17:45 - 20:00
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Torun Dewan
Discussant/s:
Pau Vall-Prat
Meeting Room L

Brenda Van Coppenolle, Alexandra Cirone
The Deliberative Constitution: Lotteries in Denmark's 1848 Constituent Assembly

Torun Dewan, Christopher Kam, Jaakko Meriläinen, Janne Tukiainen
Candidate Exit and Voter Loyalty during Early Democratization

Anders Wieland
The Long-Run Impact of the Viking Settlements in Medieval England

Bastian Becker
State-Church Synergies in Colonial Empires: Longitudinal Evidence on Missionary Expansion in Africa

Lotem Halevy
Who gets to play? A typology of the dynamics behind enfranchisement across Europe
Candidate Exit and Voter Loyalty during Early Democratization
Torun Dewan 1, Christopher Kam 2, Jaakko Meriläinen 3, Janne Tukiainen 4
1 London School of Economics and Political Science
2 University of British Columbia
3 Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México
4 University of Turku

Fluctuations of political power might come with widespread consequences for economic development as they may hinder governments from carrying out long-term policies. We ask if such electoral volatility could be a result of voters reacting to changes in the candidate supply in an environment with clientelistic ties between politicians and voters. We use voter-level register data from the 19th-century poll books from nine English parliamentary constituencies. Prior to the Secret Ballot Act of 1872, voting in the United Kingdom was public. These data allow us to track individual voters over time and explore how they react to changes in the candidate supply, conditional on their past voting behavior. We document some persistence in vote choices using such data over the years 1832-1868 despite the weak party system. Yet, almost one third of voters in our data change their vote choice between two consecutive elections. We find that voters who voted for an exiting candidate in the previous election are around 2 percentage points more likely to change their partisan voting behavior in the subsequent election than those voters whose previously chosen candidates reran. While the effect is moderate, our results indicate that candidate turnover explains part of the electoral volatility observed at the aggregate level in the era.