Research Workshop in Political Economy (Gov 3007)

Date: 

Tuesday, April 10, 2018, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

CGIS Knafel K031
This seminar is closed to the public. Co-taught by Professors Robert Bates, Torben Iversen, and Pia Raffler, the Research Workshop in Political Economy (Government 3007) is a year-long graduate seminar that aims to encourage cross-disciplinary research and excellence in graduate training. Political economy is a research tradition that explores how institutions affect political and economic outcomes. The workshop emphasizes the development of dissertation proposals and is a place where graduate students can present their research to an audience of committed and informed peers. It is open to graduate students in the Departments of Government and Economics, and the Program in Political Economy and Government. The workshop holds both internal and public seminars and meetings. At the internal meetings, approximately twelve per semester, graduate students and faculty present their own work to one another. At the public meetings, up to two per semester, leading scholars are invited to Harvard to present their work. Although the workshop is by invitation only, affiliates of the Weatherhead Center are encouraged to attend the public meetings. First, Mayya Komisarchik will present “Electoral Protectionism: How Southern Counties Eliminated Elected Offices in Response to the Voting Rights Act.” Next, Kostas Matakos will present “Lucky Strike: MP Status and Electoral Success and Survival.” Abstract for “Electoral Protectionism: How Southern Counties Eliminated Elected Offices in Response to the Voting Rights Act” In August of 1965, the Voting Rights Act (“VRA”) explicitly prohibited the most persistent and legally crippling vestiges of southern resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment. The general provisions of the VRA abolished literacy tests, tests of moral character, and all other tests and devices designed to dis- courage registration and voting among African American citizens. While the VRA produced meaningful progress toward full enfranchisement of African Americans living in the South, it did not extinguish all efforts to shut down the avenues of political power before them. In the South, key provisions of the VRA were met with resistance and circumvention. Well-known examples of this obstruction include: county consolidations, gerrymandering, and shifting to at-large districts to dilute votes. This paper examines a much less frequently studied southern strategy for restricting African American enfranchisement: converting or eliminating elected offices in counties heavily populated by African Americans after the passage of the VRA. Applying a difference- in-difference design to county level data on elected officials in 2,855 counties, I find evidence that the passage of the VRA reduced the number of elected officials serving counties with large African American minorities in the South. Abstract for “Lucky Strike: MP Status and Electoral Success and Survival” Does holding office enhance the chances of re-election? A voluminous literature in American politics has used a multitude of methods to shed light on this question. Most of the evidence, however, comes from majoritarian systems, leaving unclear the impact of incumbency advantage in PR systems with multi-member districts (MMDs). This lack of knowledge is particularly troubling, since, in such systems, disentangling personal from the party incumbency advantage is methodologically challenging and substantively consequential. We try to fill this gap by making use of an institutional feature that results into quasi-random variation in incumbency status. In particular, we make use of the 50-seat bonus that the electoral system in Greece gifts to the first party since 2007. In a quasi-random sample of districts, at least one of the seats is secured to the first party. Using a difference-in-differences estimator, we estimate the effect being elected as a bonus-MP on the probability of also being a candidate in the next election. We also look at the impact of MP status on electoral success in the coming elections. We find a significant positive effect on both electoral survival and electoral success. Then, we examine whether this effect translates also into a higher likelihood of re-election. We find that this is the case, but the effect is conditioned by district magnitude: in low- and medium-magnitude districts personal vote is not dominated by partisan vote and individual incumbency matters. Our results lend credence to theories of intra-party competition in open-list systems (Carey and Shugart 1995) and shed light on the individual underpinnings of incumbency advantage in PR systems.