The Unrealized Potential of Presidential Coalitions in Colombia

This chapter analyzes the current Colombian legislative process in terms of the input and output of the legislative agenda during four presidential periods (1998–2014). During this time, the electoral and party system changed significantly, while presidential constitutional power and the internal rules of Congress remained unchanged. Importantly, changes in Colombia’s party system have coincided with the formation of multi-party coalition cabinets. However, this chapter shows that the growth in such coalitions does not lead to any additional advantages for these presidents. It argues two main factors explain this outcome: first, legislators face incentives to focus on developing personal constituencies rather than supporting their party’s collective agenda; second, decentralized formal institutional rules in Congress empower deputies to influence both the agenda and the content of bills, which affects the legislative efficiency of the governing coalition. As a result, executive failures remain just as frequent despite large and increasingly formalized coalitions

Leadership Turnover and Foreign Policy Change: Societal Interests, Domestic Institutions, and Voting in the United Nations

This study examines the effect of domestic political change on United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voting. We argue that foreign policy change is most likely when a new leader—one who relies on different societal groups for support than her predecessor—comes to power. We then examine the extent that domestic institutional context—in particular, democracy—shapes this process. We test our hypotheses using a new measure of UNGA voting patterns and new data on changes in leaders' supporting coalitions. We find that change in the societal support base of leaders leads to change in UN voting, especially in nondemocracies. This study lends credence to the perspective that foreign policy, like domestic policy, can vary with the particular interests that leaders represent; it encourages scholars to focus less on leadership change per se and more on changes in the societal groups to which leaders are most accountable. This study also suggests that democratic institutions inspire policy consistency not only in areas governed by treaties and international law, but also in areas of foreign policy that are easier to alter in the short term

When Does the Personal Vote Matter for Party Loyalty? The Conditional Effects of Candidate-Centred Electoral Systems

When do candidate-centred electoral systems produce undisciplined parties? In this article, we examine party discipline under open-list proportional representation, a system associated with MPs cultivating personal constituencies. We present a model explaining how legislators’ preferences and support among voters mediate political leaders’ ability to enforce discipline. We show that disloyalty in candidate-centred systems depends on parties’ costs for enforcing discipline, but only conditional on MP preferences. MPs who share the policy preferences of their leaders will be loyal even when the leaders cannot discipline them. To test the model’s implications, we use data on legislative voting in Poland’s parliament. Our empirical findings confirm that disloyalty is conditioned on party leaders’ enforcement capacity and MP preferences. We find that legislators who contribute more to the party electorally in terms of votes are more disloyal, but only if their preferences diverge from the leadership. Our results suggest that the relationship between open lists and party disloyalty is conditional on the context of the party system

The effects of candidate appearance on electoral success: Evidence from Ecuador

Research has shown that attractiveness can be an important factor for candidate success under many conditions. In this paper, we analyze the potential for voting environments to encourage voting based on appearance. We examine Ecuador’s 2019 municipal elections, where voters faced complex candidate choices within a highly candidate-centered electoral system. The ballots in these elections provided photos of each candidate, which enhanced the potential for candidate appearance to act as a heuristic in a context of low-information decision-making. We find that candidate attractiveness has a positive effect on candidate evaluation and elections outcomes, particularly when candidates are placed in the most prominent section of the ballot. We find no substantial difference by candidate gender in the effect of attractiveness overall, although the effects are more consistent for female candidates when accounting for ballot location. Further analysis utilizing gender-separated polling stations shows that the effects are strongest for female voters

The personal vote and party cohesion: Modeling the effects of electoral rules on intraparty politics

Conventional wisdom suggests that parties in candidate-centered electoral systems should be associated with less cohesive policy preferences among legislators. We model the incentives of party leaders to achieve voting unity without relying on discipline, showing that candidate-centered systems have the counterintuitive effect of promoting party agreement on policies and preference cohesion. These implications derive from the degree of control over list rank held by leaders for cohesion under open lists (OLPR) and closed lists (CLPR). Because discipline is costlier in OLPR due to leaders' lack of control over list rank, leaders seeking voting unity propose policies that promote agreement between members and leadership. Under CLPR, however, leaders can more easily achieve voting unity by relying on discipline and therefore lack incentives to promote internal agreement. We then extend the model to allow the party leader to replace members, showing that preference cohesion itself is greater under OLPR. Further, our baseline results hold when allowing legislative behavior to affect vote share and when accounting for candidates' valence qualities. We interpret our results to suggest that candidate-centered systems result in stronger incentives for developing programmatic parties, compared to party-centered systems

Multi-level legislative representation in an inchoate party system: Mass-elite ideological congruence in Brazil

Research suggests that legislatures in many new and developing democracies may fail to represent voters due to fragmented political systems, incohesive parties, and weak programmatic linkages between elites and voters. Using Brazil's state and national assemblies, we examine the potential for voter-elite congruence in these legislative environments, long considered weak in programmatic representation and highly fragmented due to a decentralized political structure. We use mass and elite survey data from the National Congress and 12 state assemblies from 2005-2014 to jointly estimate deputies' and respondents' ideal points on a common left-right scale. Despite many barriers to ideological representation, we find a relatively strong aggregate pattern of congruence between voters' and politicians' ideological positions, with stronger voter-deputy correspondence for state deputies on average. These patterns are confirmed in a dyadic analysis of deputy and voter characteristics. However, we also find weaknesses in party-level ideological congruence for major parties, particularly for the major left-wing party's voters and the supporters of right-wing parties. These findings suggest that, while the party system did not prevent overall ideological representation, it did may have hindered important aspects of party representation

Scaling Roll Call Votes with wnominate in R

This paper presents a software package designed to estimate Poole and Rosenthal W-NOMINATE scores in R. The package uses a logistic regression model to analyze political choice data, usually (though not exclusively) from a legislative setting. In contrast to other scaling methods, W-NOMINATE explicitly assumes probabilistic voting based on a spatial utility function, where the parameters of the utility function and the spatial coordinates of the legislators and the votes can all be estimated on the basis of observed voting behavior. Building on software written by Poole in Fortran, the new wnominate package in R facilitates easier data input and manipulation, generates bootstrapped standard errors, and includes a new suite of graphics functions to display the results. We demonstrate the functionality of this package by conducting a natural experiment using roll calls -- an experiment which is greatly simplified by the data manipulation capabilities of the wnominate package in R

Recovering a Basic Space from Issue Scales in<i>R</i>

Basicspace is an R package that conducts Aldrich-McKelvey and Blackbox scaling to recover estimates of the underlying latent dimensions of issue scale data. We illustrate several applications of the package to survey data commonly used in the social sciences. Monte Carlo tests demonstrate that the procedure can recover latent dimensions and reproduce the matrix of responses at moderate levels of error and missing data

Ballot design and invalid votes: Evidence from Colombia

We examine the tendency for complex ballots to undermine the ability of voters to cast valid votes. Specifically, we investigate the role of ballot design in explaining the high rate of invalid votes in Colombia observed in 2007. We address this question first by looking at data from a study observing the use of alternate ballot designs in a controlled environment, varying the information voters have when attempting to cast the ballot. Our results show that there is an effect of the ballot design on the amount of invalid votes and that this effect varies with education level. We then examine the observed pattern of invalid votes in Colombia before and after the implementation of the ballot redesign. Our results suggest that the introduction of a ballot with improved usability was associated with a significant decline in the number of invalid votes and that a rural-urban difference observed before the new ballot was no longer present