling environment. All of the donors reviewed in this query emphasise that their programmes are designed according to the local context and needs, and thus, beyond the big actors - EU, UN and US, there is little overarching information on what the donors do in this area. While there is a significant literature base in the broad area of electoral support, it tends to be focussed at the country, programme, or thematic, level, rather than at the global, or donor, level taken by this paper. There was a peak in global-level publications on this subject around 2006, the year the electoral cycle model was published by the European Commission, International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). This review concludes by providing examples of the electoral assistance work carried out by five donors (UN, EU, US, UK and Germany).

DETERMINANTS OF CITIZENS’ ATTITUDE TO THE ACTIVITIES OF THE PRESIDENT OF UKRAINE (1994–2020)

The article analyzes the determinants of citizens’ assessment of the activity of the Presidents of Ukraine during 1994–2020. The institution of the Presidency in the mass consciousness of Ukrainians is a reflection of social stratification. Social groups, formed mainly by different identities, evaluate the President's activities through the prism of their own economic situation, ideological identification, ethno-cultural affiliations, ethno-political aspirations and geopolitical orientations. The attitudes of Ukrainians to the head of state are related to electoral cycles, when the most positive assessments of activity are observed in the first year after the election. Using the method of multiple linear regression, it was found that the socio-economic determinant of the financial situation of the family was less tied to the electoral cycles: regardless of the term of office of the President , wealthy citizens evaluate his activities more positively while the poor ones evaluate it more negatively. In the mid-1990s, the attitudes towards the President of Ukraine were also differentiated by a region of residence and a language of communication in the family. However, after 2004 the factor of language communication in the family has reduced its influence on the assessment of the President's actions in favor of the question of the expediency of the Russian language official status. The factor of regional polarization restored its influence during 2003–2013. At the same time, since the end of the 1990s, the factor of geopolitical orientations of citizens has been gaining influence and has become one of the key ones in the following years. The assessment of the activities of Viktor Yushchenko, Viktor Yanukovych and Petro Poroshenko is characterized by clear geopolitical orientations. Instead, the attitudes to the activities of President Volodymyr Zelenskyi in the second year of his term are characterized by a negative attitude of respondents with both left and right ideological views.

Nigeria in Search of a Credible Electoral Administration

Recent elections in Nigeria have produced conflicting and ambiguous assessments regarding the quality, integrity and credibility of the country’s electoral governance. On one hand, widespread domestic and international criticisms of the farcical 2007 elections provoked remarkable constitutional, statutory, and administrative proposals, programmes, and policies for reforming Nigeria’s electoral processes. Those reforms led to electoral cycles that observers adjudged to be comparatively competitive, broadly acceptable, and generally indicative of a shift away from the country’s extended history of electoral maladministration, corruption, and chicanery. On the other hand, credible reports emphasize the persistence of significant levels of fraud, violence, and disorganization in Nigerian elections. This chapter shows that these contradictory outcomes and dual perspectives are consistent with the partial and incomplete nature of recent electoral reforms in Nigeria. Those reforms have extended the autonomy of the country’s election management commission, without guaranteeing the agency’s effective political insulation or addressing broader and deeper weaknesses in the country’s electoral landscape. Nigeria resembles a classic hybrid regime with increasingly competitive electoral contests that, however, continue to witness undemocratic levels of manipulation, corruption, and violence. More extensive reforms, along the lines proposed by a major official electoral reform committee, would have produced more substantial improvements in electoral integrity and quality.

The Contingent Electoral Impacts of Programmatic Policies: Evidence From Education Reforms in Tanzania

A large literature documents the electoral benefits of clientelist and programmatic policies in low-income states. We extend this literature by showing the cyclical electoral responses to a large programmatic intervention to expand access to secondary education in Tanzania over multiple electoral periods. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we find that the incumbent party’s vote share increased by 2 percentage points in the election following the policy’s announcement as a campaign promise (2005), but decreased by -1.4 percentage points in the election following implementation (2010). We find no discernible electoral impact of the policy in 2015, two electoral cycles later. We attribute the electoral penalty in 2010 to how the secondary school expansion policy was implemented. Our findings shed light on the temporally-contingent electoral impacts of programmatic policies, and highlight the need for more research on how policy implementation structures public opinion and vote choice in low-income states.