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Political Concepts
A Working Paper Series of the Committee on Concepts and Methods
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| Jennifer Gandhi, "What Are We Missing? Electoral Data in Democracies and Non-democracies," November 2008 |
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| Abstract | | Elections are foundational political events both for citizens and public officials in the real world and for social scientists’ understanding of their behavior. The incentives provided by elections are thought to affect a range of policies and outcomes and to serve as the main distinguishing feature between democratic and non-democratic regimes. Given the importance of electoral contests under both regime types, it is important to assess the availability and quality of our information regarding elections. In this paper, I argue that regime type should affect the missingness and consistency of electoral statistics because the institutional constraints that limit the ability of incumbents to manipulate information vary across democracies and non-democracies. Analyzing electoral data from three prominent cross-national datasets, I find some evidence for this claim although discrepancies across data sources may be due to the purposeful decisions and inadvertent errors of researchers as much as to the machinations of incumbents. |
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C&M
The Committee on Concepts and Methods
International Political Science Association (IPSA)
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Copyright (c) 2005 Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas.
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