Fiscal Policy Outcomes and Electoral Accountability in

We examine whether and when voters in American states hold elected officials accountable for the results of fiscal policy decisions. Clear fiscal policy effects appear in both gubernatorial and legislative elections between 1968 and 1992, independent of the effects of incumbency, coattails, term limits, and macroeconomic conditions. The results show that voters expect Democrats to provide higher levels of taxes and spending relative to state economies. Net of these expectations, Republican gubernatorial candidates lose votes if their party is responsible for unanticipated increases in the size of the state budget, but Democrats do not, and indeed may be rewarded for small increases. Independent of this, the incumbent party is punished for failing to maintain fiscal balance, and accountability is generally stronger following a period of unified party control than under divided government. Taken together, these results show how electoral accountability for fiscal policy outcomes is strong but highly contingent on a complex configuration of party labels, partisan control, expectations, and institutions. Despite the attention given to "big government " and budget deficits during recent political campaigns, the connection between fiscal policy outcomes and election results in the American state

Who's Asking? Interviewer Coethnicity Effects in African Survey Data

Face-to-face interviews constitute a social interaction between interviewer and respondent, and in the African context, social interactions are strongly shaped by ethnicity. Yet research using African survey data typically fails to account for the effect of shared ethnicity on survey responses. We find that respondents give systematically different answers to coethnic and noncoethnic interviewers across surveys in 14 African countries, but with significant variation in the degree of bias across question types and types of noncoethnic dyads, with the largest effects occurring where both the respondent and interviewer are members of ethnic groups with a history of political competition and conflict, and where the respondent or interviewer shares an ethnicity with the head of state. Our findings have practical implications for consumers of African survey data and underscore the context dependence of the social interaction that constitutes the survey experience

Replication Data for: Electoral ink and turnout in a partial democracy

Inking voters' fingers after they cast ballots is standard practice in elections in emerging democracies. Inking helps prevent double voting in countries with unreliable voting records and weak administrative capacity but may unintentionally enable politicians to manipulate turnout by making decisions to vote more visible. We explore the effects of inking on turnout through a GOTV experiment conducted in Kampala during the February 2011 Ugandan general election. In the experiment, we reminded people to vote and informed them about the use and implications of electoral ink. This treatment likely reduced turnout, particularly for younger and less educated voters. Our results suggest that common electoral practices aimed at reducing fraud can have unintended---and not always benign---behavioral consequences