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Michael Bechtel
Former Member
Title
Prof. Dr.
Last Name
Bechtel
First name
Michael
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http://tinyurl.com/cxll4nu
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1 - 10 of 34
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PublicationDoes Compulsory Voting Increase Support for Leftist Policy?Citizens unequally participate in referendums and this may systematically bias policy in favor of those who vote. Some view compulsory voting as an important tool to alleviate this problem while others worry about its detrimental effects on the legitimacy and quality of democratic decision-making. So far, however, we lack systematic knowledge about the causal effect of compulsory voting on public policy. We argue that sanctioned compulsory voting mobilizes citizens at the bottom of the income distribution and that this translates into an increase in support for leftist policies. We empirically explore the effects of a sanctioned compulsory voting law on direct-democratic decision-making in Switzerland. We find that compulsory voting significantly increases electoral support for leftist policy positions in referendums by up to 20 percentage points. We discuss the implications of these results for our understanding of the policy consequences of electoral institutions.Type: journal articleJournal: American Journal of Political ScienceVolume: 60Issue: 3DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12224
Scopus© Citations 72 -
PublicationReality Bites: The Limits of Framing Effects in Salient Policy Decisions(Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015-09)
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PublicationWhat Is Litigation in the World Trade Organization Worth?Conventional wisdom holds that the creation of international, court-like institutions helps countries to peacefully settle trade conflicts, thereby enhancing overall welfare. Many scholars and pundits have argued, however, that these institutions remain ultimately ineffective, because they merely reflect the distribution of power in the anarchic international system. We explore how litigation in the WTO affects bilateral trade between countries involved in a trade dispute. We find that sectoral exports from complainant countries to the defendant increase by about $10.5 billion in the three years after a panel ruling. However, countries that have proactively filed a complaint and carried the main costs of litigation do not systematically gain more than less active third parties that merely joined an existing WTO dispute and carried smaller litigation costs. We conclude that international judicial institutions can provide positive economic externalities and may thereby lead to a less power-based distribution of the gains from trade.Type: journal articleJournal: International OrganizationVolume: 69Issue: 2
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PublicationAll Policies Are Glocal : International Environmental Policymaking with Strategic Subnational GovernmentsNational governments have intensified their attempts to create international institutions in various policy fields such as environment, finance, and trade. At the same time, many subnational policymakers have begun to duplicate international efforts by setting their own, stricter policies while others remain inactive or enact more lax regulation. This "glocalization" of policy creates a complex and economically costly patchwork system of regulations. To shed light on this phenomenon we analyze the interaction between subnational and national governments within a general model of international treaty negotiations. The glocalization of regulatory policy can be understood as an attempt by subnational policymakers to strategically constrain or empower national governments in international negotiations. We find that the shadow of international treaty formation gives rise to within-country and cross-country policy balancing dynamics that may explain some of the subnational policy polarization currently observable in many countries. We specify the conditions under which they occur, spell out empirically testable hypotheses, and identify possible theoretical extensions.Type: journal articleJournal: British Journal of Political ScienceVolume: 45Issue: 3
Scopus© Citations 11 -
PublicationPreferences for International Redistribution: The Divide Over the Eurozone BailoutsWhy do voters agree to bear the costs of bailing out other countries? Despite the prominence of public opinion in the ongoing debate over the eurozone bailouts, voters' preferences on the topic are poorly understood. We conduct the first systematic analysis of this issue using observational and experimental survey data from Germany, the country shouldering the largest share of the EU's financial rescue fund. Testing a range of theoretical explanations, we find that individuals' own economic standing has limited explanatory power in accounting for their position on the bailouts. In contrast, social dispositions such as altruism and cosmopolitanism robustly correlate with support for the bailouts. The results indicate that the divide in public opinion over the bailouts is not drawn along distributive lines separating domestic winners and losers. Instead, the bailout debate is better understood as a foreign policy issue that pits economic nationalist sentiments versus greater cosmopolitan affinity and other-regarding concerns.Type: journal articleJournal: American Journal of Political ScienceVolume: 2014Issue: 58 (4)
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PublicationMass Support for Climate Cooperation Depends on Institutional DesignEffective climate mitigation requires international cooperation and these global efforts need broad public support to be sustainable over the long run. We provide estimates of public support for different types of climate agreements in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Using data from a large-scale experimental survey, we explore how three key dimensions of global climate cooperation---costs and distribution, participation, and enforcement---affect individuals' willingness to support these international efforts. We find that design features have significant effects on public support. Specifically, our results indicate that support is higher for global climate agreements that involve lower costs, distribute costs according to prominent fairness principles, encompass more countries, and include a small sanction if a country fails to meet its emissions reduction targets. In contrast to well documented baseline differences in public support for climate mitigation efforts, opinion responds similarly to changes in climate policy design in all four countries. We also find that the effects of institutional design features can bring about decisive changes in the level of public support for a global climate agreement. Moreover, the results appear consistent with the view that the sensitivity of public support to design features reflects underlying norms of reciprocity and individuals' beliefs about the potential effectiveness of specific agreements.Type: journal articleJournal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of AmericaVolume: 110Issue: 34
Scopus© Citations 184 -
PublicationNot Always Second Order: Subnational Elections, National-level Vote Intentions, and Volatility Spillovers in a Multi-level Electoral SystemThe widespread second-order view on subnational elections leaves little room for the idea that subnational election campaigns matter for national-level electoral preferences. I challenge this perspective and explore the context-conditional role of subnational election campaigns for national-level vote intentions in multilevel systems. Campaigns direct citizens' attention to the political and economic fundamentals that determine their electoral preferences. Subnational election campaigns and the major campaign issues receive nationwide media coverage. This induces all citizens in a country to evaluate parties at the national level even if they themselves are not eligible to vote in the upcoming subnational election. Thereby, subnational election campaigns may lead to a reduction in the uncertainty of voters' national-level electoral preferences throughout the country, which is reflected by a decrease in the volatility of national-level vote intentions. I explore weekly vote intention data from Germany (1992-2007) within a conditional volatility model. Subnational elections reduce uncertainty in nationwide federal-level vote intentions for major parties. However, patterns of incumbency and coalitional shifts moderate this volatility-reducing effect.Type: journal articleJournal: Electoral StudiesVolume: 31Issue: 1
Scopus© Citations 28 -
PublicationThe Green Side of Protectionism: Environmental Concerns and Three Facets of Trade Policy PreferencesA large literature in international political economy views individuals' trade policy preferences as a function of the income effects of economic openness. We argue that the expected environmental consequences of free trade play a noteworthy and underappreciated role for protectionist attitudes that has not been noted so far. We use unique Swiss survey data that contains measures of individuals' environmental concerns and different aspects of trade policy preferences to examine whether those who are more concerned about the environment also hold more protectionist trade policy preferences. Our results support this expectation. Individuals who are more concerned about the environment tend to think that globalization has more negative than positive effects, more strongly support jobs-related protectionism, and place more emphasis on aspects that go beyond price and quality when evaluating foreign products. Our results suggest that also the expected environmental consequences of free trade matter for trade policy preferences and not just the potential effects on the domestic wage distribution.Type: journal articleJournal: Review of International Political EconomyVolume: 19Issue: 5
Scopus© Citations 49 -
PublicationHow Lasting Is Voter Gratitude? An Analysis of the Short- and Long-term Electoral Returns to Beneficial PolicyDominant theories of electoral behavior emphasize that voters myopically evaluate policy performance and that this shortsightedness may obstruct the welfare-improving effect of democratic accountability. However, we know little about how long governments receive electoral credit for beneficial policies. We exploit the massive policy response to a major natural disaster, the 2002 Elbe flooding in Germany, to provide an upper bound for the short- and long-term electoral returns to targeted policy benefits. We estimate that the flood response increased vote shares for the incumbent party by 7 percentage points in affected areas in the 2002 election. Twenty-five percent of this short-term reward carried over to the 2005 election before the gains vanished in the 2009 election. We conclude that, given favorable circumstances, policy makers can generate voter gratitude that persists longer than scholarship has acknowledged so far, and elaborate on the implications for theories of electoral behavior, democratic accountability, and public policyType: journal articleJournal: ajps American Journal of Political ScienceVolume: 55Issue: 4
Scopus© Citations 228 -
PublicationCapitalizing on Partisan Politics? The Political Economy of Sector-Specific Redistribution in GermanyThis paper studies the redistributive effects of government partisanship on economic sectors in a parliamentary democracy. Based on a rational partisan perspective and policy-induced campaign contribution models, we expect that once in office, ideologically different parties deliver favorable policies to different industries in order to enrich their electoral and sector-specific supporters. Using daily stock market data, we empirically evaluate whether and how the mean and the volatility of returns to four important economic sectors covaried with the electoral prospects of a right-/left-leaning coalition in Germany from 1991 to 2005. This sheds light on the magnitude of sector-specific redistribution to be expected from ideologically different governments holding office. The results show that the mean and the volatility of defense and pharmaceutical sector returns increase if a right-leaning government is becoming more likely to win the upcoming election. In contrast, an increase in the probability of a left-leaning government triggers higher returns to the alternative energy sector and increases the volatility of consumer sector returns. Thus, our estimates partly support the idea that parties redistribute across sectors.Type: journal articleJournal: Journal of Money, Credit and BankingVolume: 42Issue: 2-3
Scopus© Citations 14