We present new evidence about the long-run relationship between state capacity and economic performance in Europe, the birthplace of modern economic growth. Our database is novel and spans 11 countries and 4 centuries from the Old Regime to World War I. We argue that national governments undertook two political transformations over this period: fiscal centralization and limited government. We find a significant direct relationship between fiscal centralization and economic growth. Furthermore, we find that an increase in the state's capacity to extract greater tax revenues was one mechanism through which both fiscal centralization and, to some extent, limited government played significant economic roles. We believe that our analysis is among the first to show systematic evidence that state capacity is an important determinant of long-run economic growth.

Misreporting is a problem that plagues researchers who use survey data. In this article, we develop a parametric model that corrects for misclassified binary responses using information on the misreporting patterns obtained from auxiliary data sources. The model is implemented within the Bayesian framework via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods and can be easily extended to address other problems exhibited by survey data, such as missing response and/or covariate values. While the model is fully general, we illustrate its application in the context of estimating models of turnout using data from the American National Elections Studies.

Invalid voting and absenteeism are alternative sources of abstention under compulsory voting. Previous research failed to systematically study the mechanisms behind each form of non-voting and the relationships between them. We develop an analytical framework and an empirical strategy to jointly examine invalid voting and absenteeism in Brazil, the world’s largest democracy with mandatory voting. Using Bayesian inferential methods and analyzing both individual and district-level data, we show that less educated and politically knowledgeable citizens are less likely to vote and, when they do, they are typically unable to successfully complete their ballot. Unlike absenteeism, invalid voting also has a political dimension reflecting voters’ disenchantment with elections and democratic performance. Both sources of abstention coexist and, together, undermine electoral participation.

Existing scholarship offers few answers to fundamental questions about the mortality of political parties in established party systems. Linking party research to the organization literature, we conceptualize two types of party death, dissolution and merger, reflecting distinct theoretical rationales. They underpin a new framework on party organizational mortality theorizing three sets of factors: those shaping mortality generally and those shaping dissolution or merger death exclusively. We test this framework on a new dataset covering the complete life cycles of 184 parties that entered 21 consolidated party systems over the last five decades, resorting to multilevel competing risks models to estimate the impact of party and country characteristics on the hazards of both types of death. Our findings not only show that dissolution and merger death are driven by distinct factors, but also that they represent separate logics not intrinsically related at either the party or systemic level.

This paper analyzes the influence of alternative voting technologies on electoral outcomes in multi-party systems. Using data from a field experiment conducted during the 2005 legislative election in Argentina, we examine the role of information effects associated with alternative voting devices on the support for the competing parties. We find that differences in the type of information displayed and how it was presented across devices favored some parties to the detriment of others. The impact of voting technologies was found to be larger than in two-party systems, and could lead to changes in election results. We conclude that authorities in countries moving to adopt new voting systems should carefully take the potential partisan advantages induced by different technologies into account when evaluating their implementation.

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Analyzing the British Election Study from 1964 to 2010, we examine the influence of electoral context on turnout, focusing on the closeness of elections in terms of lagged seat and constituency-level winning margins. Using cross-classified multilevel models to account for individual and contextual factors and disentangle life cycle, cohort- and election-specific effects, we find that closeness strongly affects voting behavior, particularly among new electors. Widening seat margins in British elections over the last decades have had a persistent impact on turnout. Respondents who faced less competitive environments when young are more likely to abstain in subsequent elections than those reaching voting age after close-fought races. We conclude that variations in competitiveness have had both short- and long-term effects on turnout.

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