Andrew C. Eggers

On the Validity of the Regression Discontinuity Design for Estimating Electoral Effects: New Evidence from over 40,000 Close Races

The regression discontinuity (RD) design is a valuable tool for identifying electoral effects, but this design is only effective when relevant actors do not have precise control over election results. Several recent papers contend that such precise control is possible in large elections, pointing out that the incumbent party is more likely to win very close elections in the United States House of Representatives in recent periods. In this article, we examine whether similar patterns occur in other electoral settings, including the U.S. House in other time periods, statewide, state legislative, and mayoral races in the U.S. and national or local elections in nine other countries. No other case exhibits this pattern. We also cast doubt on suggested explanations for incumbent success in close House races. We conclude that the assumptions behind the RD design are likely to be met in a wide variety of electoral settings and offer a set of best practices for RD researchers going forward.

Proportionality and Turnout: Evidence From French Municipalities

Many studies find that voter turnout is higher in proportional representation (PR) elections than in plurality elections, but because the two systems differ in multiple ways and are used in different contexts it is difficult to know precisely why. I focus on municipal elections in France, where cities above a certain population threshold are required to use a PR system while those below use a type of plurality rule; this setting allows me to compare political outcomes across electoral systems while holding fixed a large set of social and political features. I find that the PR system noticeably increases turnout compared with plurality. I provide evidence suggesting that it does so in part by encouraging turnout in lopsided races and in part by inducing entry of new candidates. The findings highlight the importance of electoral proportionality in explaining cross-national differences in voter turnout.

Partisanship and Electoral Accountability: Evidence from the UK Expenses Scandal

Why do voters support corrupt politicians? One reason is that voters care about both corruption and partisan control of government; the more voters care about which party wins, the less they can deter individual wrongdoing. I highlight this tradeoff in the 2009 UK expenses scandal, showing that electoral accountability was less effective in constituencies where the partisan stakes of the local contest were higher: not only did corrupt MPs in these constituencies suffer smaller punishments, but these MPs were also more likely to be implicated in the scandal in the first place. The findings point to an under-appreciated consequence of partisanship (and underlying causes such as strong party systems and polarization at the elite or mass level) for the electoral control of politicians.

Capitol Losses: The Mediocre Performance of Congressional Stock Portfolios

Given the effects of policy on financial markets, political insiders should be capable of enriching themselves through savvy investing. Consistent with this view, two widely cited studies claim that members of both the House and Senate show uncanny timing in trading stocks, fueling the public perception that corrupt “insider trading” is widespread in Congress. We call this consensus into question. First, we reinterpret existing studies of congressional stock trading between 1985 and 2001 and conduct our own analysis of trades in the 2004–2008 period, concluding that in neither period do members of Congress trade with an information advantage. Second, we conduct the first analysis of members’ portfolio holdings, showing that between 2004 and 2008 the average member of Congress would have earned higher returns in a passive index fund. Our research suggests that, if there is unethical investing behavior in Congress, it is far more limited than previous research implies.

Party Cohesion in Westminster Systems: Inducements, Replacement and Discipline in the House of Commons, 1836–1910

We consider the historical development of a characteristic crucial for the functioning and normative appeal of Westminster systems: cohesive legislative parties. To do this, we gather the universe of the twenty thousand parliamentary divisions that took place between 1836 and 1910 in the British House of Commons, construct a voting record for every Member of Parliament serving during this time, and carry out analysis that aims to both describe and explain the development of cohesive party voting. In line with previous work, we show that|with the exception of a chaotic period in the 1840s and 1850s|median discipline was always high and increased throughout the century, with an obvious uptick around 1868. We use novel methods to show that much of the rise in cohesion results from the elimination of a rebellious ‘left tail’ from the 1860s onwards, rather than central tendency shifts. In explaining the aggregate trends, we use panel data techniques to show that there is scant evidence for ‘replacement’ explanations that involve new intakes of members behaving in more disciplined ways than those leaving the chamber. We oer evidence that more loyal MPs were more likely to obtain ministerial posts, and speculate that this and other ‘inducement’-based accounts oer more promising explanations of increasingly cohesive parties.

Open/closed list and party choice: experimental evidence from the UK

Which parties benefit from open-list (as opposed to closed-list) proportional representation elections? This article shows that a move from closed-list to open-list competition is likely to be more favorable to parties with more internal disagreement on salient issues; this is because voters who might have voted for a unified party under closed lists may be drawn to specific candidates within internally divided parties under open lists. The study provides experimental evidence of this phenomenon in a hypothetical European Parliament election in the UK, in which using an open-list ballot would shift support from UKIP (the Eurosceptic party) to Eurosceptic candidates of the Conservative Party. The findings suggest that open-list ballots could restrict support for parties that primarily mobilize on a single issue.

Guarding the Guardians: Legislative Self-Policing and Electoral Corruption in Victorian Britain

We offer an institutional explanation for the dramatic decline in corrupt practices that characterizes British political development in the mass suffrage era. Parliamentary candidates who faced corruption charges were judged by tribunals of sitting MPs until 1868, when this responsibility was passed to the courts. We draw on theory and empirical evidence to demonstrate that delegating responsibility over corruption trials to judges was an important institutional step in cleaning up elections. By focusing on an institutional explanation for Victorian electoral corruption (and its demise), we provide an account that complements the existing literature while offering clearer implications for contemporary policy debates.

Corruption, accountability, and gender : do female politicians face higher standards in public life?

Previous research suggests that female politicians face higher standards in public life, perhaps in part because female voters expect more from female politicians than from male politicians. Most of this research is based on observational evidence. We assess the relationship between accountability and gender using a novel survey vignette experiment fielded in the United Kingdom in which voters choose between a hypothetical incumbent (who could be male or female, corrupt or noncorrupt) and another candidate. We do not find that female politicians face significantly greater punishment for misconduct. However, the effect of politician gender on punishment varies by voter gender, with female voters in particular more likely to punish female politicians for misconduct. Our findings have implications for research on how descriptive representation affects electoral accountability and on why corruption tends to correlate negatively with women’s representation.

Incumbency Effects and the Strength of Party Preferences: Evidence from Multiparty Elections in the United Kingdom

Previous researchers have speculated that incumbency effects are larger when voters have weaker partisan preferences, but evidence for this relationship is surprisingly weak. We offer a fresh look at the question by examining the United Kingdom’s multiparty system. In general, the electoral value of incumbency should depend on the proportion of voters who are nearly indifferent between the parties competing for incumbency; in a multiparty system, that proportion may differ across constituencies depending on which parties are locally competitive. After first showing that UK voters in recent decades have stronger preferences between Conservatives and Labour than between Conservatives and Liberals, we show that incumbency effects are larger in close contests between Conservatives and Liberals than in close contests between Conservatives and Labour. By documenting how partisanship influences incumbency effects, our analysis shows that the comparative study of incumbency effects offers broader insights into electoral accountability across political systems.

Quality-Based Explanations of Incumbency Effects

Empirical studies of incumbency effects continue to accumulate, but progress in explaining these findings is modest. I introduce a simple framework that clarifies how differences in candidate characteristics (i.e., quality) could account for empirical findings of incumbency effects based on regression discontinuity designs (RDD). The key observation is that although RDD ensures that marginal winners and losers of close elections are comparable, the candidates who compete in the next election may differ for many reasons, of which “scare-off” (the tendency of incumbents to deter strong challengers) is just one. Using a simple model, I show that quality differences between marginal incumbent-party candidates and their opponents may persist even when incumbency is irrelevant to voters, incumbent retirement is random, and all new candidates are drawn from the same candidate pool. I conclude by showing how quality differences can help explain puzzling findings in prior empirical work.