Adrián Lucardi

Successful coordination around a Duvergerian equilibrium requires accurate and consistent information about parties’ expected electoral support. In practice, such information is often unreliable and rarely available at the local level, where polls are prohibitively expensive, making voters’ coordination difficult. In this paper we leverage Argentina’s Open, Mandatory, and Simultaneous Primary Elections as a large-scale survey of voter preferences. Using data from 135 municipalities in the province of Buenos Aires (2011-2023), we show that a narrower margin between the top-two placed parties in the primary increases turnout and the proportion of positive votes in the general election, while decreasing electoral fragmentation. Additionally, whereas the first-placed party in the primary does not benefit from a «bandwagon» effect, the second-placed one is substantially more likely to win the election than the third-placed one. In line with theoretical predictions, these phenomena are more pronounced (a) in concurrent elections; (b) in smaller municipalities; and (c) when the second-placed party is closer to the first-placed one.

Even in countries where elections are generally considered free and fair, parties invest substantial effort in placing monitors at the precinct level to oversee the voting process. While monitors are intended to deter fraud, certain configurations may increase opportunities for manipulation. Polling places staffed only by incumbent party monitors have been linked to irregularities, though opposition parties may have incentives to exaggerate such claims. This article examines the impact of party monitors on the outcomes of both rounds of Argentina’s 2023 presidential election. Exploiting the quasi-random assignment of monitors to polling stations within schools, we estimate the causal effect of unchecked versus cross-party monitoring. The results show that unchecked monitors increased their party’s vote count. We find consistent and significant effects associated with monitors from the Peronist coalition (UPP) in provinces that either had a Peronist governor or held concurrent federal and provincial elections, and only in the first round. The findings suggest that mutual oversight by monitors from different parties, as occurred in the runoff, may help deter electoral manipulation.

To what extent do presidents favor, and are favored by, their home state? While presidents may favor «their» state due to personal attachment or for sentimental reasons, such behavior is electorally costly in democracies where all votes are counted equally. Instead, we propose a network mobilization story in which presidents tend to disproportionately recruit collaborators from the state where they have their political base, and the prospect of cabinet appointments and increased access to the national executive induces these collaborators to mobilize voters at election time. Consistent with this explanation, in both Argentina (1983-2024) and Mexico (1988-2024), presidential candidates over-perform electorally in the state where they have their political base; and the president’s state is over-represented in the national cabinet. In contrast, we document mostly null results for Brazil (1989-2024), and show that in neither country do presidents affect either fiscal transfers to, or the unemployment rate in, their state.

Runoff systems allow for a reversion of the first-round result: the most voted candidate in the first round may end up losing the election in the second. But do voters take advantage of this opportunity? Or does winning the first round increase the probability of winning the second? We investigate this question with data from presidential elections since 1945, as well as subnational elections in Latin America. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that being the most voted candidate in the first round has a substantial positive effect on the probability of winning the second round in mayoral races -especially in Brazil-, but in presidential and gubernatorial elections the effect is negative, though not statistically significant at conventional levels. The positive effect in municipal races is much stronger when the top-two placed candidates are ideologically close -and thus harder to distinguish for voters- but weakens considerably and becomes insignificant when the election is polarized. We attribute these differences to the disparate informational environment prevailing in local vs. higher-level races.

A burgeoning literature finds that incumbency effects reflect mostly a personal rather than a partisan advantage. We attribute this to incumbents’ mobilization incentives. Incumbents have weaker incentives to exert costly effort on behalf of their copartisans in national races than in local ones, where their local power is at stake. We examine these implications in the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina’s largest subnational unit, where midterm elections give mayors a strong incentive to help their copartisans running for the local council, but much weaker ones to support those running for a national seat. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find a large positive effect of incumbency in local mayoral and midterm elections. In contrast, local incumbents neither help nor hurt their copartisans running for the presidency or the national legislature.

We claim that the overall effect of district magnitude on female representation is ambiguous because district magnitude increases both (a) party magnitude — which promotes the election of women — and (b) the number of lists getting seats — which hampers it, as marginal lists are usually headed by men. For identification, we exploit the fact that the Argentine Chamber of Deputies and the Buenos Aires legislature elect half of their members every two years, and thus some districts have varying magnitudes in concurrent and midterm elections. We find a positive but weak effect of district magnitude on female representation, which can be decomposed into a positive effect driven by party magnitude and a negative one channeled by the number of lists getting seats. We find similar results in a sample of seven Latin American countries.

When (and why) do legislators quit their jobs? Previous answers to this question have focused on retirements. Looking at voluntary resignations instead, in this paper we argue that when legislative positions are not perceived as especially valuable, leaving congress to assume an elected (executive) position or a job in the (sub)national bureaucracy may be a career-advancing move. We document this claim with data from Argentina, where roughly 12% of elected deputies voluntarily quit before their term ends, but rarely become unemployed. Consistent with expectations, we show that resignations coincide temporally with instances of executive alternation at the (sub)national level, and are driven by individuals placed at the top of party lists or elected in midterm years.

In many developing countries, national legislative seats are considered less valuable than (subnational) executive positions. Even then, ambitious politicians may seek a legislative seat either (a) as a window of opportunity for jumping to an executive office; or (b) as a consolation prize when no better option is available. Using a regression discontinuity design adapted to a PR setting, we examine these possibilities in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies between 1983 and 2011. In line with the consolation prize story, we find that marginal candidates from the Peronist party – which often controls the provincial governorship – are more likely to be renominated and serve an additional term in the legislature, but not necessarily to jump to an executive office. The effect is stronger in small provinces.

Local politicians are often expected to mobilize voters on behalf of copartisan candidates for national office. Yet this requirement is difficult to enforce because the effort of local politicians cannot be easily monitored and the promise of rewards in exchange for help is not fully credible. Using a formal model, we show that the incentives of local politicians to mobilize voters on behalf of their party depend on the proportion of copartisan officials in a district. Having many copartisan officials means that the party is more likely to capture the district, but the effort of each local politician is less likely either to be noticed by higher-level officials or to make a difference on the election outcome, thus discouraging lower-level officials from exerting effort. We validate these claims with data from federal elections in Mexico between 2000 and 2012. In line with the argument, the results show that political parties fail to draw great mobilization advantages from simultaneously controlling multiple offices.

One of the primary international factors proposed to explain the geographic and temporal clustering of democracy is the diffusion of democracy protests. Democracy protests are thought to diffuse across countries primarily through a demonstration effect, whereby protests in one country cause protests in another based on the positive information that they convey about the likelihood of successful protests elsewhere, and secondarily, through the actions of transnational activists.In contrast to this view, we argue, that, in general, democracy protests are not likely to diffuse across countries because the motivation for and the outcome of democracy protests results from domestic processes that are unaffected or undermined by the occurrence of democracy protests in other countries. Our statistical analysis supports this argument. Using daily data on the onset of democracy protests around the world between 1989 and 2011, we found that in this period, democracy protests were not significantly more likely to occur in countries when democracy protests occurred in neighboring countries either in general or in ways consistent with the expectations of diffusion arguments.

How do elections and the economy affect authoritarian survival? Distinguishing between (a) non-election periods in autocracies that do not hold competitive elections; (b) election periods in autocracies that hold regular elections; and (c) non-election periods in such autocracies, I argue that bad economic performance makes authoritarian regimes especially likely to break down in election years, but the anticipation of competitive elections should dissuade citizens and elites from engaging in anti-regime behavior in non-election periods, facilitating short-term survival. Thus, compared to regimes that do not hold competitive elections, electoral autocracies should be more vulnerable to bad economic performance in election periods but more resilient to it in non-election years. A study of 258 authoritarian regimes between 1948 and 2011 confirms these expectations. I also find that the effect is driven by competitive elections for the executive office, and elections-related breakdowns are more likely to result in democratization.

How does district magnitude affect electoral outcomes? This paper addresses this question by exploiting a combination of two natural experiments in Argentina between 1985 and 2015. Argentine provinces elect half of their congressional delegation every two years, and thus districts with an odd number of representatives have varying magnitudes in different election years. Furthermore, whether a province elects more representatives in midterm or concurrent years was decided by lottery in 1983. The results indicate that district magnitude (a) increases electoral support for small parties, (b) increases the (effective) number of parties getting seats, and (c) reduces electoral disproportionality. The last two results are driven by the mechanical rather than the psychological effect of electoral rules.

How do incumbents manage to relax term limits when they cannot impose their preferences unilaterally? Interpreting constitutional reforms as a bargaining game between a term-limited executive and the opposition, we argue that reforms involving term limits should be more likely when (a) the incumbent party can change the constitution unilaterally; or (b) the opposition is pessimistic about its future electoral prospects. Moreover, (c) this second effect should be stronger when a single opposition party has veto power over a reform, because this precludes the executive from playing a “divide-and-rule” strategy. We examine these claims with data from the Argentine provinces between 1983 and 2017. In line with expectations, the results show that the probability of initiating a reform is highest when the executive’s party controls a supermajority of seats, but falls sharply when a single opposition party has veto power over a reform, and this party expects to do well in the next executive election.

How do electoral opportunities affect politicians’ career strategies? Do politicians behave strategically in response to the opportunities provided by the electoral calendar? We argue that in a legislature that combines nonstatic ambition with a staggered electoral calendar, different kinds of politicians will have dissimilar preferences toward running in concurrent or midterm elections. Employing a simple decision-theoretic model, we show that politicians with no previous executive experience should strategically use midterm legislative elections as a way to increase their visibility among voters, while more experienced politicians should opt for concurrent elections. We support these claims with data from the Argentine Chamber of Deputies between 1983 and 2007.

Can subnational elections contribute to democratization? In autocracies that hold competitive elections at multiple levels of government, subnational executive offices provide opposition parties with access to resources, increase their visibility among voters, and let them gain experience in government. This allows opposition parties to use subnational executives as “springboards” from which to increase their electoral support in future races, and predicts that their electoral support should follow a diffusion process, that is, a party’s electoral performance in municipality m at time t should be better if that party already governs some of m’s neighbors since t − 1. I evaluate this claim with data from municipal-level elections in Mexico between 1984 and 2000. Consistent with the fact that the Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party, PAN) followed an explicit strategy of party-building from below but the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD) did not, the results indicate that diffusion effects contributed to the growth of the former but not the latter.

Recent studies based on regression discontinuity designs have detected negative incumbency effects in new democracies. However, regression discontinuity studies rely on analyses of close elections where actors are likely to behave strategically in ways that might undermine positive incumbency effects or exaggerate negative incumbency effects. In particular, (a) voters who supported second-loser parties in close elections may switch to the first loser in order to unseat an incumbent, while (b) higher-level officials such as governors may strategically target municipalities in which their party lost or won by a small margin. Evidence from municipal elections in Mexico is largely consistent with these claims — the vote share of second-loser parties drops disproportionately in close elections and negative incumbency effects are attenuated in the presence of copartisan governors — but the size of estimated effects suggests that strategic behavior is on its own not sufficient to account for the “incumbency curse.”

According to the literature, the electoral system used in Argentina to elect national deputies is strongly biased toward the traditional parties. This is explained by the conjunction of four factors: (a) the geographical malapportionment that benefit the less populated provinces; (b) an electorate that tends to favor the traditional parties in those provinces; and (c) the majoritarian effects of the low district magnitudes of the small provinces, that are strengthened by (d) the political fragmentation the country has experienced since the 2001 political crisis. However, this analysis does not take into account other two important elements of the Argentine electoral system. In the first place, the D’Hondt formula used in Argentina is widely regarded as the most majoritarian of all PR formulas. In the second place, in the last few years the governing party has obtained very good electoral results in the province of Buenos Aires, by far the most under-represented of all, but also suffered several defeats in 4 of the 7 most over-represented districts of the country. This could imply that, at least between 2003 and 2007, the political effects of the electoral formula could have been more significant than those of malapportionment. A simulation analysis carried out in this paper confirms this supposition: between 2005 and 2009, the suppression of malapportionment would not have altered the composition of the Chamber of Deputies in a significant way, but the substitution of the Largest Remainder formula with Hare quota for the D’Hondt formula would have reduced the size of the government bloc by 14-21 seats (5.4%-9.2% of the Chamber), independently of the over-representation of the less populated provinces.

The accepted wisdom in the literature is that, by providing credible constraints on incumbents, authoritarian legislatures promote investment and hence growth. However, studies of individual legislatures show that these bodies have limited policy-making capacity and their members enjoy relatively little autonomy from the government, casting doubts on their capacity to actually constrain incumbents’ behavior. Moreover, the relationship between legislatures and economic performance is generally based on cross-sectional variation, thus ignoring the possibility that regimes that always had a legislature may be systematically different from those that did not. Drawing on a substantially larger sample than previous studies, employing three alternative measures of authoritarian legislatures and accounting for the possibility of heterogeneous effects, I find no evidence that authoritarian legislatures are associated with higher growth rates or increased access to private credit, either cross-sectionally or over time.