This study shows that shifts in political climate influence stock prices. As the party in power changes, there are systematic changes in the industry-level composition of investor portfolios, which ...weaken arbitrage forces and generate predictable patterns in industry returns. A trading strategy that attempts to exploit demand-based return predictability generates an annualized risk-adjusted performance of 6% during the 1939 to 2011 period. This evidence of predictability spans 17%–27% of the market and is stronger during periods of political transition. Our demand-based predictability pattern is distinct from cash flow-based predictability identified in the recent literature.
Forbearance HOLLAND, ALISHA C.
The American political science review,
05/2016, Volume:
110, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Particularly in developing countries, there is a gap between written law and behavior. Comparative research emphasizes that laws go unenforced due to resource constraints or inadequate control of the ...bureaucracy. I instead introduce the concept of forbearance, or the intentional and revocable nonenforcement of law, and argue that politicians often withhold sanctions to maximize votes as well as rents. Drawing on tools from price theory and distributive politics, I present several methods to separate situations when politicians are unable versus unwilling to enforce the law. I demonstrate the identification strategies with original data on the enforcement of laws against street vending and squatting in urban Latin America. In contexts of inadequate social policy, politicians use forbearance to mobilize voters and signal their distributive commitments. These illustrations thus suggest the rich, and largely neglected, distributive politics behind apparent institutional weakness.
Many resource-strapped developing country governments seek international aid, but when that assistance is channeled through domestic civil society, it can threaten their political control. As a ...result, in the last two decades, 39 of the world’s 153 low- and middle-income countries have adopted laws restricting the inflow of foreign aid to domestically operating nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Governments recognize that such laws harm their international reputations for supporting democracy and may invite donor punishment in terms of aid reductions. Yet, they perceive foreign aid to NGOs as supporting political opponents and threatening their grip on power. In the aftermath of competitive electoral victories, governments often take new legal steps to limit these groups’ funding. We test this argument on an original dataset of laws detailing the regulation of foreign aid inflows to domestically operating NGOs in 153 low- and middle-income countries for the period 1993–2012. Using an event history approach, we find that foreign aid flows are associated with an increased risk of restrictive law adoption; a log unit increase in foreign aid raises the probability of adoption by 6.7%. This risk is exacerbated after the holding of competitive elections: the interaction of foreign aid and competitive elections increases the probability of adoption by 11%.
We exploit variation in U.S. gubernatorial term limits across states and time to empirically estimate two separate effects of elections on government performance. Holding tenure in office constant, ...differences in performance by reelection-eligible and term-limited incumbents identify an accountability effect: reelection-eligible governors have greater incentives to exert costly effort on behalf of voters. Holding term-limit status constant, differences in performance by incumbents in different terms identify a competence effect: later-term incumbents are more likely to be competent both because they have survived reelection and because they have experience in office. We show that economic growth is higher and taxes, spending, and borrowing costs are lower under reelection-eligible incumbents than under term-limited incumbents (accountability), and under reelected incumbents than under first-term incumbents (competence), all else equal. In addition to improving our understanding of the role of elections in representative democracy, these findings resolve an empirical puzzle about the disappearance of the effect of term limits on gubernatorial performance over time.
Competition reduces rent extraction in private-sector firms. In this article, we empirically assess whether it similarly disciplines politicians by evaluating local-level governments' performance in ...Flanders. The results indicate that electoral competition - measured via the number of parties competing in elections - significantly positively affects the productive efficiency of municipal policy. Intertemporal competition - measured as the volatility of election outcomes over time - has a similar, but weaker, positive effect. These beneficial effects are mitigated by the fact that competition may lead to more fragmented governments, which is shown to work against their productive efficiency. Overall, though, the beneficial effects outweigh the unfavourable ones in our sample.
This study examines Twitter use by presidential candidates during the 2012 primary election. The Twitter feeds and activity levels of candidates from the Republican, Democratic, Libertarian, and ...Americans Elect parties and their campaigns were gathered over a 3-month span. Variables examined include the number of tweets posted, followers gained, and followers added as well as the occurrence of hashtags, user mentions, hyperlinks, and content categories within tweets. Results showed candidates’ presence on Twitter was not uniform. Tweet frequency did not necessarily result in followers gained. Interestingly, the candidates who tweeted the most were not major party nominees. As the Republican primary campaign progressed, the amount of daily tweeting by the candidates was not higher than it had been earlier in the primary season.
In the digital age, political science is faced with a shift of election campaigns and political discourse to digital or virtual arenas. Because the internet is a highly volatile medium and online ...content can become inaccessible after the campaign season, new challenges for research arise as well as the need for the preservation of online content. Moreover, the sheer volume of data researchers have to deal with has reached levels where traditional methods are being highly challenged. This paper puts forth a web harvesting workflow with a strong focus on granular extraction of unstructured information (publication dates) for automated analysis. As our approach is methodological, we would like to point out the benefits that researches in political science may draw from adapting our methodology. We demonstrate this by analysing an event-based web crawl of German parties participating in the election campaign for the European Parliamentary Election in 2019. We employ distant reading methods to generate topic models, which are subsequently evaluated by hermeneutic analysis of a subset of the data.
The proliferation of election reforms poses a challenge for local election officials (LEOs) charged with conducting elections. To meet this challenge, LEOs attempt to communicate, inform, and ...persuade voters how to cast their ballots in a manner that is efficient and effective for both the voter and the administrator. This article examines the effects of efforts by LEOs to persuade voters to return mailed ballots before Election Day and in person in order to facilitate the efficient administration of vote-by-mail elections in Colorado. Field experiments testing the efficacy of alternative messages find that many messages have no effect on the timing or method of ballot return. Messaging that focuses on LEOs' responsiveness to voters' demands is most effective at steering voters to return their mailed ballots in person but results in later ballot returns.
We test whether good economic conditions and expansionary fiscal policy help incumbents get reelected in a large panel of democracies. We find no evidence that deficits help reelection in any group ...of countries independent of income level, level of democracy, or government or electoral system. In developed countries and old democracies, deficits in election years or over the term of office reduce reelection probabilities. Higher growth rates over the term raise reelection probabilities only in developing countries and new democracies. Low inflation is rewarded by voters only in developed countries. These effects are both statistically significant and quite substantial quantitatively. (JEL D72, E62, H62, O47)
Much of the gender gap literature focuses on women’s greater average liberalism relative to men. This approach masks considerable heterogeneity in political identity and behavior among women based on ...race, class, and other key socio-demographic characteristics. In the 2016 Presidential contest, political divisions among women were evident in exit polling, which demonstrated that a majority of white women voted for Donald Trump. This was not an anomaly but reflects a more long-standing distinction between white women and women of other racial and ethnic identifications. In this paper, we draw on intersectionality and system justification theory as frameworks for exploring the distinctive political behavior of white women. Using data from the 2012 and 2016 American National Election Studies, we evaluate the factors that attracted white women voters to the GOP and kept them in the fold in spite of expectations that sexism in the campaign would drive women away from the party during the 2016 Presidential race. Our analyses show that many white women endorse sexist beliefs, and that these beliefs were strong determinants of their vote choice in 2016, more so than in 2012. Our findings also point to important divisions among white women based on educational attainment and household income in terms of both the endorsement of sexism and vote choice. These results shed new light on white women’s political behavior and qualify the existing gender gap literature in important ways, offering new insights into the ways whiteness, gender, and class intersect to shape political behavior.
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