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

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Now showing 1 - 9 of 9

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.
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.
Cognitive Ability, Union Membership, and Voter Turnout
(2019) Stegmueller, Daniel; Becher, Michael; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
Labor unions are said to in uence elections and public policy by increasing their members’ electoral turnout. But existing research likely overestimates the turnout effect of union membership by ignoring sorting in the labor market. In the presence of a union wage premium, both membership and turnout are shaped by the same (unobserved) factors, such as cognitive ability. To disentangle the union effect from positive selection, we use unique data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. It allows us to specify a latent factor potential outcome model with matching on both observable and unobservable individual characteristics. We find that about one-third of the observed union turnout effect is due to selection, more than what previous studies suggest.
Reducing Unequal Representation: The Impact of Labor Unions on Legislative Responsiveness in the U.S. Congress
(Cambridge University Press, 2020-07-21) Becher, Michael; Stegmueller, Daniel; French National Research Agency; National Research Foundation of Korea; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
It has long been recognized that economic inequality may undermine the principle of equal responsiveness that lies at the core of democratic governance. A recent wave of scholarship has highlighted an acute degree of political inequality in contemporary democracies in North America and Europe. In contrast to the view that unequal responsiveness in favor of the affluent is nearly inevitable when income inequality is high, we argue that organized labor can be an effective source of political equality. Focusing on the paradigmatic case of the U.S. House of Representatives, our novel dataset combines income-specific estimates of constituency preferences based on 223,000 survey respondents matched to roll-call votes with a measure of district-level union strength drawn from administrative records. We find that local unions significantly dampen unequal responsiveness to high incomes: a standard deviation increase in union membership increases legislative responsiveness towards the poor by about six to eight percentage points. As a result, in districts with relatively strong unions legislators are about equally responsive to rich and poor Americans. We rule out alternative explanations using flexible controls for policies, institutions, and economic structure, as well as a novel instrumental variable for unionization based on history and geography. We also show that the impact of unions operates via campaign contributions and partisan selection.
Ideology and compliance with health guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic: A comparative perspective
(Wiley, 2021-08-30) Becher, Michael; Stegmueller, Daniel; Brouard, Sylvain; Kerrouche, Eric; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
Objective We measure the prevalence of noncompliance with public health guidelines in the COVID-19 pandemic and examine how it is shaped by political ideology across countries. Methods A list experiment of noncompliance and a multi-item scale of health-related behaviors were embedded in a comparative survey of 11,000 respondents in nine OCED countries. We conduct a statistical analysis of the list experiment capturing degrees of noncompliance with social distancing rules and estimate ideological effect heterogeneity. A semiparametric analysis examines the functional form of the relationship between ideology and the propensity to violate public health guidelines. Results Our analyses reveal substantial heterogeneity between countries. Ideology plays an outsized role in the United States. No association of comparable magnitude is found in the majority of the other countries in our study. In many settings, the impact of ideology on health-related behaviors is nonlinear. Conclusion Our results highlight the importance of taking a comparative perspective. Extrapolating the role of ideology from the United States to other advanced industrialized societies might paint an erroneous picture of the scope of possible nonpharmaceutical interventions. Heterogeneity limits the extent to which policymakers can learn from experiences across borders.
Local Union Organization and Law Making in the US Congress
(The University of Chicago Press, 2018-04) Becher, Michael; Stegmueller, Daniel; Käppner, Konstantin; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
The political power of labor unions is a contentious issue in the social sciences. Departing from the dominant focus on membership size, we argue that unions’ influence on national law making is based to an important degree on their local organization. We delineate the novel hypothesis that the horizontal concentration of union members within electoral districts matters. To test it, we draw on administrative records and map the membership size and concentration of local unions to districts of the US House of Representatives, 2003–12. We find that, controlling for membership size, representatives from districts with less concentrated unions have more liberal voting records than their peers. This concentration effect survives numerous district controls and relaxing OLS assumptions. While surprising for several theoretical perspectives, it is consistent with theories based on social incentives. These results have implications for our broader understanding of political representation and the role of groups in democratic politics.