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The impact of local campaigning on voter choice has been studied within the theme of mobilisation. Grassroots effort can attract votes efficiently, but campaign contact is (potentially) endogenous, so results showing positive effects could be flawed. Experimental solutions to this problem are possible, but could also have low external validity. Drawing on the electoral geography literature, this article suggests that endogeneity concerns can be addressed through so‐called ‘friends and neighbours voting’. One source of endogeneity is that that candidates may tend to canvass those living close to their own homes, and those canvassed would be expected in any case to be prone to support local candidates. The problem of endogeneity is reframed and treated as an omitted variable bias. Using unique Irish data on the geographic location of the homes of candidates, as well as data on the location of the voters, the analysis confirms that canvassing has a positive impact on candidate choice independent of the effect of geographic distance. More importantly, these two variables interact. The results point to the relevance of the geographic dimension of electoral politics in driving the endogeneity bias in local campaigning studies.

Coffee is one of the most popular beverages in the world. The high production and health properties of coffee make it one of the best among daily drinks. Coffee is wrongly identified as only a stimulant because of its caffeine content. On the other hand, coffee is one of the best sources of other bioactive compounds, such as flavonoids and phenolic acids. Organic coffee is produced without artificial fertilizers and pesticides. Not only the high quality of beans but also roasting and brewing times guarantee the best taste and quality of coffee beverages. The aim of the present experiment was to determine the best level of roasting and brewing time for organic and conventional coffee. The experiment was carried out with Peru coffee beans from organic and conventional farms. The contents of caffeine and bioactive compounds were measured in different roasted and brewed coffee drinks. The obtained results showed that the conventional coffee contained significantly more caffeine, total flavonoids, and quercetin derivatives than the organic coffee. On the other hand, the organic coffee was characterized by a higher level of almost all bioactive compounds. The best level of roasting was determined to be medium, and the optimal brewing time was 3 minutes.

In this study, we reconcile conflicting findings from the extant literature on the impact of tax system parameters on tax noncompliance. We argue that social norms play a role of heuristics facilitating tax payers' response to the instrumental incentives posed by the systemic parameters, such as tax rate and penalties for evasion, and thus moderate the effect of those parameters on willingness to evade taxes. Relying on a unique survey experiment conducted in fourteen countries of Central-Eastern Europe, we demonstrate two types of a conditioning effect of norms. First, the impact of tax rates on respondents' propensity for tax evasion is moderated by the perceived norms of the society at large (descriptive norms). In particular, an increasing tax rate lowers the probability of evasion as long as one views "most others" as honest taxpayers, which highlights the importance of equitability (fairness) concerns for tax compliance decisions. In contrast, the impact of punishment is moderated by the perceived norms of one's immediate reference group (subjective norms). Strong subjective compliance norms tend to effectively replace penalties as a mechanism discouraging tax evasion, suggesting that the deterrent effect of a penalty can be entirely suppressed when subjective norms are strong. These findings have important implications for the understanding of tax compliance decisions under different formal and informal regimes.

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In a recent article published in Politics & Gender, Michael Jankowski and Kamil Marcinkiewicz (2019) study the effects of gender quotas on the electoral performance of female candidates in open-list proportional representation (OLPR) systems. On the empirical side, their study is a critical reanalysis of the Polish case, in particular the regularities demonstrated in a 2014 study that I coauthored. We argued there that at the micro level (candidate level), the effects of quotas were somewhat “paradoxical”: following the installation of quotas, women candidates tend to perform worse relative to their male counterparts than they did during the pre-quota period. Jankowski and Marcinkiewicz claim to demonstrate that those “paradoxical” effects are minor and thus practically negligible. In this note, I argue that their conclusion is largely a result of the particular methodological choices made by these authors. These choices seem unobvious, debatable, and potentially controversial. The note concludes that we need more reflection and debate on the methodological aspects of analyzing candidates’ electoral success in complex electoral systems, such as multidistrict OLPR. This would greatly facilitate future efforts aimed at an unequivocal examination of the contentious concepts such as the notion of “paradox of gender quotas.”

The developmental model of voter turnout posits that the propensity to vote (or abstain) is a habit acquired during the period of a young adult's socialisation to the electoral process. Once acquired, the habit tends to persist and the individual becomes fairly 'immune' to the potential influences hypothesised to affect turnout. In particular, Franklin proposes that electoral context will have a strong impact on those who have no or little experience of voting (or abstaining) in democratic elections but virtually no impact on those whose 'electoral experience' is more substantial. Tests of the above crucial hypothesis have focused mostly on the heterogeneous effects of electoral competitiveness (election closeness) on turnout. I follow the same route but also point to potential drawbacks of the tests performed so far. At the same time, I propose what I claim is a superior test of experience-conditioned impact of closeness on turnout. My test -utilising data on sixteen Swedish elections conducted between 1956 and 2006 -yields suggestive results supporting Franklin's hypothesis.The developmental model of voter turnout is a major comprehensive attempt to explain the phenomenon of electoral participation and abstention.The model has been developed by Eric Plutzer (2002) whose crucial observation is that a person's propensity to vote (or abstain) is characterised by inertia: participation and abstention tend to persist over time. Plutzer thus suggests that the period of young adulthood -when the citizens of the democratic polities have their initial opportunities to participate in elections -is most critical from the viewpoint of people's long-term engagement in electoral democracy. Drawing on this claim, Mark Franklin (2004) proposes that the impact of electoral context -including electoral competitiveness -on turnout should be most pronounced in the case of the young adults whose socialisation to the electoral process has just started. As those citizens go through subsequent stages of their 'electoral biographies', their propensity to react to context should diminish and their participation decisions should be driven largely by inertia. Franklin shows empirically that the effects of electoral competitiveness (election closeness) on turnout are indeed conditioned by the amount of 'electoral experience' a person has. Franklin's tests, however, focus largely on single-member district (SMD) electoral systems, and so a question remains as to whether his hypothesis applies to proportional representation (PR) systems as well. Moreover, his tests rely heavily on aggregated data and hence they are prone to the threat of ecological fallacy (Matsusaka and Palda, 1993). Finally, when resorting to individual-level (survey) data Franklin relies on self-reported, rather than validated, turnout measures. Survey respondents' propensity to over-report their turnout (see, e.g., Karp and Brockington, 2005) might thus be another source of bias in his analyses. In this article, I propose a new test of Franklin's hypothesis, one that addr...