Kenneth F. Greene

The Political Economy of Authoritarian Single-Party Dominance:

Why do authoritarian dominant parties, once established, continue to win elections or lose power? Employing a time-series cross-national analysis of election outcomes and two country case studies, the author shows that dominant parties endure despite poor economic performance, voter demand for new parties, and sufficiently permissive electoral institutions. Instead, the author demonstrates that dominant parties continue to win when they can politicize public resources, and they fail when privatizations put the state’s fiscal power out of their reach.The argument has implications for the fate of dominant parties, transitions to democracy in competitive authoritarian regimes, and the study of incumbency advantages and electoral fairness in comparative politics.

The Latin American Left’s Mandate: Free-Market Policies and Issue Voting in New Democracies

The rise of the left across Latin America is one of the most striking electoral events to occur in new democracies during the last decade. Current work argues either that the lefts electoral success stems from a thoroughgoing rejection of free-market policies by voters or that electorates have sought to punish poorly performing right-wing incumbents. Whether the new left has a policy or performance mandate has implications for the type of policies it may pursue in power and the voting behavior of Latin American electorates. Using a new measure of voter ideology called vote-revealed leftism (vrl ) and a time-series cross-sectional analysis of aggregate public opinion indicators generated from mass surveys of eighteen countries over thirteen years, the authors show that the left has a clear economic policy mandate but that this mandate is much more moderate than many observers might expect. In contrast to the generalized view that new democracies are of low quality, the authors reach the more optimistic conclusion that wellreasoned voting on economic policy issues and electoral mandates are now relevant features of politics in Latin America.

Usando as respostas previsíveis da abordagem list-experiments como variáveis explicativas em modelos de regressão

The list experiment, also known as the item count technique, is becoming increasingly popular as a survey methodology for eliciting truthful responses to sensitive questions. Recently, multivariate regression techniques have been developed to predict the unobserved response to sensitive questions using respondent characteristics. Nevertheless, no method exists for using this predicted response as an explanatory variable in another regression model. We address this gap by first improving the performance of a naive two-step estimator. Despite its simplicity, this improved two-step estimator can only be applied to linear models and is statistically inefficient. We therefore develop a maximum likelihood estimator that is fully efficient and applicable to a wide range of models. We use a simulation study to evaluate the empirical performance of the proposed methods. We also apply them to the Mexico 2012 Panel Study and examine whether vote-buying is associated with increased turnout and candidate approval. The proposed methods are implemented in open-source software.

The Representational Fault Line: Candidates and Voters in Mexico's 2006 Elections

l l i l a s p o r t a l even before The 2006 presIdenTIaL eLection dissolved into a nasty street battle, it was widely perceived as strongly polarized. The two leading candidates, Felipe Calderón of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) and Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), staked out starkly different positions on key economic issues. Calderón promised continuity with free-market reforms, focusing on investment as the engine of growth. López Obrador argued that the neoliberal strategy would benefit only a few, and he promised to alleviate poverty through state spending on infrastructure and social welfare. Unlike in prior presidential elections where the PAN and PRD candidates downplayed their differences to challenge the dominant PRI with broad pro-democracy appeals, in this first post-transition election, the candidates made their differences clear. The dust usually settles and even the most polarized campaigns typically yield to institutionalized opposition after Election Day. But in this case, the razor-thin margin of victory for Calderón at just 0.57% cast doubt on the outcome and led to increasing polarization. López Obrador rejected the official results, escalated his confrontation with the state well beyond what most had expected—from marches and blockades of major streets, to efforts to paralyze the Congress and plans to establish a parallel government—and he easily secured the loyal support of top PRD leaders and the active participation of hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens. Faced with crowds in the capital, flaring tempers, and statements like “to hell with the institutions,” some commentators rang the alarm bell. Was the hard-fought campaign the tip of an iceberg that runs cold and deep between polarized camps in society? Could Mexico’s democratic train be running off the rails, guiding it not toward the station of stable institutions found in the United States and Western Europe but toward the wreckage of instability found in other Latin American nations? We suggest a more optimistic reading. Although ideological polarization goes well beyond the polemical campaigns of the presidential candidates and extends to the PAN and PRD’s congressional candidates, it does not extend to the voters. The voters were in fact surprisingly immune to campaigns that attempted to draw them into partisan battles, and in the post-electoral period their influence may put the brakes on political conflict. If party elites pay attention to the issue mandates given by their supporters, then they will find ways to avoid legislative gridlock in the 2006–2009 Congress. Our analysis is based on two unique surveys that give us an extraordinary view of both elite and mass opinion. The first is the Mexico 2006 Candidate and Party Leader Survey of congressional candidates for plurality district races that we conducted in the three weeks leading up to the election.2 The PAN and PRD generously furnished us with contact information for their candidates, without which we could not have accomplished the study. Unfortunately, the PRI refused to participate. However, prior work shows that although the PRI has a wide range of internal opinion at the elite level, it is relatively centrist in The represenTaTional faulT line: candidates and voters in mexico’s 2006 eLections