Albert Falcó-Gimeno | Universitat de Barcelona (original) (raw)
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Papers by Albert Falcó-Gimeno
The COVID-19 outbreak poses an unprecedented challenge for contemporary democracies. Despite the ... more The COVID-19 outbreak poses an unprecedented challenge for contemporary democracies. Despite the global scale of the problem, the response has been mainly national, and global coordination has been so far extremely weak. All over the world governments are making use of exceptional powers to enforce lockdowns, often sacrificing civil liberties and profoundly altering the pre-existing power balance, which nurtures fears of an authoritarian turn. Relief packages to mitigate the economic consequences of the lockdowns are being discussed, and there is little doubt that the forthcoming recession will have important distributive consequences. In this paper we study citizens' responses to these democratic dilemmas. We present results from a set of survey experiments run in Spain from March 20 to March 28, together with longitudinal evidence from a panel survey fielded right before and after the virus outbreak. Our findings reveal a strong preference for a national as opposed to a Europe...
British Journal of Political Science
The design of government portfolios – that is, the distribution of competencies among government ... more The design of government portfolios – that is, the distribution of competencies among government ministries and office holders – has been largely ignored in the study of executive and coalition politics. This article argues that portfolio design is a substantively and theoretically relevant phenomenon that has major implications for the study of institutional design and coalition politics. The authors use comparative data on portfolio design reforms in nine Western European countries since the 1970s to demonstrate how the design of government portfolios changes over time. Specifically, they show that portfolios are changed frequently (on average about once a year) and that such shifts are more likely after changes in the prime ministership or the party composition of the government. These findings suggest a political logic behind these reforms based on the preferences and power of political parties and politicians. They have major implications for the study of institutional design a...
Political Analysis
An increasing number of studies exploit the occurrence of unexpected events during the fieldwork ... more An increasing number of studies exploit the occurrence of unexpected events during the fieldwork of public opinion surveys to estimate causal effects. In this paper, we discuss the use of this identification strategy based on unforeseen and salient events that split the sample of respondents into treatment and control groups: the Unexpected Event during Survey Design. In particular, we focus on the assumptions under which unexpected events can be exploited to estimate causal effects and we discuss potential threats to identification, paying especial attention to the observable and testable implications of these assumptions. We propose a series of best practices in the form of various estimation strategies and robustness checks that can be used to lend credibility to the causal estimates. Drawing on data from the European Social Survey, we illustrate the discussion of this method with an original study of the impact of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks (Paris, 01/07/2015) on French...
Party Politics
Political parties differ in the geographic distribution of their support. This article argues tha... more Political parties differ in the geographic distribution of their support. This article argues that a regionalized distribution of a party’s votes facilitates its participation in government, because it produces a tendency to prioritize demands for locally targeted goods that are more conducive to the negotiation of reciprocal logrolling agreements with potential partners. Using a measure based on the Gini coefficient, I empirically evaluate the extent to which the geographic concentration of votes plays a role in the formation of governments, taking Spanish local elections from 1987 to 2011 as a test bed. With around 500 formation opportunities and 20,000 potential governments, multinomial choice models are estimated (conditional and mixed logits) and a very sizable effect is documented: A one-standard deviation increase in the electoral geographic concentration of the members of a potential government almost doubles the likelihood of its formation. These findings are relevant for s...
Political Science Research and Methods
This paper examines how a party’s decision to enter a coalition government affects voter percepti... more This paper examines how a party’s decision to enter a coalition government affects voter perceptions of the party’s policy position. We argue that, for the decision to change voter beliefs, it must be at odds with voters’ prior opinions about the party. Specifically, the party must join a coalition that is not the one voters perceive as the ideologically closest option. Otherwise, the party’s action simply confirms voters’ pre-existing beliefs. Hence, whether or not joining a coalition alters voter attitudes depends on the type of alternative coalitions the party could enter. We test the hypothesis using three complementary empirical strategies: a cross-country analysis of party reputations in five coalition-prone European countries, individual panel data, and a quasi-experimental test. All three empirical tests provide support for our claim. This paper contributes to our understanding of voter information processing, coalition politics, and party competition.
West European Politics, 2013
ABSTRACT According to Gamson’s Law, the allocation of cabinet portfolios in parliamentary democra... more ABSTRACT According to Gamson’s Law, the allocation of cabinet portfolios in parliamentary democracies is proportional to the legislative seat shares of the governing parties. However, portfolio allocation departs systematically from perfect proportionality. This paper proposes a theory of portfolio allocation that seeks to explain the variance in proportionality across different bargaining situations. It argues that the degree to which the coalition formation process is characterised by uncertainty and complexity influences portfolio allocation. In uncertain and complex bargaining situations, parties that otherwise would be in an advantageous bargaining position will have a difficult time exploiting their bargaining advantage. As a result, portfolio allocation in such circumstances will be closer to proportionality. These patterns are observed in data on coalition formation in 14 West European parliamentary systems in the period 1945–1999.
The Journal of Politics
Recent studies of coalition-directed voting suggest that what political parties say during a camp... more Recent studies of coalition-directed voting suggest that what political parties say during a campaign can influence voter perceptions of the likelihood of certain coalitions and that this, in turn, may foster strategic voting in multiparty systems. Here, we expand this argument, and show that pre-election coalition signals also have the potential to influence voter perceptions of the parties themselves. By revealing their coalition preferences, parties provide information on where they stand on the political continuum. We test our argument using a survey experiment run during a regional election campaign in Spain in which we manipulated the coalition signals emitted by two parties: one, a traditional, social-democratic party and, the second, a new, liberal party. Results show how coalition signals can significantly influence the party's position and, ultimately, affect voters' stated probability of voting, especially in the case of the recently founded party.
In compounded polities, political parties need to coordinate their electoral and governing strate... more In compounded polities, political parties need to coordinate their electoral and governing strategies across the central and the regional tiers of government. The coalition game is also more complex, especially for the state-wide parties (SWPs) which alternate in government at the central level, as their need for cohesiveness across party levels is higher and the quest for vertical congruence across institutional levels is more pressing. This paper aims to gauge when SWPs will prefer to craft regional coalition cabinets rather than governing alone or staying in opposition providing or not support to the governing party(ies). We show that multi-level dynamics matter for SWPs' regional government formation strategies, particularly their minority/majority status at the central level substantially affects how they behave at the regional level. Authors' information: Tània Verge (tania.verge@upf.edu). She is visiting professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, Un...
Literature on the economic vote has tended to see all coalition governments as arrangements that ... more Literature on the economic vote has tended to see all coalition governments as arrangements that make the attribution of responsibilities for executive decision-making difficult, but coalitions differ in many respects, including the way they make decisions. There is therefore variance in the way parties in office share responsibilities. This, we argue, can have a crucial impact on how voters assess coalition governments at the polls. More concretely, we believe it will affect the importance/presence of the economic vote, which will vary depending on the specific coalition we look at.
Parties make policy in government and in parliament, but we do not know what institution matters ... more Parties make policy in government and in parliament, but we do not know what institution matters the most for policy-making. We use an extensive dataset with information on party manifestoes, parties' bargaining power, and redistribution policies for 20 OECD countries to show empirically that parliamentary composition is a better predictor of redistribution policies than cabinet composition when we take parties' bargaining power into account. On the one hand, we use voting power indices in order to calculate parties' bargaining power in parliaments and cabinets. On the other hand, we also use information on parties' preferences using data from the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP). We estimate dynamic TSCS models based on legislature and cabinet datasets. The empirical results show that parliaments impact policy through the legislative bargaining power that parties obtain after elections. Opposition parties, therefore, also affect policy because they can have or ha...
The COVID-19 outbreak poses an unprecedented challenge for contemporary democracies. Despite the ... more The COVID-19 outbreak poses an unprecedented challenge for contemporary democracies. Despite the global scale of the problem, the response has been mainly national, and global coordination has been so far extremely weak. All over the world governments are making use of exceptional powers to enforce lockdowns, often sacrificing civil liberties and profoundly altering the pre-existing power balance, which nurtures fears of an authoritarian turn. Relief packages to mitigate the economic consequences of the lockdowns are being discussed, and there is little doubt that the forthcoming recession will have important distributive consequences. In this paper we study citizens' responses to these democratic dilemmas. We present results from a set of survey experiments run in Spain from March 20 to March 28, together with longitudinal evidence from a panel survey fielded right before and after the virus outbreak. Our findings reveal a strong preference for a national as opposed to a Europe...
British Journal of Political Science
The design of government portfolios – that is, the distribution of competencies among government ... more The design of government portfolios – that is, the distribution of competencies among government ministries and office holders – has been largely ignored in the study of executive and coalition politics. This article argues that portfolio design is a substantively and theoretically relevant phenomenon that has major implications for the study of institutional design and coalition politics. The authors use comparative data on portfolio design reforms in nine Western European countries since the 1970s to demonstrate how the design of government portfolios changes over time. Specifically, they show that portfolios are changed frequently (on average about once a year) and that such shifts are more likely after changes in the prime ministership or the party composition of the government. These findings suggest a political logic behind these reforms based on the preferences and power of political parties and politicians. They have major implications for the study of institutional design a...
Political Analysis
An increasing number of studies exploit the occurrence of unexpected events during the fieldwork ... more An increasing number of studies exploit the occurrence of unexpected events during the fieldwork of public opinion surveys to estimate causal effects. In this paper, we discuss the use of this identification strategy based on unforeseen and salient events that split the sample of respondents into treatment and control groups: the Unexpected Event during Survey Design. In particular, we focus on the assumptions under which unexpected events can be exploited to estimate causal effects and we discuss potential threats to identification, paying especial attention to the observable and testable implications of these assumptions. We propose a series of best practices in the form of various estimation strategies and robustness checks that can be used to lend credibility to the causal estimates. Drawing on data from the European Social Survey, we illustrate the discussion of this method with an original study of the impact of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks (Paris, 01/07/2015) on French...
Party Politics
Political parties differ in the geographic distribution of their support. This article argues tha... more Political parties differ in the geographic distribution of their support. This article argues that a regionalized distribution of a party’s votes facilitates its participation in government, because it produces a tendency to prioritize demands for locally targeted goods that are more conducive to the negotiation of reciprocal logrolling agreements with potential partners. Using a measure based on the Gini coefficient, I empirically evaluate the extent to which the geographic concentration of votes plays a role in the formation of governments, taking Spanish local elections from 1987 to 2011 as a test bed. With around 500 formation opportunities and 20,000 potential governments, multinomial choice models are estimated (conditional and mixed logits) and a very sizable effect is documented: A one-standard deviation increase in the electoral geographic concentration of the members of a potential government almost doubles the likelihood of its formation. These findings are relevant for s...
Political Science Research and Methods
This paper examines how a party’s decision to enter a coalition government affects voter percepti... more This paper examines how a party’s decision to enter a coalition government affects voter perceptions of the party’s policy position. We argue that, for the decision to change voter beliefs, it must be at odds with voters’ prior opinions about the party. Specifically, the party must join a coalition that is not the one voters perceive as the ideologically closest option. Otherwise, the party’s action simply confirms voters’ pre-existing beliefs. Hence, whether or not joining a coalition alters voter attitudes depends on the type of alternative coalitions the party could enter. We test the hypothesis using three complementary empirical strategies: a cross-country analysis of party reputations in five coalition-prone European countries, individual panel data, and a quasi-experimental test. All three empirical tests provide support for our claim. This paper contributes to our understanding of voter information processing, coalition politics, and party competition.
West European Politics, 2013
ABSTRACT According to Gamson’s Law, the allocation of cabinet portfolios in parliamentary democra... more ABSTRACT According to Gamson’s Law, the allocation of cabinet portfolios in parliamentary democracies is proportional to the legislative seat shares of the governing parties. However, portfolio allocation departs systematically from perfect proportionality. This paper proposes a theory of portfolio allocation that seeks to explain the variance in proportionality across different bargaining situations. It argues that the degree to which the coalition formation process is characterised by uncertainty and complexity influences portfolio allocation. In uncertain and complex bargaining situations, parties that otherwise would be in an advantageous bargaining position will have a difficult time exploiting their bargaining advantage. As a result, portfolio allocation in such circumstances will be closer to proportionality. These patterns are observed in data on coalition formation in 14 West European parliamentary systems in the period 1945–1999.
The Journal of Politics
Recent studies of coalition-directed voting suggest that what political parties say during a camp... more Recent studies of coalition-directed voting suggest that what political parties say during a campaign can influence voter perceptions of the likelihood of certain coalitions and that this, in turn, may foster strategic voting in multiparty systems. Here, we expand this argument, and show that pre-election coalition signals also have the potential to influence voter perceptions of the parties themselves. By revealing their coalition preferences, parties provide information on where they stand on the political continuum. We test our argument using a survey experiment run during a regional election campaign in Spain in which we manipulated the coalition signals emitted by two parties: one, a traditional, social-democratic party and, the second, a new, liberal party. Results show how coalition signals can significantly influence the party's position and, ultimately, affect voters' stated probability of voting, especially in the case of the recently founded party.
In compounded polities, political parties need to coordinate their electoral and governing strate... more In compounded polities, political parties need to coordinate their electoral and governing strategies across the central and the regional tiers of government. The coalition game is also more complex, especially for the state-wide parties (SWPs) which alternate in government at the central level, as their need for cohesiveness across party levels is higher and the quest for vertical congruence across institutional levels is more pressing. This paper aims to gauge when SWPs will prefer to craft regional coalition cabinets rather than governing alone or staying in opposition providing or not support to the governing party(ies). We show that multi-level dynamics matter for SWPs' regional government formation strategies, particularly their minority/majority status at the central level substantially affects how they behave at the regional level. Authors' information: Tània Verge (tania.verge@upf.edu). She is visiting professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, Un...
Literature on the economic vote has tended to see all coalition governments as arrangements that ... more Literature on the economic vote has tended to see all coalition governments as arrangements that make the attribution of responsibilities for executive decision-making difficult, but coalitions differ in many respects, including the way they make decisions. There is therefore variance in the way parties in office share responsibilities. This, we argue, can have a crucial impact on how voters assess coalition governments at the polls. More concretely, we believe it will affect the importance/presence of the economic vote, which will vary depending on the specific coalition we look at.
Parties make policy in government and in parliament, but we do not know what institution matters ... more Parties make policy in government and in parliament, but we do not know what institution matters the most for policy-making. We use an extensive dataset with information on party manifestoes, parties' bargaining power, and redistribution policies for 20 OECD countries to show empirically that parliamentary composition is a better predictor of redistribution policies than cabinet composition when we take parties' bargaining power into account. On the one hand, we use voting power indices in order to calculate parties' bargaining power in parliaments and cabinets. On the other hand, we also use information on parties' preferences using data from the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP). We estimate dynamic TSCS models based on legislature and cabinet datasets. The empirical results show that parliaments impact policy through the legislative bargaining power that parties obtain after elections. Opposition parties, therefore, also affect policy because they can have or ha...