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Publications

Transparency, Policy Outcomes, and Incumbent Support

Publication . Aguiar-Conraria, Luis; Magalhães, Pedro C.; Veiga, Francisco

Government transparency has been discussed both as a way to decrease informational asymmetries between officeholders and citizens and as part of what makes for procedurally fair governance. These two different lines of argument generate predictions about how transparency should change voters’ reactions to economic and policy outcomes. First, under high transparency, voters should respond less positively to fiscal expansions. Second, they should become more sensitive to incumbents’ ability to deliver outcomes that generate benefits in the long-run than to current tangible benefits. We test these arguments using municipality level data in Portugal. Controlling for variables that previous research has shown to drive electoral support for incumbents in local elections, only in the least transparent municipalities is support positively related with increases in local current expenditures, budget deficits, and municipal wages. Instead, where transparency is higher, voters are more likely to reward improvements in the quality of education.

2019Journal article

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What are the best quorum rules? A laboratory investigation

Publication . Aguiar-Conraria, Luis; Magalhães, Pedro C.; Vanberg, Christoph A.

Many political systems with direct democracy mechanisms have adopted rules preventing decisions from being made by simple majority rule. The device added most commonly to majority rule in national referendums is a quorum requirement. The two most common are participation and approval quorums. Such rules are responses to three major concerns: the legitimacy of the referendum outcome, its representativeness, and protection of minorities regarding issues that should demand a broad consensus. Guided by a pivotal voter model, we conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate the performances of different quorums in attaining such goals. We introduce two main innovations in relation to previous work on the topic. First, part of the electorate goes to the polls out of a sense of civic duty. Second, we test the performances of a different quorum, the rejection quorum, recently proposed in the literature. We conclude that, depending on the preferred criterion, either the approval or the rejection quorum is the best.

2020Journal article

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Favourable outcomes, procedural fairness, and political support: results from a survey experiment

Publication . Magalhães, Pedro; Abril, Tiago

In this research note we address this issue and attempt to add to the literature in three ways. First, we look experimentally at how both procedural fairness and outcome favourability matter for people’s support for political authorities, in terms of both incumbent approval and (intended) voting. Second, we look at different dimensions of procedural fairness — Voice, Neutrality, and Transparency — to determine which of them appears to be most consequential for political support. Finally, we test for the existence of a process-outcome interaction in the explanation of political support using the experimental method.

2018Book part

Open access