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Very little is known about whether voters' perceptions of the economy affect government support in the same way in developing countries as they do in developed ones. Indeed, weak party systems and a lack of democratic experience may work against prospective voting, high levels of poverty may force voters to emphasize pocketbook concerns at the expense of the national economy, and strong presidents and a lack of voter experience may reduce the role of the political and economic context in conditioning allocations of political credit and blame. Yet our two-stage hierarchical analysis of survey data from 18 Latin American countries over the 1995-2009 period shows that voters evaluate the incumbent prospectively at the beginning of the incumbent's term and retrospectively at the end, emphasize sociotropic concerns more than egotropic ones except in the poorest countries, weight the economy more during periods of volatility than stability, and attribute responsibility for the economy according to the concentration of political control in the executive's party. Thus voters in new democracies have the necessary conditions to hold politicians accountable for economic outcomes in the same way that voters in more established democracies do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clientelism and corruption are often linked by conceptual similarities and by common causes. However, there have been few cross-national studies of how these forms of political behaviors are linked. Using data from a unique dataset on the perceived frequency of clientelist mobilization in 70 democracies, I demonstrate that both political experts and ordinary citizens perceive clientelist countries to have difficulties in controlling corruption. Clientelism is also associated with the level of corruption experienced by businesses in their interactions with government officials who set policy, distribute contracts, and raise funds for campaigns. However, it is not associated with the level of corruption firms have with non-political actors like utilities employees nor with the frequency government officials and policemen target citizens for bribes. The association of clientelism with grand corruption and not petty bribery suggests that not only may some forms of clientelism be corrupt in themselves, clientelism may generate incentives for other corrupt behaviors by influencing the need for funds to maintain clientelist machines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: While government support is often a function of its economic record, this is not always the case. We look at the forces that lead some citizens to focus on economic issues while other citizens are more interested in foreign policy, corruption, social policy, or some other issue. Data compiled from 32 countries participating in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project demonstrate that while the economy is generally viewed as important, the economy's place on the issue agenda varies across individuals and also electoral contexts. If the economy is not perceived as important, its effect on government approval is strongly mitigated. Our data suggest that the economy is more likely to dominate other issue concerns when the economy is in a recession, in countries with volatile economies, if the citizen in unemployed, or if the citizen is economically vulnerable. Governance crises related to corruption and human rights reduce attention to the economy, though we do not find clear evidence that terrorist attacks or participation in wars do the same. Thus variations in the economy's salience need to be further incorporated into studies of economic voting. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Variations in economic voting are commonly linked to the ability of voters to hold politicians accountable. In contrast, we argue that they may also stem from the incentives that voters have to cast an economic vote or not. In this paper, we follow Pacek and Radcliff (1995) and argue that voters who receive welfare benefits from anti-poverty programs should be insulated from swings in the national economy and thus have fewer incentives to cast a sociotropic vote. Evidence from the Mexican public opinion surveys conducted over the 1991-2004 period offers support this proposition. The findings suggest the rewards for investing in anti-poverty welfare programs may increase with program efficiency rather than politicization and that effective social safety nets are political ones as well. It also suggests that variations in economic voting might not reflect the weakness of accountability but its strength: voters are getting what they ask for. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of a larger project looking at the factors that cause some voters to place greater weight on economic concerns when evaluating the incumbent or voting. Here we argue that informal employment, working without a written contract with your employer, makes voters vulnerable to shifts in the job market by inducing wage volatility and increasing the ease of being dismissed while denying workers access to potential coping mechanisms during economic downturns such as severance pay, unemployment insurance, or pensions. The result, we predict, is that informally employed voters will place greater weight on national economic outcomes and capabilities to generate jobs when voting. We test this hypothesis with original survey data on approval of Argentine President Nestor Kirchner and Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo as well as of voting intentions in the 2006 Peruvian presidential elections. The implications of the growth of the informal sector on electorasl outcomes is then discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the effect of electoral laws on political party competition. The researchers use constituency level electoral data from over 50 countries to show that Duverger's predictions are generally supported at the constituency level. They opine that electoral institutions have not constrained partisan fragmentation in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. They add that the resulting theories of the effects of electoral systems at the national level support Duverger.

Abstract: A large literature in political science and economics has emerged in recent years on the causes of corruption. This research has generally focused on either the economic factors that create opportunities and demands for corruption or the political factors that can reduce corruption including dense social networks of social capital, increasing legal mechanisms for monitoring and prosecuting corrupt officials, and political institutions that create electoral accountability by increasing competition and clarity of responsibility. The general consensus of the latter literature is that political competition allows voters to punish corrupt officials. We argue that corruption often exists as part of a larger clientelist framework where politicians tolerate the misuse of state funds by officials in order to gain access to the networks maintained by those funds. We thus build on recent work by Bueno de Mesquita et al (2000), Chhibber and Noorudin (2004), and Singer (2005) that argues that as the size of the necessary winning coalition decreases, political parties will emphasize clientelistic and personalist appeals instead of the provision of public goods and efficient economic outcomes to maintain their support. As a result, we argue that corruption should be highest in countries with either extremely high or low levels of electoral fragmentation. We test this proposition within the frameworks and datasets developed by Treisman (2000), Persson and Tabellini (2003), and Gerring and Thacker (2004). ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work on the effects of fiscal federalism suggest that the effect of decentralization on public good provision and fiscal restraint is largely determined by the social and political context in which the decentralizsation coccurs. This paper extends this work by showing that the outcome of decetralization is contingent upon the patterns of political competition that develop in the local political arena following decentralization. Specifically, the use of state resources to maintain clinetelist networks and low levels of budgetary discipline both predomidate in localities with either extremely high or low levels of electoral fragmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]