Investigating elite behavior through field experiment in Brazil: do candidates answer more to core or swing voters?

Abstract

Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing (ESPM), BrazilThis paper explores recent advances in experimental methodology to analyze elite behavior. Using an email experiment conducted in the context of the Brazilian 2008 municipal elections, we studied whether candidates target "swing" or "core" voters during campaigns. Candidates from all parties -1,000 candidates in all -were contacted by randomly generated citizens who identified themselves as either core or swing voters. Additionally, we randomized senders' past voting behavior and their gender. To identify the baseline answer rate, we employed a placebo treatment with no reference to the elections. Our results show that Brazilian candidates target any sender as long as she identifies herself as a potential voter. Within this general finding, models with city-specific fixed effects indicate that Brazilian politicians tend to target core voters. The paper contributes to the general experimental literature by providing an easily replicable design that can test the behavior of elite interaction with the public. At the same time, the paper extends the literature on core versus swing voters by providing an empirical test that can shed light on the effects of a specific political environment (type of election, voting rule, and party structure), and how it affects the relationship between candidates and voters during elections.

Constituency Service under Nondemocratic Rule: Evidence from China

“…Talking about constituency service is much easier than devoting scarce resources to providing service. Field audits can yield national measures of the quality of constituency service that are not subject to these biases and have been usefully employed in a variety of settings (Broockman 2013;Butler and Broockman 2011;Butler et al 2012;Carnes and Holbein 2015;Dropp and Peskowitz 2012;Loewen and Mac-Kenzie 2013;McClendon 2016;Putnam 1994;Spada and Guimarães 2013;Spada et al 2012;White et al 2015).…”

“…Field studies of constituency service have a rich history in democracies, spanning both advanced industrialized countries (Broockman 2013;Butler and Broockman 2011;Butler, Karpowitz, and Pope 2012;Carnes and Holbein 2015;Dropp and Peskowitz 2012;Loewen and MacKenzie 2013;Putnam 1994;White, Nathan, and Faller 2015) and emerging economies (McClendon 2016;Spada and Guimarães 2013;Spada et al 2012). This study adopts a similar approach to studying constituency service under nondemocratic rule.…”

Different Processes, Different Outcomes? Assessing the Individual‐Level Impacts of Public Participation

“…1 1 Some political scientists have conducted experimental work examining public participation in the political arena (e.g., Iandoli et al 2018; Spada and Guimarães 2013; see also Prosser et al 2018) and offered descriptive or case studies on local governments (e.g., Lowndes, Pratchett, and Stoker 2001; Prosser et al 2017). However, these studies mostly focus on elite behaviors and are less relevant in the context of public administration. …”