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We develop a general approach to measuring electoral competitiveness for parties and governments, which is distinct from existing approaches in two ways. First, it allows us to estimate the actual probability of re-electing the incumbent into office, which lies closer to the theoretical concept of interest than most widely used proxies. Second, it incorporates both pre-electoral competitiveness—that is, the uncertainty about the outcome of the upcoming election—and post-electoral competitiveness—that is, the uncertainty concerning who will form the government given a certain election result. The approach can be applied to, and compared across, a multitude of institutional settings and is particularly advantageous in analyses of multiparty democracies. To demonstrate its full potential, we first apply the approach on 1,700 local government elections in Sweden. Three advantages over existing approaches are documented: Our election probability measure shows substantial variation over the election cycle, it can be accurately measured for a single party as well as a government, and it is more capable of predicting re-election into office than any previous measure of electoral competitiveness. A second application on 400 national elections in 34 democracies shows that the approach also works well in a more challenging cross-national setting.

AbstractWe develop a general approach to measuring electoral competitiveness for parties and governments, which is distinct from existing approaches in two ways. First, it allows us to estimate the actual probability of re-electing the incumbent into office, which lies closer to the theoretical concept of interest than most widely used proxies. Second, it incorporates both pre-electoral competitiveness—that is, the uncertainty about the outcome of the upcoming election—and post-electoral competitiveness—that is, the uncertainty concerning who will form the government given a certain election result. The approach can be applied to, and compared across, a multitude of institutional settings and is particularly advantageous in analyses of multiparty democracies. To demonstrate its full potential, we first apply the approach on 1,700 local government elections in Sweden. Three advantages over existing approaches are documented: Our election probability measure shows substantial variation over the election cycle, it can be accurately measured for a single party as well as a government, and it is more capable of predicting re-election into office than any previous measure of electoral competitiveness. A second application on 400 national elections in 34 democracies shows that the approach also works well in a more challenging cross-national setting.

Building on theoretical insights from research on the rentier state and the "resource curse," several studies have supported the argument that oil hinders democracy. However, previous research on the rentier state has neglected the global surge of multiparty autocracies or "electoral authoritarian" regimes since the end of the Cold War. No systematic study has been carried out on the question of whether or not and how oil affects electoral contests in nondemocratic regimes. In this paper we contribute to filling this gap by combing the literature on multiparty autocracy and the political economy of the rentier state. As oil production creates substantial, nontransparent revenue streams to national and subnational governments, we hypothesize that oil production has a negative effect on electoral competitiveness, both cross- and subnationally, in multiparty autocracies. Consequently, the democratic "resource curse" emphasized in earlier work on the rentier state is likely to persist even after the introduction of multipartyism in cases where oil production predates democratic institutions. The paper tests the hypothesis cross-nationally, using data on all multiparty elections held in the world in the period 1975 - 2010, and subnationally, using a new data set on subnational election results and oil production in Nigeria. Our results confirm that oil impedes electoral competitiveness, both cross- and subnationally, in multiparty autocracies.

AbstractWe advance the literature on electoral institutions and legislative representation by investigating legislators' position taking strategies in Taiwan under the single non-transferable voting period. Existing research largely assumes that representatives elected from the same electoral rule behave similarly. We challenge this conventional understanding by arguing that legislators in multi-member districts (MMDs) tend to move toward the extreme direction from the party line if they come from districts where their party is less competitive. This pattern of legislative representation allows them to appeal to partisan voters, as lowering one's partisan profile can be too costly in such districts. On the contrary, those who are elected from strong partisan districts are expected to deviate from the party toward the moderate direction. Given a solid partisan foundation in these districts, these legislators may target voters across party lines. Our analysis covering the entire period of MMD elections after Taiwan's democratization (1992–2008) provides robust empirical evidence to our theoretical claim. Our findings, therefore, shed lights for future studies on the intertwining nature between electoral systems, district level factors, and legislative representation.

In recent research Verba and Nie and Hansen have provided systematic evidence on the positive effects of mass participation on other aspects of the public policy process. Specifically, Verba and Nie demonstrated that for data on American communities, a curvilinear relationship exists between the level of mass political participation and the extent of elite-mass agreement on 'policy agenda' items. The effect of this relationship is such that the highest agreement, or 'attitude concurrence', is found in those communities with the highest levels of participation. Working with the same data, Hansen3 showed that the competitiveness of elections also influences concurrence independently and that there was an interaction effect of participation and competition on policy-agenda agreement. The interaction was such that attitude concurrence was highest in communities with especially high levels of both participation and competition.