Mark Andreas Kayser

Who Surfs, Who Manipulates? The Determinants of Opportunistic Election Timing and Electorally Motivated Economic Intervention

In this paper, I develop a career concerns model of government policy choice within a dynamic optimal stopping framework to predict the degree of surfing (opportunistic timing) and manipulation (politically motivated economic intervention) under alternate institutional structures. Among other results, I find that the likelihood of opportunistic elections rises with exogenous economic performance, with longer maximum term lengths, with future electoral uncertainty, and with economic volatility but diminishes in the value of office-holding; manipulation increases with the maximum term length and with the value of office-holding but decreases with exogenous economic performance and with economic volatility. The model suggests that single-party governments should be highly opportunistic in calling elections and that countries that allow opportunistic election timing should experience less economically distortionary political intervention than their fixed-timing counterparts.

Benchmarking across Borders: Electoral Accountability and the Necessity of Comparison

When the economy in a single country contracts, voters often punish the government. When many economies contract, voters turn against their governments much less frequently. This suggests that the international context matters for the domestic vote, yet most research on electoral accountability assumes that voters treat their national economies as autarkic. We decompose two key economic aggregates—growth in real gross domestic product and unemployment—into their international and domestic components and demonstrate that voters hold incumbents more electorally accountable for the domestic than for the international component of growth. Voters in a wide variety of democracies benchmark national economic growth against that abroad, punishing (rewarding) incumbents for national outcomes that underperform (outperform) an international comparison. Tests suggest that this effect arises not from highly informed voters making direct comparisons but from “pre-benchmarking” by the media when reporting on the economy. The effect of benchmarked growth exceeds that of aggregate national growth by up to a factor of two and outstrips the international component of growth by an even larger margin, implying that previous research may have underestimated the strength of the economy on the vote.

Trade and the Timing of Elections

Do trade-transmitted international business cycles affect the timing of national elections? This article shows that export expansions do not differ substantively from booms in aggregate output in inviting opportunistic governments to call elections, especially as their terms mature. Further analysis confirms two ancillary implications of this relationship: (a) that clusters of countries tend to hold elections in periods of international economic expansion and (b) that national election cycles, much like business cycles, have become more correlated over time, most prominently in Europe. The findings in this article raise implications for continued economic integration: freer movement of goods, services and capital may imply more correlated business cycles and, by extension, election cycles.

Electoral Systems and Real Prices: Panel Evidence for the OECD Countries, 1970 2000

In a recent article, Rogowski and Kayser introduced a claim to the political economy literature that majoritarian electoral systems: (a) systematically privilege consumers relative to producers and, consequently, (b) reduce real prices. The authors, modifying an established model of regulation, showed that, within a competitive political system, politicians favour those who provide only votes (consumers) over those who provide both money and votes (producers). When producers provide only money, the intuition becomes apparent even without a model: politicians respond more to voters under (majoritarian) systems in which a small change in vote share can produce a large change in seat share. Cross-sectional evidence for the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries in 1990 was strongly supportive, suggesting that real prices were, all else equal, about 10 per cent lower in the averageOECDcountry with single-member district (SMD) electoral systems than in those that used some form of proportional representation (PR). As with all new empirical claims, healthy scepticism is warranted. Indeed, recent research in related areas has to be contrasted with – but it has not contradicted – these price results, associating proportional electoral arrangements with more positive social welfare outcomes including (a) less income inequality, (b) higher public spending, or, in combination with central banking institutions, (c) greater price stability. We acknowledge the possible incongruity of these results with those of Rogowski and Kayser; after all, verification of the price effects would suggest a more complicated relationship between electoral institutions and social welfare than is indicated in the extant literature.

Electoral systems and the balance of consumer-producer power

1. Introduction 2. Electoral systems and consumer power: theoretical considerations 3. Electoral systems and real prices: panel evidence for the OECD countries 4. Electoral systems and real prices around the world 5. A closer look: case studies and mechanisms 6. Socio-economic origins of electoral systems 7. Discussion and conclusion.

Vintage errors: do real-time economic data improve election forecasts?

Economic performance is a key component of most election forecasts. When fitting models, however, most forecasters unwittingly assume that the actual state of the economy, a state best estimated by the multiple periodic revisions to official macroeconomic statistics, drives voter behavior. The difference in macroeconomic estimates between revised and original data vintages can be substantial, commonly over 100% (two-fold) for economic growth estimates, making the choice of which data release to use important for the predictive validity of a model. We systematically compare the predictions of four forecasting models for numerous US presidential elections using real-time and vintage data. We find that newer data are not better data for election forecasting: forecasting error increases with data revisions. This result suggests that voter perceptions of economic growth are influenced more by media reports about the economy, which are based on initial economic estimates, than by the actual state of the economy.

Diffusion or Confusion? Clustered Shocks and the Conditional Diffusion of Democracy

Scholars, observing clustering in transitions to democracy, argue that democratization diffuses across borders as citizens in autocracies demand the same reforms they witness in neighboring states. We disagree. This article demonstrates that diffusion plays only a highly conditional role in democratization. We advance and test an alternative two-step theory of clustered democratization: (1) economic and international political shocks, which are clustered spatially and temporally, induce the breakdown of authoritarian regimes; then (2) democratic diffusion, in turn, influences whether a fallen dictatorship will be replaced by a democracy or a new autocracy. Diffusion, despite playing an important role, is insufficient to explain the clustering of transitions. Using data on 125 autocracies from 1875 to 2004, we show that economic crises trigger authoritarian breakdowns, while diffusion influences whether the new regime is democratic or authoritarian.

Eine länderbasierte Prognose zur Bundestagswahl 2017

A Länder-based Forecast of the 2017 German Bundestag Election Abstract: When elections are distant, polls are poor predictors. Too few voters are paying attention and too much can change before election day. Structural models can establish baseline expectations but suffer from high uncertainty and underspecification imposed by small samples. We present an early forecast of the 2017 Bundestag election results for individual parties that leverages economic and political data as well as state parliament (Landtag) election results in the German states (Länder) to sidestep these shortcomings. A linear random effects model provides our estimates. Länder elections are dispersed over the calendar and offer the advantage of capturing both actual voter preferences and new political issues. We argue that this approach offers a promising method for early forecasts when polls are not informative.