No abstract

A recent, widely cited study [Healy AJ, Malhotra N, Mo CH (2010) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 107(29):12804-12809] finds that college football games influence voting behavior. Victories within 2 weeks of an election reportedly increase the success of the incumbent party in presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial elections in the home county of the team. We reassess the evidence and conclude that there is likely no such effect, despite the fact that Healy et al. followed the best practices in social science and used a credible research design. Multiple independent sources of evidence suggest that the original finding was spurious-reflecting bad luck for researchers rather than a shortcoming of American voters. We fail to estimate the same effect when we leverage situations where multiple elections with differing incumbent parties occur in the same county and year. We also find that the purported effect of college football games is stronger in counties where people are less interested in college football, just as strong when the incumbent candidate does not run for reelection, and just as strong in other parts of the state outside the home county of the team. Lastly, we detect no effect of National Football League games on elections, despite their greater popularity. We conclude with recommendations for evaluating surprising research findings and avoiding similar false-positive results. In a recent study, Healy et al. (1) find that college football games influence voting behavior. Victories within 2 weeks of an election seem to increase the success of the incumbent party in presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial elections in the home county of the team. This study has received significant media coverage [for one illustrative example, see a 2012 article published by Slate entitled "Will Ohio State's football team decide who wins the White House?" (2)] and has been influential among scholars, receiving ∼130 citations in 5 years. Several factors contribute to the impact of this particular study. First, the result is surprising and memorable. Second, the results are substantively important for several reasons. Previous studies have shown that bad weather and natural disasters can influence election results (3-5), but such findings do not necessarily show that voters are incompetent or irrational. Governments prepare for and respond to natural disasters, and therefore, disasters could reasonably influence election results by revealing more information about the quality of the incumbent (6). However, the finding that football games influence elections may suggest that voters are incompetent or irrational, because "[u]nlike aberrant weather, local sports outcomes are not something that citizens could expect government to prepare for nor to respond to" (ref. 7, p. 296). Some scholars have gone so far as to suggest that this finding challenges the health of democracy: "This research could describe the reality of democracies as being closer to the worst-case view" (ref. 8, p. 7).The identifying assumptions of Healy et a...

This paper proposes a novel theoretical framework to study the features of mass purges in authoritarian regimes. We contend that mass purges are an instrument of top-down accountability meant to motivate and screen a multitude of agents (e.g., single-party members, state bureaucrats). We show that the set of purged agents is well delineated in mild purges, whereas no performance indicator is a guarantee of safety in violent purges. The proportion of purged agents is non-monotonic in the intensity of violence. For the autocrat, increasing the intensity of violence always raises performance, but it improves the selection of subordinates only if violence is low to begin with. Hence, even absent de jure checks, the autocrat is de facto constrained by her subordinates’ strategic behavior. We use historical (including the Soviet purges and the Cultural Revolution) and recent (the Erdogan purge) events to illustrate our key theoretical findings.

No abstract