An increasing number of studies exploit the occurrence of unexpected events during the fieldwork of public opinion surveys to estimate causal effects. In this paper, we discuss the use of this identification strategy based on unforeseen and salient events that split the sample of respondents into treatment and control groups: the Unexpected Event during Survey Design. In particular, we focus on the assumptions under which unexpected events can be exploited to estimate causal effects and we discuss potential threats to identification, paying especial attention to the observable and testable implications of these assumptions. We propose a series of best practices in the form of various estimation strategies and robustness checks that can be used to lend credibility to the causal estimates. Drawing on data from the European Social Survey, we illustrate the discussion of this method with an original study of the impact of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks (Paris, 01/07/2015) on French citizens’ satisfaction with their national government.
The COVID-19 outbreak poses an unprecedented challenge for contemporary democracies. Despite the global scale of the problem, the response has been mainly national, and global coordination has been so far extremely weak. All over the world governments are making use of exceptional powers to enforce lockdowns, often sacrificing civil liberties and profoundly altering the pre-existing power balance, which nurtures fears of an authoritarian turn. Relief packages to mitigate the economic consequences of the lockdowns are being discussed, and there is little doubt that the forthcoming recession will have important distributive consequences. In this paper we study citizens' responses to these democratic dilemmas. We present results from a set of survey experiments run in Spain from March 20 to March 28, together with longitudinal evidence from a panel survey fielded right before and after the virus outbreak. Our findings reveal a strong preference for a national as opposed to a European/international response. The national bias is much stronger for the COVID-19 crisis than for other global problems, such as climate change or international terrorism. We also find widespread demand for strong leadership, willingness to give up individual freedom, and a sharp increase in support for technocratic governance. As such, we document the initial switch in mass public preferences towards technocratic and authoritarian government caused by the pandemic. We discuss to what extent this crisis may contribute to a shift towards a new, self-enforcing political equilibrium.
The design of government portfolios – that is, the distribution of competencies among government ministries and office holders – has been largely ignored in the study of executive and coalition politics. This article argues that portfolio design is a substantively and theoretically relevant phenomenon that has major implications for the study of institutional design and coalition politics. The authors use comparative data on portfolio design reforms in nine Western European countries since the 1970s to demonstrate how the design of government portfolios changes over time. Specifically, they show that portfolios are changed frequently (on average about once a year) and that such shifts are more likely after changes in the prime ministership or the party composition of the government. These findings suggest a political logic behind these reforms based on the preferences and power of political parties and politicians. They have major implications for the study of institutional design and coalition politics.
Recent studies of coalition-directed voting suggest that what political parties say during a campaign can influence voter perceptions of the likelihood of certain coalitions and that this, in turn, may foster strategic voting in multiparty systems. Here, we expand this argument and show that preelection coalition signals also have the potential to influence voter perceptions of the parties themselves. By revealing their coalition preferences, parties provide information on where they stand on the political continuum. We test our argument using a survey experiment run during a regional election campaign in Spain in which we manipulated the coalition signals emitted by two parties: one, a traditional social democratic party and, the second, a new liberal party. Results show how coalition signals can significantly influence the party's position and, ultimately, affect voters' stated probability of voting, especially in the case of the recently founded party.
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