Segnalazione bibliografica. Autore: Jason Ross Arnold Acta Politica 47, 67-90 (January 2012) Abstract Social scientists have demonstrated how transparency and democratic accountability can help control political corruption. Whereas this research has had much to say about how an open media environment produces constraints on politicians, the problem of how a politically ignorant public can enforce accountability has received much less attention. In this article, I argue that effective citizen monitoring of government officials depends on accurate corruption perceptions, which depends on the degree to which citizens are politically informed. An analysis of 10 Latin American countries with varied levels of corruption shows that...

The secret ballot is considered a central feature of free and fair elections all over the world. While the reasons to uphold it seem to be overwhelming, we argue that the secret ballot is only second-best at best and that a modified version of open voting might prove to be more democratic. Instead of denying the various problems and difficulties that an open system might encounter, we want to offer a genuine proposal that can avoid these numerous pitfalls. After rehearsing the various arguments pro and contra open voting, we draw attention to the role of shame, which has been neglected by both sides in the debate. While shame plays a pivotal role in the democratic argument pro open voting, it also brings out new problems that tell against opening up the vote. This means that, if we want to draw on the democratic potential of open voting, we will have to find a system that minimizes the undesirable effects of shame. In the third and final section, we will formulate a concrete proposal of open voting that we believe is more democratic than the current secret ballot and is able to avoid potential worries. Even if this proves to be highly speculative, it serves as an invitation for further empirical research.

Segnalazione bibliografica. Acta Politica 46, 400-424 (October 2011) Autore: Simon Otjes Abstract The List Pim Fortuyn (LPF) is a key example of a family of new right-wing parties that, according to many observers, have had a strong effect on European party systems. This article studies the effect of the entry of the LPF into the Dutch Parliament on the parliamentary party system. The article looks at two aspects of the party system: first, did the LPF affect the issue agenda of the legislature? And second, has the LPF been able to create a new significant line of conflict in the legislature, as Kriesi...

Segnalazione bibliografica. American Journal of Political Science, Volume 55, Number 4, 1 October 2011 , pp. 852-868(17) Autori: Michael M. Bechtel; Jens Hainmueller Abstract Dominant theories of electoral behavior emphasize that voters myopically evaluate policy performance and that this shortsightedness may obstruct the welfare-improving effect of democratic accountability. However, we know little about how long governments receive electoral credit for beneficial policies. We exploit the massive policy response to a major natural disaster, the 2002 Elbe flooding in Germany, to provide an upper bound for the short- and long-term electoral returns to targeted policy benefits. We estimate that the flood response increased vote...