Can Institutions Cure Clientelism?

投票是现代世界民主的基本工具。也许比当代选举中使用的任何其他手段都更能体现选民的偏好构成统治精英的过程。然而，民主国家的大多数公民认为，在选票的传播和组成方面的一系列制度创新是理所当然的，正是这些创新使这一工具今天能够成为选民自由和真正信念的象征。在这些创新中，有一项是在选票准备和分发方面的一揽子具体改革，即所谓的澳大利亚选票改革，它促成了民主历史上最关键的转折点之一- -投票选择从法律上的秘密过渡到事实上的秘密。本项目将严格审查澳大利亚选票（AB）的使用如何影响巴西政党政治的基本结构。AB是一种统一的选票，允许选择任何登记的候选人，由选举当局印刷和分发（而不是候选人或政党）。结合一篇关于发展中民主国家的制度和裙带关系的文献，我们将评估AB对四个关键结果的影响：1)现任国家政党机器的选举实力；2)地方选举经纪人对选举的控制程度；3)右翼政党的选举实力；4)参与选举过程的范围。为了利用AB的影响，本项目将研究1958-1966年期间巴西联邦众议员和参议院竞选的市级投票结果。分析将利用这样一个事实，即该国文官和军事统治者推出AB的特殊方式，创造了一个极其罕见的纯洁性的自然历史实验。在此期间，立法选举——众议院和参议院的席位同时被争夺——在三个不同的时间举行：1958年、1962年和1966年。1958年，AB在巴西全国范围内适用于参议员选举，而候选人印刷选票则在巴西全国范围内适用于众议员选举。1962年，选举制在巴西全国的参议员选举中仍然有效，但也扩展到圣保罗州、里约热内卢市和各州首府的议员选举。1966年，情况基本相同，只是代表选举的选区进一步扩大到所有居民超过10万的市镇。本项目将最大限度地利用巴西投票改革在地理上和制度上的针对性以及在时间上的交错性，采用几种变体的差中差法来估计AB对利益结果的因果影响。实证评估AB对政治代表结构的影响一直是制度导向社会科学的重大挑战之一。这一任务吸引了政治学家、经济学家和历史学家的努力，并催生了对世界各地政治历史经验的大量调查。鉴于AB在巴西采用的特殊性，我们有理由假设，当前的项目有潜力对该机构在整个社会科学语料库中对该主题的影响进行最清晰的评估。因此，本项目的研究结果可能有助于正在进行的政策辩论，即在尚未采用AB的政策中采用AB的吸引力。更广泛地说，本项目采用的研究设计可能在未来作为一个模型，说明如何在采用正式规则时同时利用空间、时间和制度变化，以估计民主制度设计各方面的影响。该项目还将在培养研究生和教育本科生方面产生持久的影响。每组学生所需的大量行政和编码职责将为组织和执行大规模社会科学定量研究项目提供实践指导。

The ballot is the fundamental instrument of democracy in the modern world. Perhaps more than any other device utilized in contemporary elections, it has come to embody the process by which voter preferences structure the makeup of the ruling elite. Yet most citizens of democratic polities take for granted the series of institutional innovations in the dissemination and composition of the ballot that made it possible for this instrument to serve today as a symbol of the free and authentic convictions of voters. Among such innovations, it was a specific packet of reforms in ballot preparation and distribution, the so-called Australian ballot reforms, which were responsible for one of the most crucial turning points in the history of democracy - the transition from de jure to de facto secrecy in vote choice.This project will provide a rigorous examination of how the use of the Australian ballot (AB)- a uniform ballot paper permitting the selection of any registered candidate and which is printed and distributed by electoral authorities (as opposed to candidates or parties)- affected the fundamental structure of party politics in Brazil after its introduction in the early 1960s. Engaging the claims of a literature on institutions and clientelism in developing democracies, the impact of the AB on four key outcomes will be evaluated: 1) the electoral strength of incumbent state party machines; 2) the degree of electoral control enjoyed by local vote brokers; 3) the electoral strength of right parties; and 4) the scope of participation in the electoral process.In order to get leverage on the impact of the AB, this project will examine municipal-level vote returns for federal deputy and senate contests in Brazil during the 1958-1966 period. The analysis will exploit the fact that the peculiar manner in which the AB was rolled out by the country's civilian and military rulers created a natural experiment of history of exceptionally rare purity. During this period, legislative elections - which put seats for both the Chamber of Deputies and Senate simultaneously up for grabs - were held at three different times: 1958, 1962, and 1966. In 1958, the AB was in effect throughout all of Brazil for senatorial contests, whereas candidate printed ballots were utilized throughout all of Brazil for the deputy contests. In 1962, the AB remained in effect for all of Brazil for the senatorial contests but was also extended to deputy contests in the state of São Paulo, the city of Rio de Janeiro, and state capitals. In 1966, basically the same situation obtained, save for the fact that the AB for deputy contests was extended further to all municipalities with more than one hundred thousand inhabitants. Taking maximal advantage of the geographically and institutionally targeted and temporally staggered nature of ballot reform in Brazil, this project will employ several variants of the difference-in-difference technique to estimate the causal impact of the AB on the outcomes of interest.Empirically evaluating the impact of the AB on the structure of political representation has been one of the great challenges of institutionally oriented social science. It is a task which has courted the efforts of political scientists, economists, and historians, and one which has spawned numerous investigations into the historical experiences of polities around the world. Given the peculiarities of the AB's adoption in Brazil, it is reasonable to posit that the current project has the potential to produce the cleanest evaluation of the impact of this institution in the entire social science corpus on the subject. As a consequence, the findings of this project are likely to contribute to ongoing policy debates about the attractiveness of adopting the AB within polities that have not yet done so. More broadly, the research design employed by this project may in the future serve as a model of how to simultaneously exploit spatial, temporal, and institutional variation in the adoption of formal rules in order to estimate the impact of aspects of democratic institutional design. The project will also have a lasting impact in terms of training graduate students and educating undergraduates. The substantial administrative and coding duties required of each group of students will provide a hands on tutorial on the organization and execution of large scale quantitative research projects in the social sciences.