The Political Economy of Democratic Backsliding and Malapportionment

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Democracy has come under pressure in recent years. Several countries have been subject to democratic backsliding whereby elected state executives slowly undermine the electoral, judicial, and civil society institutions meant to constrain their power. Several governments have, for example, passed electoral redistricting laws that heavily bias against opposition parties (e.g., Hungary 2011). Others have managed to pass constitutional amendments that grossly impair the independence of the judiciary, media, and other sources of countervailing power (e.g., Venezuela 2007). This panel brings together four papers that study the causes and effects of such worrying practices.

The papers of Beramendi et. al. and Walter and Emmenegger focus on one important way through which the core democratic principle of one person one vote can be subverted -- i.e., malapportionment. Beramendi et. al. are the first to empirically examine how widespread malapportionment is, and how it affects substantive representation (i.e., the content of actual public policy). Walter and Emmenegger use historical data to study the causes of malapportionment and show how electoral geography and partisan politics explain why politicians choose to adopt electoral institutions that give some voters significantly greater weight than others.

In democracies grave malapportionment, as well as other types of institutions and laws that clearly violate democratic principles, are presumably only feasible if politicians believe that they will not be voted out of office as a response to their undemocratic behavior. The last two papers of the panel therefore ask under which conditions voters do (and do not) hold elected officials accountable for clear violations of democratic principles.

Van Noort exploits a novel natural experiment in Romania to examine which (if any) voters hold the ruling party electorally accountable for the passing of a clearly unconstitutional law aimed at overturning the conviction of its national leader for large-scale corruption. The last paper, by Vogler and Gingerich, provides a novel theory for why voters sometimes fail to recognize and act upon transgressions of democratic norms by elected officials. They highlight the important and long-lasting role that past interruptions of local self-government may have on the ability of voters to act as a check on elected politicians.

Taken together the papers make an important and complementary contribution to our understanding of why core democratic institutions are sometimes distorted, and what consequences this has for substantive representation.

Sub Unit

• Division 6: Political Economy

Discussants

• Aditya Dasgupta University of California, Merced

• Dawn L. Teele Johns Hopkins University

Individual Presentations

• Democracy Distorted: The Role of Malapportionment - Pablo Beramendi, Duke University; Carles Boix, Princeton University; Marc Guinjoan, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Melissa Ziegler Rogers, Claremont Graduate University

• Do American Voters Really Not Punish Overt Authoritarian Behavior at the Polls? Natural Experimental Evidence from the 2021 Insurrection of the US Capitol - Sam van Noort, Princeton University

• Self-Government Interrupted: Legacies of External Rule in Brazil and Poland - Daniel W. Gingerich, University of Virginia; Jan P. Vogler, University of Konstanz