Peer-Reviewed Articles
Junqueira, Andrea, Thiago Silva, and Guy Whitten. Forthcoming. “Coalition as a Heuristic: Voters’ Perceptions of Party Positions in Presidential Multiparty Democracies.” Journal of Elections, Public Opinion, and Parties.
The ability of voters to accurately perceive the ideological positions of political parties is foundational to the democratic process. Existing research has demonstrated that in parliamentary democracies, voters rely on information about coalition status to navigate the complexities of placing parties on an ideologically coherent scale. We contribute to this literature by investigating the role of coalitions as a heuristic tool in presidential democracies. We argue that the central role of the president in coalition formation and operation, combined with the higher complexity of party systems, makes coalition information in these democracies more accessible and understandable primarily among sophisticated voters. Testing our hypotheses with data from three presidential democracies, we find, as expected, that sophisticated voters are more likely than less sophisticated voters to perceive parties in coalition with the president’s party as ideologically closer to the party of the president.
Junqueira, Andrea, and Patrick Cunha Silva. 2024. “Strengthening the Party, Weakening the Women: Unforeseen Consequences of Strengthening Institutions.” The Journal of Politics. Available here.
The party politics literature suggests that an institutionalized party system can be key for well-functioning democracies. Do the benefits of strong parties also extend to women’s descriptive representation? We argue that increasing parties’ strength can perpetuate and even intensify parties’ pre-existing patterns of exclusion of particular groups, including women, when elites are gender-biased. While stronger parties are better able to carry out their organizational goals, we contend that increasing gender equity is often not part of such goals. To evaluate this argument, we combine an exogenous electoral reform that increased parties’ ability to control their members in Brazil with a regression discontinuity design. We find that while the reform increased parties’ ability to pursue their organizational goals, it increased the gap in votes between men and women. Further, we demonstrate that the behavior of men towards women co-partisans drives this pattern. These findings highlight the unintended consequences of institutional engineering.
Janusz, Andrew, Patrick Cunha Silva, and Andrea Junqueira. 2024. “Electoral Role Models: Political Empowerment and Candidate Emergence.” Political Behavior. Available here.
Does the election of politicians from historically marginalized groups spur others to enter politics? Some political scientists and policymakers posit that the election of women and people of color to prominent political offices can inspire others to run for office, yet prior research has yielded mixed results. We contribute to the literature on representation by exploring the impact of role models on candidate emergence at the local level, where aspiring politicians typically begin to climb the political ladder. Using data from Brazilian elections and a set of regression discontinuity designs, we find no evidence that the election of a woman or Afro-Brazilian mayor spurs women and Afro-Brazilians to run for city council positions. Our results, which are robust to several alternative specifications, suggest that even if the election of a woman or minority politician inspires others to enter politics, barriers may impede them from running for office.
Eastman, Abbie, Andrea Junqueira, Ali Kagalwala, Andrew Philips, and Guy Whitten. 2024. “Volatile Pies: Modeling Compositional Volatility.” Social Science Quartely. Available here.
Objective: To demonstrate the utility of modeling compositional volatility in substantive domains beyond budgeting. Methods: We show how to model compositional volatility on its own or as a part of a system of equations in which the component parts of the compositional outcome variable are also modeled. Results: Using data on the volatility of support for German political parties, we demonstrate the usefulness of stand-alone models of compositional volatility. Using data on the volatility of income shares in the United States, we demonstrate the usefulness of modeling volatility together with compositional components. Conclusion: There is considerable potential for modeling compositional volatility.
Junqueira, Andrea, Ali Kagalwala, and Christine Lipsmeyer. 2023. “What’s Your Problem? How Issue Ownership and Partisan Discourse Influence Personal Concerns.” Social Science Quartely. Available here.
Objective: Politics around the world has become more divisive. We ask if the influence of far-right parties extends to personal concerns and argue that a theory combining issue ownership with partisan discourse can explain personal policy salience. Method: Using aggregate Eurobarometer data, we create compositional models to estimate the effect of partisan discourse on pocketbook policy concerns. We focus on whether these elite messages influence concerns differently depending on the presence of a far-right party. Results: We find that more partisan discussion about law-and-order issues influences relative personal concerns on security and immigration issues across ideological groups when a far-right party is present. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that an “issue owning” party can alter how people interpret politics and view their own concerns. Far-right parties influence the perceptions of people across ideologies. Research showed that these parties can influence parties and voters; we show that they can shape personal perceptions.
Junqueira, Andrea, Thiago Silva, and Guy Whitten. 2023. “What About Us? Political Competition, Economic Performance, Immigration, and Nativist Appeals.” Social Science Quartely. Available here.
Objective: To develop and test theoretical expectations about when political parties will make more or fewer nativist appeals in their electoral campaigns. Methods: We use spatial autoregressive models to test our claims about the ways in which electoral competition drives nativist appeals. Results: We find strong support for our theoretical expectations on how spatial and temporal processes influence parties’ nativist appeals. We also find strong support for our expectations on how the percentage of foreign-born population shapes nativist appeals by government parties and how economic performance shapes nativist appeals by opposition parties. Conclusion: Spatial party competition conditions the relationship between economic performance, immigration, and parties’ nativist appeals, revealing the strategic behavior of political parties in their choices of when to make nativist appeals more or less prominent in their electoral campaigns.
Barberia, Lorena, Maria Leticia Claro Oliveira, Andrea Junqueira, Natalia Moreria, and Guy Whitten. 2021. “Should I Stay or Should I Go? Embracing Causal Heterogeneity in the Study of Pandemic Policy and Citizen Behavior.” Social Science Quartely. Available here.
Objective: To test for multicausality between government policy, health outcomes, economic performance, and citizen behavior during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Methods: We perform Granger-causality tests to explore the interrelationship between four endogenous variables, social distancing policy, home isolation, balance rate, and average weekly COVID-19 deaths, in the 26 states of Brazil. As exogenous variables, we included a linear time trend and a dummy for the week in which the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Results: Our analysis of Granger causal ordering between the four variables demonstrates that there is significant heterogeneity across the Brazilian federation. These findings can be interpreted as underscoring that there is no common model applicable to all states, and that the dynamics are context-dependent. Conclusion: Our suggested approach allows researchers to account for the complex interrelationship between government policy, citizen behavior, the economy, and COVID-related health outcomes.
Under Review
Cheibub, Jose, Andrea Junqueira, and Thiago Moreira. “Preventing a War of All Against All: Geographic Sorting in OLPR Electoral Systems.” Under review.
In open-list proportional representation (OLPR) systems, candidates must obtain personal votes to succeed. Conventional wisdom about these systems is that they induce intraparty competition and, ultimately, weak political parties. In this paper, we argue that, even under extreme institutional conditions, parties face incentives to limit competition among co-partisans. To evaluate this argument, we create the first measure of intraparty competition to incorporate the spatial distribution of all votes in the district. Using polling station-level data in Brazil, we show that about fifty percent of parties coordinate competition among co-partisans by limiting the number of strong candidates in the list or selecting candidates whose electoral bases do not overlap. We also show that electorally strong parties are more prone to coordination and that coordination leads to electoral success. Our findings challenge the perception of weak parties in OLPR systems, highlighting strategic coordination as a prevalent phenomenon even in permissive electoral environments.
Junqueira, Andrea, Diana O’Brien, Matthew Hayes, Jongwoo Jeong, Brian Crisp, and Matthew Gable. “Race, Gender, and Nascent Political Ambition.” Under review.
We offer a comprehensive analysis of nascent political ambition across racial/ethnic groups and gender. Our original survey data, which over-samples Black and Hispanic respondents, reveals that the gap in nascent political ambition is not between men and women, but rather between white men and the majority of the polity. There is no significant gender gap in political ambition among Black and Hispanic respondents, nor between Black and Hispanic men and white women. This race-gender ambition gap is most present for local offices, where many politicians start their political careers. Our findings highlight the importance of encouragement in shaping political ambition. White men are particularly responsive to encouragement from non-political sources, but the ambition gaps close when respondents receive encouragement from political sources. This suggests that political parties can play a crucial role in remediating the racegender ambition gap by actively recruiting and encouraging qualified candidates from diverse backgrounds.
Selected Work in Progress
Junqueira, Andrea. “The Political Economy of the Heavy Hand: How Poverty Reduces Politicians’ Incentives to Reform Security Policies.” In Progress.
In democracies, how can coercive security policies that violate the rights of many be so pervasive, even when those most affected by their negative consequences are a large share of the population? I argue that the explanation can be found by examining voters’ incentives to demand security vis-a-vis other policies. Among low-income citizens, security concerns compete with other immediate needs, including food and shelter, thereby reducing the relative importance of violence as the primary driver of political demands. In response, strategic politicians become less responsive to the preferences of the poor on this policy dimension. With a multi-method research approach, I test the implications of my theory using a difference-in-differences-in-differences (DDD) design of electoral results and an original survey experiment with politicians. I find that low-income voters are less responsive to violence shocks and that politicians emphasize security concerns less when trying to attract the vote of low-income citizens relative to the wealthy.
Cooperman, Alicia, Andrea Junqueira, Thiago Moreira, and Manuela Munoz. “How do Mega Cities Decentralize Local Representation? Precinct-Level Voting Behavior and Municipal Service Provision: Evidence from Brazil and Colombia.” In progress.
Rapid urbanization increases the need to produce public goods, particularly in developing countries, where underprovision and unequal access to services are common. Many public services and development projects are tied to specific neighborhoods, where citizens vote at polling stations whose vote shares are publicly known. We argue that even in “at large electoral systems,” the local nature of public services provision creates incentives for voters to demand narrow local representation and for local politicians to respond to specific requests and interests of a given group of constituencies within the city, often at the expense of others. We test our expectations by exploring variation in sub-municipal service provision in three major cities in Latin America: Sao Paulo, Bogota, and Fortaleza. Our manuscript focuses on our empirical findings and the complex challenges facing scholars studying sub-municipal outcomes in multiple cases. Our results speak to the difficulties of overcoming underdevelopment and achieving democratic consolidation in the global south.
Junqueira, Andrea, Thiago Silva, and Guy Whitten. “Coalition Governance, Economic Voting, and Costs of Ruling in Presidential and Parliamentary Regimes.” In progress.
Throughout the democratic world, the modal government is a coalition of two or more political parties. Such cooperative arrangements between political rivals create challenges for voters attempting to evaluate their government’s performance and have motivated extensive literature on the costs of ruling and economic voting in conditions where clarity of responsibility for governing outcomes is less than clear. Although this literature has advanced our understanding of the relevant dynamics on how voters identify who is responsible for implementing policies and how they appropriately reward or punish the government for its performance, the vast majority of what we know about these dynamics comes from data on parliamentary regimes. In this project, we will compare these dynamics between presidential and parliamentary regimes. Presidential democracies are fundamentally different from parliamentary democracies in that the chief executive is elected separately from the legislature and serves for a fixed term. These features raise interesting questions about how voters hold governments accountable, especially when the government is a coalition. To answer these questions, we leverage a new collection of data on election results from presidential and parliamentary regimes that spans over 70 years (1949-2020), augmented by survey data on voters’ knowledge about governments in these two regime types.
Junqueira, Andrea, Ali Kagalwala, Andrew Philips, and Guy Whitten. “Endogenous Pie: Modeling Simultaneity in Dynamic Models of Compositional Outcomes.” In progress.
Recent advances in the analysis of compositional data have extended the applicability of compositional-outcome models from cross-sectional data to time series and time-series-cross-section data. These models can explicitly account for the temporal and spatial dynamics in one’s theory. While these advances are many, and important, the models presented thus far assume that regressors are weakly exogenous. In this letter, we relax the assumption of weak-exogeneity by introducing a model that accounts for simultaneity between compositional outcomes and endogenous non-compositional variables in time series data. Our approach involves creating what we call a compositional vector autoregression framework. We demonstrate the utility of our modeling approach with an application that analyzes income inequality in the United States.
Cheibub, Jose, Andrea Junqueira, and Thiago Moreira. “Legal Equality and Effective Inequality: Mapping Representation Across Neighborhoods in Brazil.” In progress.