This creates what we might call “the declining talent pool of soccer,” or more simply, the “benchwarmer” dilemma: You want your best 11 players on the field, but in order to motivate your players, you’ve got to threaten to replace them with an inferior player from the bench. Thus, one of these situations may result: Your 11 best players might give less than a full effort (knowing that their imperfect effort is still better than a benchwarmer’s full effort), or your inferior benchwarming players might be the ones you put on the field.

The same problem arises when choosing government officials. The result is inferior governance.

The “Benchwarmer” Dilemma in the British Cabinet

In recently published research, Torun Dewan and David Myatt argue that the same dynamic limits the performance of governments. They’ve got the British cabinet in mind. With salaries and benefits defined by statute, the British Prime Minister’s only “stick” to motivate junior ministers is the threat of removal. But since ministers generally come from a small pool (the House of Commons), the PM can’t actually remove a minister unless the PM is willing to substitute in a less desirable alternate.

Thus, the longer a party controls the British cabinet, the less talented it will be at governing. Either the ministers remain in their positions for so long that the threat of removal loses its credibility, or else talented ministers are replaced with inferior ministers so often that the overall talent level crumbles. Eventually, the cabinet becomes so ineffective that that majority loses control of parliament, allowing the other party to start the same process all over again with its (initially) fresh talent pool.

Is There a “Benchwarmer” Dilemma in U.S. Elections?

I like Dewan and Myatt’s argument. It makes a lot of sense. It helps explain why there is often a “honeymoon” period after elections when the new government seems so effective.¹ In large measure, their argument works so well because it focuses on the British cabinet, where roughly 90 cabinet members (ministers and junior ministers) need to be drawn from a pool of 350 or so majority-party members of parliament. After all, the soccer analogy that I use above might not work so well if there were 1000 players on the roster and only 11 on the field.

Or would it? I think that the “benchwarmer” problem from the soccer analogy can apply just as well to American elections. Consider a member of the U.S. House running for reelection in his district. The only punishment that his “boss” (his voters) can threaten him with is removal from office, whether in the primary or in the general election. They have observed the incumbent over the past two years–longer if he has served several terms–and they understand his strengths and weaknesses. By contrast, they may be mostly unfamiliar with the challenger, who may be a political newcomer.

Thus, voters are faced with a dilemma: Should they keep the star player (the incumbent) on the field despite imperfect performance, or should they substitute in a less experienced, less tested benchwarmer? Elections aren’t merely a referendum on the incumbent’s performance.² Instead, it’s an evaluation of the incumbent that takes account of uncertainty about the challenger’s ability to fill the incumbent’s shoes.

The effect of all this might be that incumbents know they can safely underperform without having to worry much about losing their seats. Maybe that’s why over 90% of U.S. House members get reelected every two years.³ Despite all the recent hubbub about 2010 being an anti-incumbent election year, I’ll be stunned (like Sides and Yglesias) if that pattern changes much this year. Voters find it better to stick with the devil you know than with the benchwarmer you don’t.

This problem is not unique to the states. Some countries have adopted a quota system to combat such underrepresentation. Obviously, if you reserve a quarter of Congressional seats for women, then you’ll end up with more women in Congress. But the question is, do these quotas actually help change the status of women in politics? What if we imposed a quota for a while and then withdrew it–would women see an enduring improvement?

Turns out we would.

The Indian Experiment

I finally got around to reading Bhavnani’s article, published last February, in which he exploits some fascinating data to show that even if you impose a quota for only one election, in the following (quota-free) election, women will still have much better odds of winning after the quotas are removed than they did before the quotas were put in place.

India uses a quota system to ensure representation of women in local offices. Prior to each election, 33% of local seats will be reserved for women; only women may run in these races. These reservations are made through a genuinely random lottery system.¹ So a seat might be reserved for women in one election but then open to anybody in the following election.

These rules create an honest-to-goodness natural experiment. Bhavnani looks at unreserved seats in the 2002 Mumbai elections. He compares those that were reserved in 1997 (the treatment group) to those that were not (the control). He’s not comparing reserved seats to unreserved seats; he’s comparing unreserved seats that were previously reserved to unreserved seats that were not previously reserved. This technique enables him to estimate the long-term effect of quotas after they are withdrawn.

Even after quotas are removed, women are five times more likely to win in post-quota seats than in other seats. Chew on that. Five times more likely.

Here’s some more comparisons between the treatment and control groups. In the control, only 3.7% of winners are female; in the treatment, 21.6% are. In the control, only 35.8% of wards had a female candidate bother to run; in the treatment, 73% did. In the control, only 4.4% of candidates were female; in the treatment, 11.9% were.

There are several reasons that (withdrawn) quotas could have these enduring effects. Bhavnani points to two as most likely. First: Women realize that they can win elections, so they keep running. Not just incumbents, though; you also get more rookie women choosing to run in the treatment than in the control. Something about seeing successful women makes other women realize that they can run. Second: Parties realize that women can win, so they start nominating women to represent them in the election.

Thoughts

Hillary's problem in 2000?

I have no methodological or theoretical critiques of this paper. That’s unusual, if you read my other posts. However, I do have lingering questions that I hope future research addresses.

Bhavnani shows that quotas continue to help women in the first election (only) after they are withdrawn. How long does it take (if ever) for these effects to disappear? Unfortunately, it appears that Bhavnani could not find data to test that. I’d love to see it though. A short term effect is interesting, but not the end of the story.

These quotas apply only to local elections. I’d be curious to look at all the women in state/national office and see how many got their start under (or immediately after) a quota. Does getting your start under a quota make you look like a weaker candidate when you run for office later? Recall that many thought Hillary Clinton had an unfair advantage winning her first Senate election, so she had to work very hard to prove herself as something more than Bill’s shadow. Do women who start out under a quota have a similar problem?

Given that this dispute revolves mostly around methodological (not theoretical) differences, one wonders why this article did not appear as a reply to Gerber et al, followed by a response from the original authors. As my critique at the end of this review will make clear, there are many holes that Gerber et al could poke in Denny and Doyle’s approach.

Details

Those familiar with Gerber et al’s 2003 article may be surprised to see methodological arguments leveled against it. After all, Gerber et al used sound experimental methods to neutralize methdological concerns. They selected a sample of voters who had not turned out in recent elections; they randomly assigned some of those non-voters to receive a mobilization treatment in 1998; of those who actually turned out in 1998 as a result of this mobilization effort, they then looked to see how many turned out again in 1999. At each stage, turnout information for each voter was gathered from public records–not from self-reported polling data.

The problem, Denny and Doyle claim, is not so much with the research design as with the statistical analysis. Gerber et al use instrumental variables in a lagged binary choice model, a procedure that does not yield consistent estimators. As a result, Denny and Doyle write, it appears that Gerber et al severely overestimated the effect that voting in previous elections has on voting in subsequent elections–that is, Gerber et al overestimated the extent to which voting is habit forming.

Denny and Doyle seek to estimate the strength of “habit” more accurately by using Britain’s National Child Development Study (NCDS), a six-stage panel that tracked children born in March of 1958 into the late 1990s. They use a large number of time-variant and time-invariant variables from this study to predict turnout in 1979, this cohort’s first opportunity to vote. For later elections, they use the same background variables, but insert a lag for whether the respondent had voted in previous elections. This procedure produces the estimate that voting in previous elections raises the probability of voting in subsequent elections by 13%.

Punchline: Yes, voting is habit-forming, but not as much as Gerber et al thought.

Critique

I’m surprised that AJPS did not provide Gerber et al the opportunity to reply to this article. I hope to see a reply from them in a future issue. Even if they accept Denny and Doyle’s econometric criticisms as valid (which they appear to be), I suspect that Gerber et al would find plenty of flaws in Denny and Doyle’s approach.

Randomization vs Control Variables

For example, I find it surprising that Denny and Doyle think their statistical control variables can remove individual-level background conditions (fixed effects) as well as Gerber et al’s randomization can. As Denny and Doyle acknowledge near the beginning of their article, the greatest empirical obstacle to identifying an effect of habit is that you must first control for anything that might influence an individual voter’s propensity to vote. If you omit a single variable that influences propensity to vote, then that variable’s effects will be swallowed up in the lagged turnout measure–inflating the estimated effect of habit.

Gerber et al use randomized experimentation to completely remove concerns about omitted variables; Denny and Doyle by contrast, use a (large) vector of control variables taken from the NCDS. They make a valiant effort to argue that these variables (and their sophisticated methods) can account for this problem, but let’s face it–no matter how many control variables you use, control variables can never improve on randomized experimentation.

Is Britain comparable to America?

More broadly, I wonder whether this study is even comparable to Gerber et al’s. Gerber et al studied American elections, and argued that habit raised your probability of turning out by 47%; Denny and Doyle study British elections and find that habit raises your probability of turning out by 13%. But do we really expect habit to have the same effect in such different contexts? Elections are far more frequent in the United States than in Britain–so much so that some worry about “voter fatigue” hurting American turnout. This difference alone implies two things relevant to habit formation. First: Since American elections are more frequent, voters have more opportunity to develop a strong habit. Second: Since American elections happen in more rapid succession, there is less time for the habit to “wear off” before the next election occurs. (Recall that Gerber et all compared turnout in 1998 to 1999–only one year apart; is it any surprise that this would have a stronger effect than comparing British turnout in 1979, 1987, and 1997?)

In sum: An interesting article, but I’d like to see more. I guess that’s how I end most of my reviews, though.

At first blush, one might find the question simple: Of course voters are sensitive to terrorism. After all, the 2004 Madrid train bombings are widely credited with changing the outcome of Spain’s elections, to the point that the ever-reliable Wikipedia reports this as fact.² But Berrebi and Klor go well beyond the elementary question of whether terrorism matters–they tell us exactly how it matters.

In brief: Terrorism within a particular locality exerts a strong effect, particularly if it occurs within three months of election day. In general, support for right-bloc parties tends to rise in localities that experience terror attacks.³ This shift towards the right happens regardless of who is currently in power. Voters in an area hit recently by terrorism don’t vote against the right if the right happens to control the government, as a “running tally” view of party would imply (see Fiorina 1981). Instead, they shift to the right even if the right bloc is already in power–as an “issue ownership” argument might imply (e.g. Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1994). As the authors interpret it, voters shift right because the right bloc is associated with tough responses to terrorism.

These findings have interesting implications for terrorism research, which the authors review well. In particular, these findings raise something of a paradox: If terrorist acts increase voter support for heavy-handed anti-terror tactics, then do terrorists simply reap troubles for themselves through their actions? The authors’ response: While that may be true, terrorists also succeed in placing terror at the top of the policy agenda–drawing attention to the terrorists’ cause.

Critique

Because of the methodological difficulties involved with this study, the authors spend a considerable amount of space discussing data and robustness issues. I would have liked more discussion of what this all means, though. In particular, the authors assume a purely rational causal mechanism. Both the “running tally” and “issue ownership” arguments fit mold. But nowhere do the authors cite Kam and Kinder’s recent article (2007), which identifies a link between “ethnocentrism” and support for the post-9/11 war on terror. Moreover, neither this study nor Kam and Kinder’s delves into the deep (and highly relevant) psychological literature on mortality salience.

Regardless, an interesting study worth reading carefully.

As Nichter points out, these two situations are far from hypothetical. These efforts to buy the vote happen occasionally in the United States,¹ but frequently in other countries–such as Argentina, the focus of this study.

But Nichter asks us to reconsider what’s happening here. When we observe these behaviors, are we observing “vote buying” (as we usually assume) or “turnout buying”? The question isn’t merely academic; “vote buying” smacks of corruption, but “turnout buying” looks more like mobilization, a (usually) laudable activity.

Nichter’s central claim is that parties engage primarily in turnout buying, not vote buying (although they may engage in both, to some extent). Rather than try to purchase support from moderately opposed voters, parties try to encourage non-voting supporters to turn out. This is a major shift from previous work, which has focused on vote buying. In making this claim, Nichter responds directly to Stokes (2005), even using her own data against her.

Stokes, like almost all other political scientists, assumed that when the Argentine Peronist party gave out financial rewards to voters that it was engaging in “vote buying,” not “turnout buying.” This led her down two avenues. First, she expected that money was flowing to moderately opposed voters, the group that could be persuaded to change sides most cheaply. Second, she sought to explain how the Peronists monitored these voters; given that ballots are secret, how do the Peronists know that people aren’t taking their money and then voting against them?

By shifting the focus to “turnout buying,” Nichter doesn’t have to worry about the secret ballot. He expects that parties will give money to their strongest supporters–albeit the ones that are not inclined to vote. If this is true, then the Peronists don’t need to monitor secret ballots; if such a voter bothers to turn out, the Personists can be reasonably sure that the voter will vote for them.

Using the same data (and regressions, more or less) that Stokes used, Nichter shows that Peronist money flowed predominantly toward strong Peronist supporters. Stokes noticed this too, of course, but argued it away, saying that voters had already received the Peronist money (possibly over several election cycles) and may have inflating their claims of support to exit pollsters as a result. Still, Nichter correctly points out that “the most straightforward interpretation” is that Peronists were buying turnout, not votes.

However, the same set of regressions also showed that past voting behavior had no bearing on reward distribution. That is, even if a voter told pollsters that he did not vote in the previous election (1999), that didn’t make him more (or less) likely to have received Peronist rewards during the present election. This finding runs counter to Nichter’s expectations; nonvoters should have been more likely to receive incentives. Nichter argues the point away, but he does so using similar logic as what Stokes used to argue away the relationship between Peronist support and receiving rewards. And if you read the preceding paragraph of this summary, you’ll see that Nichter rejected the logic that time around. To use Nichter’s words (about Stokes) against him, “the most straightforward interpretation” is that the Peronists weren’t targeting non-voters.

All in all, an interesting paper. His point that the parties are supporting their own partisans is well made. His point that they are targeting those that otherwise would not vote is not. Further research is needed. As Nichter points out in his article, a panel study would be ideal to parse out exactly what is going on.