Category Archives for elections

Has Democratization Reduced Infant Mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa?

picture by Teseum on flickr.

Masayuki Kudamatsu (2006)

Does democracy help babies survive in sub-Saharan Africa? By using retrospective fertility surveys conducted in 28 African countries, I compare the survival of infants born to the same mother before and after democratization to identify the effect of democracy. In measuring democracy, I adopt a theoretically motivated definition of democracy: universal suffrage and contested elections for executive office. I find that infant mortality falls by 1.8 percentage points, 18 percent of the sample mean, after democratization. The size of the reduction is larger for babies born to mothers from disadvantaged groups. I also find that the replacement of a chief executive by democratization is the driving force behind these results. Additional evidence suggests that improvements in public health service delivery, not an increase in affluence, are the key mechanism in which democratization has reduced infant mortality.

Download [PDF] here. 

The Arab Spring and Egyptian Revolution Makers: Predictors of Participation

By Mansoor Moaddel

This paper juxtaposes two clusters of theories; political conflict, resource mobilization, organizational, and political opportunity theories, on the one hand, and mass society, structural-functional, and relative deprivation theories, on the other. It assesses their explanatory power in predicting participation in revolutionary movements. It uses survey data from a nationally representative sample of 3,143 Egyptian adults who rated their participation in the revolutionary movement against President Mubarak from 1, no participation, to 10, utmost participation. The analysis of the data identified three sets of variables that are linked to participation: attitudes against the government and attitudes in favor of alternative sociopolitical orders, individual efficacy, dysphoric emotions, and immorality; such mediums of communicative power as the Internet, mobiles, and opposition newspapers; and demographics, including being male, residing in the urban area, and living impressionable years under President Mubarak. The socioeconomic status having an inverted-U relationship with participation suggests that the revolution was led by members of the middle class. The data, however, provides support for contradictory hypotheses drawn from both clusters of theories. The analysis thus suggests rethinking about predictors of participation. This entails departing from the conception that presumes the participants as monolithic individuals rather than manifold and heterogeneous, a new look at the relationship between immorality and participation, and a refocus on the monolithic state as  the unifying element in the revolutionary process.

Download the paper here [PDF]

Technology and Politicians’ Promises

Increasingly popular, promise-tracking platforms are software solutions designed to track the extent to which elected officials fulfil their promises made during electoral campaigning. David Sasaki has written an interesting post about these “promise meters”. Given that we are still in the early stages of development of these innovations, a few considerations might be noteworthy.While the cases that David lists focus on candidates for the Executive (e.g. gubernatorial elections), for illustrative purposes I focus primarily – but not solely – on cases in the field of parliamentary informatics. That is, existing or potential solutions for tracking politicians’ promises in parliament.
As David mentions, promises are not always the best metric. This may become even more evident when we consider the issues of collective intelligence and deliberation. To clarify, let us think of parliaments in their simplest form. As the etymology itself indicates, parliaments are in their origin conceived as spaces of dialogue. Such a deliberative component, some might argue, is precisely the epistemic basis that justifies the existence of parliaments as such. From this perspective, the mechanism that leverages the knowledge dispersed amongst the different parliamentarians relies on i) exposure to diverging points of view, ii) the justification of arguments on a rational basis, and ii) the willingness of parliamentarians to change their positions and preferences. From this perspective, a parliament in which its members do not change their preferences may in fact be counterproductive. The same applies to actors from the Executive as they interact with actors from other branches (e.g. Legislative) and levels (e.g. sub-national) of government and society as a whole.
Another question refers to the object of promise-tracking software. Some examples may fall prey to focusing on politicians as opposed to political parties, neglecting the role played by electoral parties in politicians’ behavior. Such oversight is particularly undesirable in the context of electoral systems that tend to foster strong party organizations (e.g. proportional representation), where parties’ directives tend to guide political action more than any individual agenda. This is perhaps one of the reasons for which voting advice applications (VAAs) developed by political scientists, such as theEUProfiler, have structured their design around political parties.
Finally, one could argue that promise-tracking platforms are built under a normative assumption that privileges a “delegate model of representation” over a “party delegate model” or a “trustee model” of representation.  Unintentionally, the discussion surrounding promise-tracking software enters a lively – and still unsettled – debate in the field of political representation theory. Edmund Burke would have loved to be a part of it.
(originally posted on the World Bank’s IC4D Blog)

EU Profiler: voting advice application for the 2009 EP elections

(originally posted here)

Here’s a link to a video about the EU Profiler, a Voting Advice Application for the 2009 European Parliamentary Elections.

http://www.euronews.net/en/article/27/02/2009/an-orientation-tool-for-eu-voters/

The EU Profiler has been developed here at the European University Institute with the collaboration of a unique team of international researchers.

A bit more about the EU Profiler:

The EU Profiler is a Europe-wide Voting Advice Application (VAA) or a party profiling website for the European Parliament elections in June 2009. It is designed to help millions of European users and potential voters to discover their positions in the political landscape for the 2009 EP elections.

In order to help voters to make their own preferences explicit and position themselves in a ‘European political landscape’, the EU Profiler offers the users (or voters) an online questionnaire with 30 political statements on which they can indicate their level of agreement or disagreement. When they have completed the set of questions, the programme goes on to state which particular party is closest to the political preferences expressed by the user (voter). Therefore, the EU Profiler allows them to compare their preferences with the positions of all national, as well as, all European parties.

The EU Profiler will be available in all EU Member States in all their respective national languages and will be customized to each country’s national campaign context. The EP elections will also be simulated in a number of non-EU member countries such as Turkey, Croatia, Switzerland and Norway.

The EU Profiler has been developed by the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence which has a unique position to form an international team of social scientists (as the ”officers” of this group and many more). The EU Profiler combines the academic excellence of the EUI with the expertise and the experience of the Dutch company ‘Kieskompas’ and the Swiss consortium ‘NCCR Democracy/Politools (smartvote)’ which are the two leading developers of party/candidates profiling websites and voting advice applications.”