Political Gold: The Australian Sports Grants Scandal

The partisan allocation of public funds has a long history in Australian politics. Using a unique dataset, which allows us to distinguish the merit-based component of the funding decision from the politically based component, we examine the 2018–2019 Australian sports grants scandal. We find that local funding allocations for sports infrastructure were directed disproportionately to win marginal electorates and to reward loyal supporters. However, contrary to our expectations, we find virtually no electoral impact of the grants: those electorates that received more sporting grant funding were no more likely to swing in favour of the government in the 2019 election than electorates that received no funding. A straw poll of members of the House of Representatives suggests one possible explanation as to why pork-barrelling persists: parliamentarians tend to overestimate its electoral impact.

Pandemic to hinder PAC re-election hopes in Costa Rica

Significance The economy will be a key electoral topic, as the country struggles to recover from a pandemic-induced slowdown with an already weak fiscal position. With opposition parties focused on building their profiles, the minority government will struggle to advance significant legislation in the final months of its term. Impacts A rise in COVID-19 cases closer to the elections could raise questions regarding whether the polls should go ahead. The introduction of other IMF-backed proposals could be delayed by doubts about their electoral impact ahead of legislative polls. Delayed IMF funding could lead to increases in government borrowing.

The Impact of Pre-Election Protests in Electoral Autocracies: The Case of Hong Kong’s Anti-ELAB Movement

Scholars of electoral autocracies accord far more attention to post-election protests than pre-election ones, as the former have the potential to trigger a regime transition. We argue that pre-election protests can have a significant effect on election outcomes. In particular, they are likely to deepen social cleavages along two dimensions: age and immigrant status. The 2019 social unrest in Hong Kong provides a unique opportunity to evaluate the electoral impact of pre-election protests. Comparing public opinion data related to the 2019 and 2015 District Council elections, we find strong empirical support for our argument, as immigrant status and age are strong predictors of voting choices and voter turnout. Our findings imply that exposure to democratic protests may not help in bridging the gap in political attitudes between immigrants and natives.

The Electoral Impact of Military Experience: Evidence From U.S. Senate Elections (1982–2016)

The belief that a military veteran candidate receives an electoral benefit at the polls based on a history of military service remains a widely held assumption in American politics. However, this assumption of a veteran electoral bonus has rarely been studied by scholars and the limited literature displays mixed results. This article presents the findings of a new study that addresses the mixed results in the literature and presents evidence that demonstrates that certain types of military veteran candidates do gain a veteran bonus in congressional elections. This advantage over nonveterans is conditioned by party, the type of race, and the nature of military service. By analyzing general election races for the United States Senate over 34 years (1982–2016), the study uncovers support for Democratic candidates with military service receiving an electoral bonus at the polls. This electoral bonus is most widely enjoyed by Democratic veterans in open Senate races and with experience in deployed warzones. The key findings suggest that previous conclusions in the literature with respect to establishing a veteran bonus in congressional elections should be reexamined to expand the time period of analysis, restructure the characterization of military experience beyond a binary variable, and include both House and Senate elections.

Conclusion: An Outsider Looks In

For problems of foreign election interference, international law is an important vehicle for promoting cooperation and combating the worst forms of human (and other) behavior. Nevertheless, scholars of international law engage these problems from limited perspectives. For example, law (including international law) does not deal well with large-scale bad effects that may result from the commission of many unfriendly acts that are individually legally permissible. Nor does international law seem able to handle nonstate actors whose electoral impact crosses national borders. Put differently, what is the meaning of “foreign” election interference when domestic actors are often willing and able to do what a foreign adversary might wish them to do? One important class of domestic actor is the useful idiot—the citizen who is easily tricked into spreading a message that advantages the adversary. A second class of actor, especially relevant for U.S. elections, is the U.S.-based social media company whose free services foreign adversaries use to influence politically relevant messaging. Lastly, international law scholars would do well to question the fundamental psychological limitations on human “rationality” on which many of their putative solutions are based; collaboration with social and cognitive psychologists would help in this regard.

Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Studying Public Politics’ Electoral Potential and Their Social Media Positioning

This study’s subject is the theoretical and methodological aspects of studying politicians’ electoral potential and their social networks positioning. This article aims to explore politicians’ activity in social media to identify its impact on their electoral potential. The authors of the paper used the methods such as analysis and synthesis to study the positioning of politicians in social networks, as well as a systematic approach to examine political, social, cultural, and economic factors affecting the characteristics of the manifestation of activity in the Internet space as a whole, and in social media in particular. The work used empirical and analytical methods to study open empirical data, methods of qualitative analysis to study content posted in virtual space. The authors consider the theoretical and methodological aspects of public politicians’ positioning in social media and their potential electoral impact. The article highlights the main methods and approaches to studying this problem and outlines the ways for further research. The findings and results can be used to research further the electoral potential of public politicians and their social media positioning.

The Contingent Electoral Impacts of Programmatic Policies: Evidence From Education Reforms in Tanzania

A large literature documents the electoral benefits of clientelist and programmatic policies in low-income states. We extend this literature by showing the cyclical electoral responses to a large programmatic intervention to expand access to secondary education in Tanzania over multiple electoral periods. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we find that the incumbent party’s vote share increased by 2 percentage points in the election following the policy’s announcement as a campaign promise (2005), but decreased by -1.4 percentage points in the election following implementation (2010). We find no discernible electoral impact of the policy in 2015, two electoral cycles later. We attribute the electoral penalty in 2010 to how the secondary school expansion policy was implemented. Our findings shed light on the temporally-contingent electoral impacts of programmatic policies, and highlight the need for more research on how policy implementation structures public opinion and vote choice in low-income states.

The Personalization of Electoral Rules: How Shifting Influence From Selectors to Voters Affects Party Unity

How does making electoral systems more candidate-centered affect party unity? Using a principal-agent perspective, this study makes three contributions to the literature on this topic. Conceptually, it suggests thinking about the incentives due to personalization as arising from a shift in electoral impact from party selectors to voters. Theoretically, it incorporates this notion into a spatial model of parliamentary voting that also considers principals’ monitoring capacities. From the resulting framework follows a rich set of observable implications, notably that candidate-centered electoral systems facilitate rather than undermine collective action within parliamentary parties under certain conditions. Empirically, this study then analyzes the 2010 reform of Sweden’s flexible-list proportional representation system, which changed the preference vote threshold. As expected, I find that when extreme (district-based) selectors disagree with the moderate bills supported by the party group leadership, personalized rules incentivize politicians to support these policies and vote in unison.