One of the primary international factors proposed to explain the geographic and temporal clustering of democracy is the diffusion of democracy protests. Democracy protests are thought to diffuse across countries, primarily, through a demonstration effect, whereby protests in one country cause protests in another based on the positive information that they convey about the likelihood of successful protests elsewhere and, secondarily, through the actions of transnational activists. In contrast to this view, we argue that, in general, democracy protests are not likely to diffuse across countries because the motivation for and the outcome of democracy protests result from domestic processes that are unaffected or undermined by the occurrence of democracy protests in other countries. Our statistical analysis supports this argument. Using daily data on the onset of democracy protests around the world between 1989 and 2011, we find that in this period, democracy protests were not significantly more likely to occur in countries when democracy protests had occurred in neighboring countries, either in general or in ways consistent with the expectations of diffusion arguments.
Can subnational elections contribute to democratization? In autocracies that hold competitive elections at multiple levels of government, subnational executive offices provide opposition parties with access to resources, increase their visibility among voters, and let them gain experience in government. This allows opposition parties to use subnational executives as “springboards” from which to increase their electoral support in future races, and predicts that their electoral support should follow a diffusion process, that is, a party’s electoral performance in municipality m at time t should be better if that party already governs some of m’s neighbors since t − 1. I evaluate this claim with data from municipal-level elections in Mexico between 1984 and 2000. Consistent with the fact that the Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party, PAN) followed an explicit strategy of party-building from below but the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD) did not, the results indicate that diffusion effects contributed to the growth of the former but not the latter.
In many developing countries, national legislative seats are considered less valuable than (subnational) executive positions. Even then, ambitious politicians may seek a legislative seat either (a) as awindow of opportunityfor jumping to an executive office; or (b) as aconsolation prizewhen no better option is available. Using a regression discontinuity design adapted to aprsetting, we examine these possibilities in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies between 1983 and 2011. In line with the consolation prize story, we find that marginal candidates from the Peronist party—which controls most provincial governorships—are more likely to be renominated and serve an additional term in the legislature, but not necessarily to jump to an executive office. The effect is stronger in small provinces.
How does district magnitude affect electoral outcomes? This article addresses this question by exploiting a combination of two natural experiments in Argentina between 1985 and 2015. Argentine provinces elect half of their congressional delegation every two years, and thus districts with an odd number of representatives have varying magnitudes in different election years. Furthermore, whether a province elects more representatives in midterm or concurrent years was decided by lottery in 1983. I find that district magnitude (a) increases electoral support for small parties, (b) increases the (effective) number of parties that gain seats and (c) reduces electoral disproportionality. The last two results are driven by the mechanical rather than the psychological effect of electoral rules.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.