Aina Gallego

Turning a Blind Eye Experimental Evidence of Partisan Bias in Attitudes Toward Corruption

This article considers how partisanship conditions attitudes toward corruption. Stirred by the puzzle of why corruption does not seem to have the electoral consequences we would expect, it explores whether party supporters are more tolerant toward corruption cases when they affect their own party. The partisan-bias hypothesis is confirmed by a survey experiment carried out in Spain, a country where a number of corruption scandals have been recently visible. The results show that the same offense is judged differently depending on whether the responsible politician is a member of the respondent’s party, of unknown partisan affiliation, or of a rival party. Furthermore, the degree of partisan bias depends on political sophistication. This suggests that although partisanship may induce tolerance to same-party corruption practices, the partisan bias disappears when political awareness is high.

POLITICAL PARTICIPATION AND THE INTERNET: A field essay

The aim of this paper is to review the main questions dealt with by the literature on the effect of Internet on political participation. The paper distinguishes three relevant aspects: the estimation of the impact of Internet on the levels and types of political participation; the analysis of the causal mechanisms that lie behind the relationship between Internet use and participation; and the effect of the Internet on participatory inequalities. We conclude by identifying the aspects on which there is a relative consensus among scholars, the debates surrounding controversial conclusions obtained from different empirical analyses, and those questions where further research seems particularly necessary.

Unequal Political Participation in Europe

The fact that social stratification factors are closely related to different levels of political participation is a classical issue that has relevant normative as well as explanatory implications for the study of participation. Research on this topic has focused mainly on unequal participation in the United States and we know little about contemporary patterns in other contexts. This article uses data from the European Social Survey to explore the effect of various possible sources of inequality (gender, age, social class, education, income, ethnicity, and working status) on four political activities: voting, working with parties and action groups, attending demonstrations, and boycotting products. Overall, age, education, and social class emerge as the most common causes of distortion, while gender, membership in minorities, and occupational variables are less clearly related to participation. In conventional political activities the differences are more predictable in the direction of the disadvantaged, while demonstrators are in some respects undistinguishable from the general public. Finally, the fact that socioeconomic inequalities in turnout are unambiguously visible in most European countries stands in contrast to past research and deserves further attention.

Online Political Participation in Spain: The Impact of Traditional and Internet Resources

This article examines how traditional and Internet resources are related to three online modes of political participation (contact, donation, and petition) in Spain. Using a Heckman selection model, we find that traditional resources are more important in predicting access to the Internet than online participation. Among Internet users, traditional resources are irrelevant for predicting participation, while online resources are important to understanding who participates online. We also find that the effects of resources are not the same for all modes of participation and that some characteristics of the political system may shape the effects of resources on online participation.

Decentralization and voter turnout

With this paper we study the impact of decentralization on turnout. We test the hypotheses that decentralization increases turnout in subnational elections, lowers participation in national elections, and reduces the gap between regional and national arenas. A comparative cross-national analysis does not show any significant effect of decentralization on turnout in national elections. But we take a closer look at two countries, Canada and Spain, where fiscal decentralization has taken place during the past decades. In both countries the empirical evidence suggests that decentralization has contributed to reducing the turnout gap between regional and national elections.

Places and preferences: a longitudinal analysis of self-selection and contextual effects

Contextual theories of political behaviour assert that the contexts in which people live influence their political beliefs and vote choices. Most studies of political assimilation, however, rely on cross-sectional data and fail to distinguish contextual influence from self-selection of individuals into areas. This paper advances understanding of this longstanding controversy by tracking thousands of individuals over an 18-year period in England. We observe individual-level left-right position and party identification before and after residential moves across areas with different political orientations. We find evidence of both non-random selection into areas and assimilation of new entrants to the majority political orientation. However, these effects are contingent on the type of area an individual moves to and, moreover, contextual effects are weak and dominated by the larger effect of self-selection into areas.

Why do voters forgive corrupt mayors? Implicit exchange, credibility of information and clean alternatives

ABSTRACT Corruption cases have limited electoral consequences in many countries. Why do voters often fail to punish corrupt politicians at the polls? Previous research has focused on the role of lack of information, weak institutions and partisanship in explaining this phenomenon. In this paper, we propose three micro-mechanisms that can help understand why voters support corrupt mayors even in contexts with high information and strong institutions: implicit exchange (good performance can make up for corruption), credibility of information (accusations from opposition parties are not credible) and the lack of credible alternatives (the belief that all politicians are corrupt). We test these mechanisms using three survey experiments conducted in Catalonia. Our results suggest that implicit exchange and credibility of information help explain voters’ support for corrupt politicians.

Visibility and Sanctions: The Social Norm of Voting in the Lab

Theories of voter turnout pay increasing attention to ethical and social motives of voting, yet the empirical foundations of such perspectives are still scarce. In this chapter, we present the results of a laboratory experiment, conducted in two different countries, in which we manipulate the social conditions under which the elections take place. We find that both visibility and the possibility of administering and receiving sanctions boost voter participation by seven or eight percentage points. We also show that voters are willing to punish non-voters at a cost to themselves one third of the time and that receiving a sanction for non-voting increases the likelihood of voting in the next round by about eight percentage points. Overall, the results are consistent with a social norm model of voting.