Which Elections Can Be Lost?

Abstract

The concept of electoral competition is relevant to a variety of research agendas in political science, yet the question of how to measure electoral competition has received little direct attention. We revisit the distinction proposed by Giovanni Sartori between competition as a structure or rule of the game and competitiveness as an outcome of that game and argue that to understand which elections can be lost (and therefore when parties and leaders are potentially threatened by electoral accountability), scholars may be better off considering the full range of elections where competition is allowed. We provide a data set of all national elections between 1945 and 2006 and a measure of whether each election event is structured such that the competition is possible. We outline the pitfalls of other measures used by scholars to define the potential for electoral competition and show that such methods can lead to biased or incomplete findings. The new global data on elections and the minimal conditions necessary for electoral competition are introduced, followed by an empirical illustration of the differences between the proposed measure of competition and existing methods used to infer the existence of competition.

Electoral Confidence and Political Budget Cycles in Non-OECD Countries

“…This implies that both datasets can be used interchangeably for periods past 1972. 14 The three properties are coded in Hyde and Marinov (2011). 15 In the classification scheme proposed by , the polity threshold of -6 separates autocracies from hybrid regimes.…”

“…Democracy and Autocracy (NELDA) dataset (Hyde & Marinov, 2011) and indicates whether a competitive, politically important election occurred in a given country-year. We restrict our analysis to "competitive" elections as our argument assumes some risk of being voted out of office.…”

“…Taking the difference between the predicted win-margin in the poll and the actual win-margin as a dependent variable, we then estimated a model of poll accuracy using country-level characteristics, election characteristics, and decade dummies as predictors. 17 From this model, we extracted an error term, which we normalized and interacted with a binary variable from the NELDA dataset (Hyde & Marinov, 2011) indicating whether there were reliable polls favorable to the incumbent. 18 By interacting the NELDA dummy variable with our error prediction, we get a more fine-grained, survey-based measure of electoral confidence thatimportantly given the context -takes into account the expected quality of polls in a given election year.…”

“…All variables are taken from Hyde and Marinov (2011) and the World Bank (2010Bank ( , 2013. 31 The results are shown in Table 3.…”

Electoral Competitiveness, Tax Bargaining and Political Incentives in Developing Countries: Evidence from Political Budget Cycles Affecting Taxation

“…This rests on the belief that an electoral loss by the incumbent is the best available proxy for governments that are particularly unpopular, and which we would thus expect to struggle in securing tax compliance prior to an election. 56 51 It is coded by excluding elections for which either of the variables nelda3, nelda4 or nelda 5 is coded 'no' (Hyde and Marinov 2012). 52 There are important debates in the literature about the most appropriate method of measuring electoral competitiveness, and none are perfect (Hyde and Marinov 2012).…”