Despite growing cross-party support for the principles of localism, the coalition's radical devolution agenda looks set to provoke a level of tension in central–local relations not seen since the 1980s. This article argues that the central cause of this friction, the front-loading of cuts...

A recent literature has used variation just around deterministic legislative population thresholds to identify the causal effects of institutional changes. This paper reviews the use of regression discontinuity designs using such population thresholds. Our concern involves three arguments: (1)...

Weak electoral registration requirements are commonly thought to encourage electoral participation, but may also promote electoral fraud. For one, candidates and their supporters can more easily mobilize voters outside the district to register and vote for the candidates, even though these...

Ascertaining whether local election results are driven by incumbents’ performance while in office or mechanically reflect constituencies’ ideological affiliation and macroeconomic conditions is crucial for evaluating the alleged accountability-enhancing property of decentralization. Based on...

Political fragmentation has been shown to be an important determinant of electoral turnout. We introduce an empirical approach that allows disentangling the impact of two dimensions of such fragmentation: the number of parties and the size inequalities between those parties. This is important as...

New democracies experience greater electoral fraud and more clientelistic spending than established democracies. This paper shows that the body of appointed local officials that a new democracy inherits from the previous regime is a key determinant of the extent of these practices. With a unique...