American Politics Research Workshop (APRW)

This Week's Speaker

Fernando Bizzarro (Department of Government), “Programmatic but weak: the parties voters want"

Abstract

Do voters reward candidates from strong parties? Theoretical and empirical works indicate that voters are better off when parties are strong than when they are weak. Strong parties have more meaningful labels, more participatory methods of candidate selection, and more robust internal accountability mechanisms which minimize informational, adverse selection, and moral hazard problems that plague democratic representation. As a consequence, voters should prefer candidates from stronger parties over candidates from weak parties. This paper studies if this is true by subjecting two nationally representative samples of Brazilian voters to conjoint survey experiments that manipulate information about parties’ ideological clarity, organization, coalitional strategy, and discipline. I find that voters are ambivalent towards strong parties. While programmatically strong parties are attractive, increasing the probability of vote choice by 9.3p.p. compared to programmatically weak parties, candidates from organizationally strong parties are less attractive to voters than candidates from weak parties that do not constrain politicians as much—a 5.7p.p. decrease in vote choice probability.

The American Politics Research Workshop (Gov 3004) meets all academic year, Tuesdays, 12:00 - 2:00 PM, in CGIS K354. This workshop presents an opportunity for graduate students and Harvard faculty to present and receive feedback on their current research. The workshop highlights key theoretical and empirical findings from Harvard affiliates on topics related to American politics.

All interested Harvard affiliates are invited to attend.