How generational replacement undermined the electoral resilience of Fianna Fáil

This chapter focuses on party switching. The civil-war cleavage that differentiated the two main Irish parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, has been gradually diminishing in importance in recent decades. This trend reached a crescendo in 2011, when the incumbent Fianna Fáil party saw a dramatic decline in voter support, with swathes of its core voters switching to the main opposition party, Fine Gael. This volatility must be seen from the perspective of a generational replacement. To understand the potential for electoral switching, as opposed to change after the fact, the chapter investigates the configuration of voters’ preferences expressed through propensity to vote questions in the INES. The general framework provides theoretical tools better to understand the scale of Fianna Fáil’s defeat, as unique commitment to that party had declined markedly from the position a generation previously and it was thus more vulnerable to punishment following the crisis

What countries select more experienced Leaders? The PolEx measure of political experience

How can we assess which countries select more experienced leaders for the highest oce? There is a wide variation in prior career paths of national leaders within, and even more so between, regime types. Obtaining a truly comparative measure of political experience is therefore a challenge and empirical studies have to rely on proxies instead. We propose PolEx, a measure of political experience that abstracts away from the details of the career paths and generalises based on duration of experience in politics, its quality, and its breadth. We draw on a novel data set of around 2,000 leaders from 1950 to 2017 and use a Bayesian latent variable model to estimate PolEx. We illustrate how the new measure can be used comparatively by addressing the question whether democracies select more experienced leaders. We find that while on average they do, this century the dierence with non-democracies has declined dramatically. Future research may leverage PolEx to investigate the role of prior political experience in, for example, policy-making and crisis management

An attitude diffusion model of the international clustering of political regimes

THESIS 8748On the basis of the relatively new and growing literature on the presence of spatial clustering and temporal waves of the spread of democracy in the world, this thesis sets out to make an inventory of the various theoretical explanations that are available to account for these phenomena and to investigate the extent to which a model based on the diffusion of individual attitudes, in combination with a cascading model of revolution, can be a potential explanation of these global and longterm patterns. Almost all existing explanations are entirely based on elite-level explanations of democratization. There is nevertheless no clear a priori reason to assume that the geographic clustering we observe cannot have been caused by mass-level attitudes and behavior. The argument is made that even if most transitions to democracy are in the end crucially dependent on decisions and actions by members of the elite, the role of public opinion cannot be ignored. Often elite members make decisions exactly because they are concerned with their popularity among the general population and at other times members of the elite actually lose their political position due to popular elections - increasingly common given the prevalence of \u27electoral dictatorships\u27, whereby the power-holders attempt to demonstrate their power to competitors throug

The international diffusion of democracy

The idea that democracy is contagious, that democracy diffuses across the world map, is now well established among policy makers and political scientists alike. The few theoretical explanations of this phenomenon focus exclusively on the political elites. This article presents a theoretical model and accompanying computer simulation that explains the diffusion of democracy on the basis of the dynamics of public opinion and mass revolutions. On the basis of the literatures on preference falsification, cascading revolutions and the social judgment theory an agent-based simulation is developed and analyzed. The results demonstrate that the diffusion of attitudes, in combination with a cascading model of revolutions,is indeed a possible theoretical explanation of the spatial clustering of democracy.Not applicableNot yet published; 12 months embargo from publication date - AV 30/7/2010 ab ke st en SB. 27/8/10 Check details when published, then embargo for 12 months - OR 30/8/1

“Aid for Trade” Effectiveness? Micro-level Evidence from Nepal

This paper considers the extent to which the ‘Aid for Trade’ (AfT) initiative has been effective in promoting improved export outcomes at the firm level. Specifically, the paper uses geo-referenced data on AfT projects from the AidData database and firm activity from a survey of nearly 150 exporting firms in Nepal to spatially identify impacts of the projects on export performance. We find qualified evidence that proximity to (more) AfT projects improves export performance but that some projects may be more effective than others. These findings are supplemented by interviews with 21 exporting firms. The results suggest that the research approach could be utilized more broadly in order to draw more generalized conclusions about AfT and firm export performance.European Commission Horizon 2020Irish Research CouncilUniversity College DublinCollege of William & Mar

On the importance of personal sources of power in politics

Political actors derive influence both from their official position and from their own personal standing. However, political science has proven to be better equipped to study formal powers and institutions. The study of informal arrangements, where actors rely on personal connections and authority, is more challenging. This has arguably led to the predominance of an institutional focus in research. We argue for the study of informal sources of power as an equally important area of research. Drawing from historical and contemporary examples, we reintroduce the concepts of auctoritas and potestas to underline the difference between individual and institutional sources of influence. We discuss the various obstacles to measurement and outline attempts proposed to date in the literature