Kiril Kolev

MEASURING DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY: AN INITIAL REPORT ON AN EMERGING DATA SET

En este trabajo reportamos sobre una nueva base de datos de encuestas a expertos, cursadas en mas de 90 paises de todo el mundo. Esta base de datos ayuda a superar la ausencia de informacion comparable entre paises en torno a los mecanismos democraticos de relacion entre ciudadanos y politicos; los modos como estos proveen bienes especificos coyunturales a cambio de apoyos electorales. Ademas, evita una limitacion que caracteriza a la mayoria de los estudios anteriores sobre rendicion de cuentas en un contexto democratico: su reducido enfoque geografico y el hecho de ser estudios de casos particulares. El reporte arroja luz sobre los desafios metodologicos enfrentados en el proceso de implantacion de la encuesta e interpretacion de sus resultados. Asimismo destaca los pasos tomados para determinar la calidad de la informacion. Este analisis preliminar de los resultados de la encuesta permite afirmar que los indicadores desarrollados son fiables y validos para medir las practicas organizacionales de los partidos politicos, sus mecanismos de relacion con el electorado y sus orientaciones programaticas.

Varying the Un-Variable: Social Structure, Electoral Formulae, and Election Quality

This paper assesses the hypothesis that election quality is worse under plurality voting systems than under proportional representation (PR). We use a two-pronged research design that permits us to harness the advantages of most similar and most different approaches to limit problems of endogeneity that afflict hypothesis testing in comparative politics. We use a subnational database of more than 1,300 accusations of electoral fraud from Costa Rica (1901–1948) that uniquely varies formulae among (provincial) electoral districts. Our statistical models reveal that plurality leads to more ballot rigging than proportional systems. We also demonstrate that plurality voting systems are associated with inferior election quality in the Quality of Elections Database (QED), which covers 170 countries between 1975 and 2004. Our findings suggest that electoral formulae, a basic feature of institutional design, have as much impact as social structure on whether elections are free and fair.

Ethnic Group Inequality, Partisan Networks, and Political Clientelism

How do ethnic group divisions affect parties’ linkage strategies? The provision of private or local club goods favoring co-ethnics by politicians has been well documented in the literature. However, whether clientelism tends to be more widespread in ethnically highly fragmented societies has not been systematically examined. Utilizing a dataset that includes information on more than 450 parties in eighty competitive party systems, we show that the mere presence of multiple ethnic groups does not lead to more clientelistic exchange. Nevertheless, in countries characterized by high levels of economic inequality between politically relevant ethnic groups, parties are more likely to rely on clientelistic strategies to attract votes. In addition, this positive relationship between ethnic income inequality and clientelism is contingent on parties’ ties to ethnic social networks. Specifically, in ethnically unequal societies, parties that can rely on existing ethnic organizations particularly engage in clientelistic modes of electoral mobilization.