College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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Item Essays on Voter Behavior and Party Representation(2024) Perilla Garcia, Jorge Enrique; Kaplan, Ethan; Drazen, Allan; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation I study how political agents such as voters and corporations behave in a context of increasing political polarization. I investigate the role that access to power has on the electoral performance of radical parties, the effect of racial unrest in the United States on campaign contributions, and whether political giving by corporations and individuals has polarized in recent years. In the last few decades, radical parties have become increasingly important in Europe and Latin America. These parties often adopt policies that depart from the mainstream economic consensus and may threaten democratic institutions. In chapter 2 of this dissertation, I explore the role that the incumbency effect may play in the success of far-right and far-left parties in Europe and Latin America. I find that, on average, and in a sample of municipal council elections held in Colombia, Sweden, Finland, Spain, and Brazil, radical parties enjoy an incumbency advantage that is as large as that of non-radical parties. To estimate these effects, I compare elections where parties marginally win or lose an additional seat in the council. This study provides suggestive evidence that far-left parties have a larger incumbency advantage than far-right parties. The wide heterogeneity of far-right parties in Sweden and Colombia is the primary driver of this difference. I posit that the difference in question could be attributed primarily to the far-right Sweden Democrats’ nonparticipation in coalitions in municipal governments and the absence of an effect of incumbency on the probability of running again for political parties in Sweden. The findings from this chapter suggest that the normal course of the democratic process may lead to radical parties encroaching on positions of power. In chapter 3, I study the effect of racial unrest on campaign contributions and how this effect is mediated by media coverage. Using a regression discontinuity in time, I find that political donations increased after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. Exploiting discontinuities in media market borders in the United States I find that counties that were more exposed to coverage of the protests by a TV station owned by Sinclair, a conservative media conglomerate, were less likely to support Republican candidates. I provide suggestive evidence that this non-intuitive result could be the consequence of higher coverage of protests by Sinclair-owned TV stations when compared to other TV stations. By rising salience of the issue of racial tensions where Democrats were more trusted than Republicans, this increased media coverage may have depressed donations to the Republican party. I also report suggestive evidence that in counties exposed to more TV ads about police brutality there was higher support for the Democratic party than in less exposed counties. In chapter 4, in a joint work with Ethan Kaplan, Andrew Sweeting, and Yidan Xu, we measure and decompose the partisanship of corporate campaign contributions from 1990 to 2020 using a variance index approach, and provide a comparison analysis of individual donations. Despite previously documented trends towards greater partisanship in voting and political discourse, the donations of corporate PACs have remained bipartisan both in aggregate and individually. This is true across most, but not all, sectors of the economy. Individual giving is, and always has been, partisan at the individual level (individuals usually only give to one party), although there was greater partisanship in the giving of the largest individual contributors in the 2020 election. We make suggestions for future research including suggestions on how to measure other dimensions of corporate polarization which may be more salient to the public.Item Home Field Advantage: Roots, Reelection, and Representation in the Modern Congress(2019) Hunt, Charles Russell; Miler, Kristina; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Prior scholarship has alluded to the importance of biography and other differentiating characteristics between candidates that are reflected in divergent electoral support from their voters. However, recent trends in partisanship and nationalization of congressional elections have led many to believe that these differences are no longer meaningful to voters or elites. In this dissertation, I argue for the continued importance of one aspect of the constituent relationship that has gone previously unstudied: the lived local roots in their districts that members of Congress often (but do not always) share with their constituents. I argue that the shared local identity that emerges from these mutual roots strengthens these legislators’ constituent relationships, and as a result improve legislators’ electoral dynamics in their districts. This project has multiple theoretical and empirical aims: first, to disentangle the concept of local district roots from related but ultimately distinct concepts like the incumbency advantage, “home styles”, and the personal vote; second, to use originally-collected biographical data from nearly 3,000 members of Congress to more precisely specify what district roots are, and to capture the full breadth of benefits they provide both legislators and constituents; and finally, to use advanced quantitative methods to demonstrate the significant positive effects that district roots continue to have on the quality and durability of a legislator’s relationship with their constituents. I first demonstrate in Chapter 3 that when legislators have deep local roots in their district, they are uniquely suited to cross-cut partisanship and outperform their party's presidential nominee in their district. In Chapter 4, I demonstrate that deeply rooted legislators have broader, more supportive constituencies than similarly-situated legislators without District route, and that as a result they outperformed expectations in both the primary and general election stages. Finally, in Chapter 5, I show that in part because they are so influential the legislator-constituent relationship, district roots also have a significant effect on legislators’ campaign spending activity. Deeply-rooted legislators require significantly less campaign spending to achieve results comparable to otherwise-similar legislators without deep local roots; and when they do spend, they do so at much higher proportions within the geographic confines of their districts. All three sets of results demonstrate that district roots are not only an important component of many legislators’ relationships with their constituents, but are also positive conditioners of their electoral dynamics in the district. I close in Chapter 6 by summarizing my results, and by laying out several noteworthy implications that these findings have on future research in congressional elections and representation. I also make a broader case for why, in many circumstances, deep local roots in the district are a normatively desirable component of congressional representation.Item The Transformation of the Role of the Economy in U.S. Presidential Elections Over Time(2012) Curry, Jill; Morris, Irwin L; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Most studies in the presidential elections literature include only a narrow subset of more recent presidential elections. This exclusion is particularly evident in work examining the relationship between economic issues and the vote for president where early presidential elections are routinely excluded. This exclusion is often done without much justification or by leaning on the poorly defined concept of the modern presidency either explicitly or implicitly by the sample used. However, there is evidence to suggest that the influence of the economy on the vote for president occurred much earlier than well into the 20th century. Diverging from most of the existing literature, this study examines the relationship between the economy and presidential elections from 1789 to 2008. The findings of this analysis are two-fold. First, the relationship between the economy and presidential elections is an enduring one. The impact of the economy on the vote for president has been present in varying degrees for almost every presidential election held in the U.S. The role of economic issues in the vote for president is not limited to just more recent presidential elections. The second conclusion is that the relationship between the economy and presidential elections is changing over time. Even though economic issues have influenced presidential elections since the founding, the U.S. today is very different from the U.S.in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The political, economic, and social landscape of the United States has changed substantially over time. This work finds that the relationship between the economy and presidential elections is evolving in that the economic issues that influenced presidential elections in early U.S. history are different from the economic issues that have affected more recent presidential elections.Item Essays on Budgetary Institutions: Theory and Evidence(2006-11-27) Amoroso, Nicolas Emiliano; Drazen, Allan; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The dissertation offers an analysis of the role of budgetary institutions on the determination of fiscal outcomes. In the second chapter I provide a theoretical model that rationalizes differences in fiscal outcomes of two countries that are supposed to obey the same set of numerical constraints on the budget. I argue that these differences arise from heterogeneity in the degree of budgetary transparency that make these rules more or less binding. Moreover, the model is able to accommodate not only long run results, where stronger institutions will always cause more constrained fiscal outcomes, but also short run implications, where countries with relatively stronger institutions can be paired with relatively unconstrained outcomes. The main lesson of the chapter is that, in a democratic environment, transparency of the budgetary process is the main ingredient responsible for the good behavior of the government, and that numeric constraints will have very different effects depending on the level of transparency. In the third chapter I conduct an empirical investigation across a set of countries, of the effects of budgetary institutions on fiscal outcomes. I exploit a new dataset on budgetary practices across countries, to construct several measures of the three recognized budgetary institutions: numerical rules, procedural rules, and budgetary transparency. The main finding of the chapter is that among budgetary institutions, transparency is the only one that is consistently associated with more fiscal discipline, a finding that goes in hand with the results of the model in the previous chapter. The fourth chapter provides an empirical investigation of the effects of budgetary transparency on fiscal outcomes in the American States. I construct a transparency measure across time from the mid 1980s that allows me, not only to look at the evolution of transparency in the American States, but to take account of possible fixed effects in the estimations. My results essentially corroborate those obtained elsewhere in the literature, that greater fiscal transparency among the American States is associated with larger size of government, but I show that this effect is less robust and economically relevant than previously thought.