CIAO DATE: 07/2014
Volume: 6, Issue: 1
June 2014
Taxing with Dictators and Democrats: Regime Effects, Transfers and Revenue in Argentina's Provinces (PDF)
Melissa Ziegler Rogers
Political institutions strongly influence incentives to tax. In this article, I examine differences across national regimes in provincial taxation in Argentina from 1959–2001 and compare them to sub-national regimes under national democracy. I argue that elections fundamentally shape taxation by guiding career incentives of provincial leaders. Under autocratic regimes, sub-national leaders have strong motivation to tax because they answer to national leaders who reward extraction. I find that national autocrats tax at higher levels, using more difficult taxes. In democratic systems, governors judged by local constituents use political resources to avoid taxation. Governors in closed electoral regimes generally collect less tax revenue than governors in competitive provinces, but this effect is largely driven by national coalition-building and privileged access to national resources. An important difference across sub-national regime type is incidence – closed provinces extract disproportionately from the dependent business sector.
Subnational Electoral Contexts and Corruption in Mexico (PDF)
Brian M. Faughnan, Jonathan T. Hiskey, Scott D. Revey
Scholars of the world’s most recent democratization processes have tended to focus on how national-level institutions have developed and how citizens have interpreted and responded to those developments. In this paper, we argue that the distinct subnational political environments that emerge from uneven national regime transitions are important determinants of how people view their political world. Specifically, we argue that citizens’ experiences with and attitudes towards corruption are particularly influenced by the subnational political context in which those citizens live. We use survey data from across Mexico to test our theoretical expectations that a multi-party electoral context will heighten citizens’ awareness of corruption as a governance issue, even as their chances of being victimized by corrupt behavior is reduced. Conversely, we posit that one-party electoral environments should facilitate a “business as usual” attitude toward corruption among government officials and citizens. As efforts to deepen democracy and improve governance continue across the developing world, our findings highlight the need to incorporate subnational political processes into efforts to under-stand and address such critical issues as corruption and its consequences.
Santiago Basabe-Serrano
This article identifies the variables that explain the dissenting legal vote in courts that operate under conditions of extreme institutional instability. Drawing on three logistic regression models, this article proposes that judges’ ideological preferences constitute a good predictor of the dissenting vote. Contrary to the classic argument, which indicates that the instability of judges encourages strategic voting, this article argues that this relationship can be demonstrated only up to a certain point – that is, until an exponential increase in institutional instability leads the judges to vote sincerely, even when this means being part of a minority or “losing” coalition.
Great Promise, but Poor Performance: Understanding the Collapse of Venezuela's Causa Radical (PDF)
Daniela Nogueira-Budny
Rising meteorically to national prominence amidst the collapse of Venezuela’s ossified two-party system, the leftist Radical Cause (LCR) seemed poised to ease the country’s crisis of representation and win the presidency in 1993. Instead, it imploded, paving the way for radical populist Hugo Chávez. How can the poor performance of a party with such great promise be explained? This article explains LCR’s initial success and eventual failure through the party’s adoption of internally democratic mechanisms. Its highly participatory approach attracted progressive groups, helping LCR’s early “meteoric” success. But it also sowed the seeds of LCR’s collapse: the absence of formalized decision-making rules and hierarchical leadership hindered the resolution of a political impasse. Internal democracy proved harmful to institutional growth and prevented the party from confronting factional conflict and instituting much-needed reforms in the long run. It is not only a heavy hierarchy and bureaucracy that prevent political change, but also the opposite in a base democracy.
Partisan Protesters and Nonpartisan Protests in Brazil (PDF)
Matthew S. Winters, Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro
In young democracies with weak parties, there is some evidence that partisan identification may shift in response to short-term government performance. The massive protests that erupted in Brazil in June 2013 sharply increased the salience of, and public attention to, poor government performance and took most observers by surprise. They were also widely depicted as nonpartisan or even antipartisan. We use two well-timed surveys to examine the effects of the protests on mass partisanship. We find that the protests led to increased nonpartisanship and decreased attachment to the governing Partido dos Tra-balhadores (Workers’ Party, PT) among the public as a whole. We also show that small leftist parties were more broadly represented among protesters than has been previously recognized.