Becher, Michael

Person:
Becher, Michael

First Name

Michael

Last Name

Becher

Affiliation

IE University

School

IE School of Politics, Economics & Global Affairs

Department

International Relations

Identifiers

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 25

From Anti-vax Intentions to Vaccination: Panel and Experimental Evidence from Nine Countries
(2022-02) Galasso, Vincenzo; Pons, Vincent; Profeta, Paola; Becher, Michael; Brouard, Sylvain; Foucault, Martial; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
Millions of people refuse COVID-19 vaccination. Using original data from two surveys in nine OECD countries, we analyze the determinants of anti-vax intentions in December 2020 and show that half of the anti-vax individuals were vaccinated by summer 2021. Vaccinations were more likely among individuals aged 50+, exposed to COVID-19, compliant with public restrictions, more informed on traditional media, trusting scientists, and less concerned about vaccines’ side effects. We run a survey experiment with informational messages. In EU countries, a message about protecting health largely increases vaccinations, even among anti-vax individuals. In the U.K. and U.S., a message about protecting the economy generates similar effects. Our findings suggest that informational campaigns should adopt adequate narratives and address concerns about vaccines’ side effects.
Dissolution power, confidence votes, and policymaking in parliamentary democracies
(SAGE, 2019-03-01) Becher, Michael; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
There is striking variation across parliamentary democracies in the power of prime ministers to employ two prominent procedures to resolve legislative conflict: the vote of confidence and the dissolution of parliament. Whereas previous contributions in comparative politics have investigated each of these two fundamental institutions in isolation, I develop a simple unified model to unbundle how this richer variety of institutional configurations shapes political bargaining over policy. The analysis clarifies that the effects of the confidence vote and dissolution power interact. As a consequence, there can be a non-monotonic effect of increasing prime ministers’ formal power on their ability to shape the policy compromise. Counterintuitively, introducing dissolution power makes the prime minister worse off under some conditions. These results suggest new directions for empirical research on the consequences of parliamentary institutions for legislative politics and policy. They also lay analytical foundations for explaining institutional variation and reforms.
Polarización Política y Cumplimiento de las Medidas de Salud Pública en Tiempos de Covid-19
(Fundación Alternativas, 2022) Becher, Michael; Menéndez González, Irene; Penadés de la Cruz, Alberto; Garmendia Madariaga, Amuitz; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
La pandemia de COVID-19 ha supuesto la mayor amenaza para la salud pública en un siglo. En España —y en muchos otros países— fue también una prueba de resistencia para la democracia. Ya antes de la pandemia, las instituciones democráticas y la democracia representativa se habían visto cuestionadas ante una creciente polarización política. Desde el comienzo de la pandemia, no obstante, ha aumentado la preocupación entre los académicos por el posible círculo vicioso entre la polarización política y la COVID-19.
Proportional Representation and Right-Wing Populism: Evidence from Electoral System Change in Europe
(Cambridge University Press, 2022-03-25) Becher, Michael; Menéndez González, Irene; Stegmueller, Daniel; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
How much do electoral institutions matter for the rise of populist parties? Evidence on this question is mixed, with some scholars arguing that the role of electoral rules is small. We provide new evidence for the impact of electoral system change. The UK's adoption of a proportional electoral system for European elections in 1999 provides a unique opportunity to study the link between electoral rules and the ascendancy of right-wing populist parties. Employing both synthetic control and difference-in-difference methods, we estimate that the electoral reform increased the vote share of right-wing populists by about 12 to 13.5 percentage points on average. During a time when populism was rising across Europe, the reform abruptly shifted populist votes in the UK above the European trend and above more plausible comparison cases. Our results also imply that caution is needed when empirical results based on partial reforms are extrapolated to electoral system change.
Organized Interests and the Mechanisms behind Unequal Representation in Legislatures
(Cambridge University Press, 2023-12-07) Becher, Michael; Stegmueller, Daniel; Lupu, Noam; Pontusson, Jonas; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
How do organized interests contribute to unequal representation in contemporary democracies? We discuss two central channels: the selection of partisan legislators through elections and postelectoral influence via lobbying. We argue that these channels are potentially complementary strategies used by rational actors. Employing a game-theoretic model and simulations of interest group influence on legislative voting, we show that this logic may explain interest group strategies in unequal times. Our model implies that interest group strategies vary with party polarization and it highlights a challenge for empirical research on unequal representation and the literature on lobbying. Using statistical models commonly used in the literature to study biases in legislative voting or policy adoption, researchers are likely to overstate the relevance of elections as a channel through which groups affect legislative responsiveness and understate the role interest groups’ postelectoral influence. Our results stress the importance of theoretical models capturing the strategic behavior of political actors as a guiding light for the empirical study of mechanisms of unequal representation.
Global Competition, Local Unions, and Political Representation: Disentangling Mechanisms
(SSRN, 2023-01) Becher, Michael; Stegmueller, Daniel; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
While recent scholarship has demonstrated multiple political effects of international trade, less attention has been paid to unbundling the mechanisms through which import competition affects democratic politics. One mechanism, in theory, works through labor unions as domestic countervailing powers shaping legislative responses on compensation and trade votes. We assess the relevance of unions as a mediating variable in the US Congress. For identification, we leverage two distinct sources of exogenous variation, one instrument for import exposure and another for unionization, and combine them in a semiparametric estimator. We find that (i) import competition lowers district-level unionization, (ii) weaker unions lead to less legislative support for compensating economic losers and less opposition to trade deregulation, and (iii) the union mechanism represents a large fraction of the overall effect of import exposure on legislative votes. The results help explain weak compensation and further trade liberalization in the face of rising global competition.
Comparative Experimental Evidence on Compliance with Social Distancing During the Covid-19 Pandemic
(SSRN, 2020-07-04) Becher, Michael; Stegmueller, Daniel; Brouard, Sylvain; Kerrouche, Eric; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
Social distancing is a central public health measure in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, but individuals’ compliance cannot be taken for granted. We use a survey experiment to examine the prevalence of non-compliance with social distancing in nine countries and test pre-registered hypotheses about individual-level characteristics associated with less social distancing. Leveraging a list experiment to control for social desirability bias, we find large cross-national variation in adherence to social distancing guidelines. Compliance varies systematically with COVID-19 fatalities and the strictness of lockdown measures. We also find substantial heterogeneity in the role of individual-level predictors. While there is an ideological gap in social distancing in the US and New Zealand, this is not the case in European countries. Taken together, our results suggest caution when trying to model pandemic health policies on other countries’ experiences. Behavioral interventions targeted towards specific demographics that work in one context might fail in another.
Sociodemographic and Psychological Correlates of Compliance with the COVID-19 Public Health Measures in France
(Cambridge University Press, 2020-04-23) Brouard, Sylvain; Vasilopoulos, Pavlos; Becher, Michael; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
The COVID-19 disease was first identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, having since spread rapidly across the world. The infection and mortality rates of the disease have forced governments to implement a wave of public health measures. Depending on the context, these range from the implementation of simple hygienic rules to measures such as social distancing or lockdowns that cause major disruptions in citizens’ daily lives. The success of these crucial public health measures rests on the public's willingness to comply. However, individual differences in following the official public health recommendations for stopping the spread of COVID-19 have not yet to our knowledge been assessed. This study aims to fill this gap by assessing the sociodemographic and psychological correlates of implementing public health recommendations that aim to halt the COVID-19 pandemic. We investigate these associations in the context of France, one of the countries that has been most severely affected by the pandemic, and which ended up under a nationwide lockdown on March 17. In the next sections we describe our theoretical expectations over the associations between sociodemographics, personality, ideology, and emotions with abiding by the COVID-19 public health measures. We then test these hypotheses using data from the French Election Study.
Endogenous Benchmarking and Government Accountability: Experimental Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic
(Cambridge University Press, 2024) Becher, Michael; Brouard, Sylvain; Stegmueller, Daniel; Becher, Michael; Duke University; College of Natural Resources and Sciences; Humboldt State University; Agence Nationale de la Recherche; National Research Foundation of Korea; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
When do cross-national comparisons enable citizens to hold governments accountable? According to recent work in comparative politics,benchmarking across borders is a powerful mechanism for making elections work. However,little attention has been paid to the choice of benchmarks and how they shape democratic accountability. We extend existing theories to account for endogenous benchmarking. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a test case,we embedded experiments capturing self-selection and exogenous exposure to benchmark information from representative surveys in France,Germany,and the UK. The experiments reveal that when individuals have the choice,they are likely to seek out congruent information in line with their prior view of the government. Moreover,going beyond existing experiments on motivated reasoning and biased information choice,endogenous benchmarking occurs in all three countries despite the absence of partisan labels. Altogether,our results suggest that endogenous benchmarking weakens the democratic benefits of comparisons across borders. © 2024 Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.
A guilt-free strategy increases self-reported non-compliance with COVID-19 preventive measures: Experimental evidence from 12 countries
(PLOS, 2021-04-21) Daoust, Jean François; Bélanger, Éric; Dassonneville, Ruth; Lachapelle, Erick; Nadeau, Richard; Becher, Michael; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
Studies of citizens’ compliance with COVID-19 preventive measures routinely rely on survey data. While such data are essential, public health restrictions provide clear signals of what is socially desirable in this context, creating a potential source of response bias in self-reported measures of compliance. In this research, we examine whether the results of a guilt-free strategy recently proposed to lessen this constraint are generalizable across twelve countries, and whether the treatment effect varies across subgroups. Our findings show that the guilt-free strategy is a useful tool in every country included, increasing respondents’ proclivity to report non-compliance by 9 to 16 percentage points. This effect holds for different subgroups based on gender, age and education. We conclude that the inclusion of this strategy should be the new standard for survey research that aims to provide crucial data on the current pandemic.