Sona N Golder
Biographic Data
| ID | 1534513 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sona N Golder |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sona N |
| FAMILY NAME | Golder |
| SIGNATURE | GOLDER S N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pennsylvania State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2259-2943 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 588 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Does switching pay off? The impact of parliamentary party instability on individual electoral performance
Independents in Parliament: Temporary Status or Final Destination
Political parties are essential for structuring parliamentary decision‐making in democracies. However, in some countries, as many as 10% of legislators experience spells outside of parliamentary party groups. This paper sheds light on this important group of independent politicians by analyzing whether and when they join existing or new party groups. We argue that the electoral motivations of members of parliament (MPs) affect their incentives fo…
All (electoral) politics is local? Candidate's regional roots and vote choice
Many authors argue that candidates are more popular among voters from their own region. Two potential explanations have been suggested: voters’ identification with their home region, and the representation of regional interests. The information on candidates’ residence can be transmitted to voters in different ways, the most easily accessible way being information printed on the ballot paper. However, most studies on “friends and neighbour voting…
Evaluating Claims of Intersectionality
Over the last forty years, scholars have adopted many different approaches to studying intersectionality. A common refrain in the literature is that one cannot evaluate the implications of an intersectional theory with an interaction model. In this article, we demonstrate that a large class of claims regarding intersectionality, whether quantitative or qualitative in nature, can be evaluated only within an interactive framework. There is some unc…
Electoral coalition signals and voter perceptions
How do electoral coalition signals affect voters' perceptions of party positions and coalition behavior in parliamentary democracies? Scholars have found that coalition signals can influence how voters view policy positions of parties. Extending research on the impact of government coalition participation on voter perceptions, a recent study found that Spanish voters update their perceptions of party positions when they receive a signal that a pa…
Permissive electoral systems and descriptive representation
Legislative representation and gender (bias)
In nearly all countries, women are underrepresented and men are overrepresented in national legislatures. This distortion in representation might occur for several reasons. One set of explanations suggests that parties, voters, or both, might discriminate against women. In this analysis we examine potential discrimination by parties and ask if elected officials discriminate against women who are thinking about a career in politics. Evaluating whe…
Partisan Portfolio Allocation in African Democracies
What determines partisan portfolio allocation in African democracies? Despite the vast literature on government formation in Europe and Latin America, there have been no studies of partisan portfolio allocation in Africa. Although coalition governments are increasingly common in Africa, most studies focus on national leaders, and, thus, we know little about how ministerial posts are divided among cabinet parties. Using an original dataset of coal…
Multi-Level Electoral Politics
National-level elections receive more attention from scholars and the media than elections at other levels, even though in many European countries the importance of both regional and European levels of government has grown in recent years. The growing importance of multiple electoral arenas suggests that scholars should be cautious about examining single levels in isolation. Taking the multi-level structure of electoral politics seriously require…
Accountability across Elections: Beyond the Second-Order Election Model
How do voters use elections as mechanisms of accountability in the multi-level systems in France, Germany, and Spain? The extent to which the voters attribute blame or credit for economic outcomes to the government at any one level depends on whether the voter believes that the government at that level plays an important role in shaping the economy. Also examined are voter opinions about corruption in government across all three levels. This is a…
Votes for Women: Electoral Systems and Support for Female Candidates
It is a well-established finding that proportional representation (PR) electoral systems are associated with greater legislative representation for women than single member systems. However, the degree to which different types of PR rules affect voting for female candidates has not been fully explored. The existing literature is also hampered by a reliance on cross-national data in which individual vote preferences and electoral system features a…
The British Academy Brian Barry Prize Essay: An Exit, Voice and Loyalty Model of Politics
Political scientists typically develop different models to examine distinct political phenomena such as lobbying, protests, elections and conflict. These specific models can provide important insights into a particular event, process or outcome of interest. This article takes a different tack. Rather than focus on the specificities of a given political phenomenon, this study constructs a model that captures the key elements common to most politic…
Organized Section Update
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Addressing Europe’s democratic deficit: An experimental evaluation of the pan-European district proposal
Many academics and commentators argue that Europe is suffering from a democratic deficit. An interesting proposal that has been put forward to address this problem is to elect some members of the European parliament in a pan-European district. In this article, we evaluate this proposal using an online experiment, in which thousands of Europeans voted on a pan-European ballot we created. We find that the voting behaviour of European citizens would…
Government Formation and Cabinets
The government in a parliamentary (or semi‐presidential ) democracy refers to the prime minister and the other cabinet ministers, whereas the government in a presidential democracy refers to the president's cabinet. The members of the government cabinet determine national policy and arguably hold the most important political positions in their country. Most governments comprise two or more parties, which means that the government formation proces…
The EuroVotePlus experiment
This paper reports on an online experiment that took place in several European countries during the three weeks before the 2014 elections for the European Parliament. We created a website where visitors could obtain information about the electoral rules used in different European Member States for this election. Participants were then invited to cast (simulated) ballots for the election according to three voting rules: closed list proportional re…
A New Approach to the Study of Parties Entering Government
Previous studies of the factors that influence the ability of parties to join governments have estimated binary choice models using the parties as the unit of analysis, which inappropriately treats each party in a government formation opportunity as an independent observation (a problem that clustered standard errors do not solve) and does not allow researchers to control for important coalition-level effects. This article demonstrates that a pre…
Response to Martin and Vanberg: Evaluating a Stochastic Model of Government Formation
In a 2012 Journal of Politics article, we presented a zero-intelligence model of government formation. Our intent was to provide a “null” model of government formation, a baseline upon which other models could build. We made two claims regarding aggregate government formation outcomes: first, that our model produces aggregate results on the distributions of government types, cabinet portfolios, and bargaining delays in government formation that c…
Portfolio Allocation and the Vote of No Confidence
There is a contradiction between theory and empirics with respect to portfolio allocation in parliamentary democracies. While the canonical model of legislative bargaining predicts the existence of a ‘formateur bonus’, empirical studies show that portfolios are allocated in a manner that favours smaller parties. This article argues that the difference between the empirical pattern and the theoretical predictions can be explained by the vote of no…
Monetary Institutions and the Political Survival of Democratic Leaders: Political Survival of Democratic Leaders
According to the political business cycle literature, survival-maximizing leaders will manipulate whatever macroeconomic policy instruments they have at their disposal in order to retain power. However, an obvious implication of the political business cycle literature has not previously been adequately tested: does having the ability to manipulate macroeconomic policy instruments actually allow leaders to stay in office longer? We argue that elec…
Modeling the Institutional Foundation of Parliamentary Government Formation
That neither the assumptions nor the predictions of standard government formation models entirely correspond to empirical findings has led some to conclude that theoretical accounts of government formation should be reconsidered from the bottom up. We take up this challenge by presenting a zero-intelligence model of government formation. In our model, three or more parties that care about office and policy make random government proposals. The on…
New Empirical Strategies for the Study of Parliamentary Government Formation
In recent years, a consensus has developed that the conditional logit (CL) model is the most appropriate strategy for modeling government choice. In this paper, we reconsider this approach and make three methodological contributions. First, we employ a mixed logit with random coefficients that allows us to take account of unobserved heterogeneity in the government formation process and relax the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) assum…
Domestic Institutions and Credible Signals1: Domestic Institutions and Credible Signals
Audience costs are a central feature of many prominent theories of international conflict. We advance the understanding of audience costs by specifying the domestic institutions necessary to generate them. In our conceptualization, audience cost capacity (ACC) is a function of the availability of alternative rulers and the cost of mobilizing against the incumbent. This conceptualization leads to the first measure of ACC that has variation between…
Who “Wins”? Determining the Party of the Prime Minister
The prime ministership is the preeminent political post in parliamentary democracies. Yet few studies examine PM party choice, perhaps under the assumption that the choice is a simple function of party size. In this article, we argue that key strategic actors and the context in which government negotiations take place can play a critical role in PM party choice. We test our hypotheses using a mixed logit with random coefficients on an original da…
Measuring government duration and stability in Central Eastern European democracies
Existing studies of government duration in parliamentary democracies typically measure the length of a government's tenure in office without accounting for delays in the government formation process. By assuming that a cabinet leaves office on the day prior to the new cabinet taking office, these measures ignore periods during which a government has lost its mandate but is still legally in power as a caretaker government. A consequence is that go…
Pre-Electoral Coalition Formation in Parliamentary Democracies
Political parties that wish to exercise executive power in parliamentary democracies are typically forced to enter some form of coalition. Parties can either form a pre-electoral coalition prior to election or they can compete independently and form a government coalition afterwards. While there is a vast literature on government coalitions, little is known about pre-electoral coalitions. A systematic analysis of these coalitions using a new data…
Bargaining Delays in the Government Formation Process
In parliamentary democracies, the transfer of power from one government to the next is sometimes characterized by long periods of negotiations in which party leaders bargain over the composition and policy objectives of a new cabinet. Although these delays can have substantial political and economic consequences, surprisingly little is known about their determinants. Moreover, the few studies that exist reach contradictory conclusions. In this ar…
Pre-electoral coalitions in comparative perspective: A test of existing hypotheses
Who “Wins”? Determining the Party of the Prime Minister
The prime ministership is the preeminent political post in parliamentary democracies. Yet few studies examine PM party choice, perhaps under the assumption that the choice is a simple function of party size. In this article, we argue that key strategic actors and the context in which government negotiations take place can play a critical role in PM party choice. We test our hypotheses using a mixed logit with random coefficients on an original da…
Votes for Women: Electoral Systems and Support for Female Candidates
It is a well-established finding that proportional representation (PR) electoral systems are associated with greater legislative representation for women than single member systems. However, the degree to which different types of PR rules affect voting for female candidates has not been fully explored. The existing literature is also hampered by a reliance on cross-national data in which individual vote preferences and electoral system features a…
Measuring government duration and stability in Central Eastern European democracies
Existing studies of government duration in parliamentary democracies typically measure the length of a government's tenure in office without accounting for delays in the government formation process. By assuming that a cabinet leaves office on the day prior to the new cabinet taking office, these measures ignore periods during which a government has lost its mandate but is still legally in power as a caretaker government. A consequence is that go…
New Empirical Strategies for the Study of Parliamentary Government Formation
In recent years, a consensus has developed that the conditional logit (CL) model is the most appropriate strategy for modeling government choice. In this paper, we reconsider this approach and make three methodological contributions. First, we employ a mixed logit with random coefficients that allows us to take account of unobserved heterogeneity in the government formation process and relax the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) assum…
The British Academy Brian Barry Prize Essay: An Exit, Voice and Loyalty Model of Politics
Political scientists typically develop different models to examine distinct political phenomena such as lobbying, protests, elections and conflict. These specific models can provide important insights into a particular event, process or outcome of interest. This article takes a different tack. Rather than focus on the specificities of a given political phenomenon, this study constructs a model that captures the key elements common to most politic…
Modeling the Institutional Foundation of Parliamentary Government Formation
That neither the assumptions nor the predictions of standard government formation models entirely correspond to empirical findings has led some to conclude that theoretical accounts of government formation should be reconsidered from the bottom up. We take up this challenge by presenting a zero-intelligence model of government formation. In our model, three or more parties that care about office and policy make random government proposals. The on…
Domestic Institutions and Credible Signals1: Domestic Institutions and Credible Signals
Audience costs are a central feature of many prominent theories of international conflict. We advance the understanding of audience costs by specifying the domestic institutions necessary to generate them. In our conceptualization, audience cost capacity (ACC) is a function of the availability of alternative rulers and the cost of mobilizing against the incumbent. This conceptualization leads to the first measure of ACC that has variation between…
Partisan Portfolio Allocation in African Democracies
What determines partisan portfolio allocation in African democracies? Despite the vast literature on government formation in Europe and Latin America, there have been no studies of partisan portfolio allocation in Africa. Although coalition governments are increasingly common in Africa, most studies focus on national leaders, and, thus, we know little about how ministerial posts are divided among cabinet parties. Using an original dataset of coal…
A New Approach to the Study of Parties Entering Government
Previous studies of the factors that influence the ability of parties to join governments have estimated binary choice models using the parties as the unit of analysis, which inappropriately treats each party in a government formation opportunity as an independent observation (a problem that clustered standard errors do not solve) and does not allow researchers to control for important coalition-level effects. This article demonstrates that a pre…
Portfolio Allocation and the Vote of No Confidence
There is a contradiction between theory and empirics with respect to portfolio allocation in parliamentary democracies. While the canonical model of legislative bargaining predicts the existence of a ‘formateur bonus’, empirical studies show that portfolios are allocated in a manner that favours smaller parties. This article argues that the difference between the empirical pattern and the theoretical predictions can be explained by the vote of no…
Legislative representation and gender (bias)
In nearly all countries, women are underrepresented and men are overrepresented in national legislatures. This distortion in representation might occur for several reasons. One set of explanations suggests that parties, voters, or both, might discriminate against women. In this analysis we examine potential discrimination by parties and ask if elected officials discriminate against women who are thinking about a career in politics. Evaluating whe…
The EuroVotePlus experiment
This paper reports on an online experiment that took place in several European countries during the three weeks before the 2014 elections for the European Parliament. We created a website where visitors could obtain information about the electoral rules used in different European Member States for this election. Participants were then invited to cast (simulated) ballots for the election according to three voting rules: closed list proportional re…
Evaluating Claims of Intersectionality
Over the last forty years, scholars have adopted many different approaches to studying intersectionality. A common refrain in the literature is that one cannot evaluate the implications of an intersectional theory with an interaction model. In this article, we demonstrate that a large class of claims regarding intersectionality, whether quantitative or qualitative in nature, can be evaluated only within an interactive framework. There is some unc…
Addressing Europe’s democratic deficit: An experimental evaluation of the pan-European district proposal
Many academics and commentators argue that Europe is suffering from a democratic deficit. An interesting proposal that has been put forward to address this problem is to elect some members of the European parliament in a pan-European district. In this article, we evaluate this proposal using an online experiment, in which thousands of Europeans voted on a pan-European ballot we created. We find that the voting behaviour of European citizens would…
Fiscal Policy and the Democratic Process in the European Union
The construction of a monetary union with a single currency in Europe raises serious concerns for those who understand the democratic process as one in which social groups compete on different ideological programs. This is because it increasingly constrains national governments of different partisan hues to follow similar fiscal and monetary policies. Recent empirical studies indicate that these concerns might be somewhat misplaced since there is…
Permissive electoral systems and descriptive representation
Monetary Institutions and the Political Survival of Democratic Leaders: Political Survival of Democratic Leaders
According to the political business cycle literature, survival-maximizing leaders will manipulate whatever macroeconomic policy instruments they have at their disposal in order to retain power. However, an obvious implication of the political business cycle literature has not previously been adequately tested: does having the ability to manipulate macroeconomic policy instruments actually allow leaders to stay in office longer? We argue that elec…
Organized Section Update
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Response to Martin and Vanberg: Evaluating a Stochastic Model of Government Formation
In a 2012 Journal of Politics article, we presented a zero-intelligence model of government formation. Our intent was to provide a “null” model of government formation, a baseline upon which other models could build. We made two claims regarding aggregate government formation outcomes: first, that our model produces aggregate results on the distributions of government types, cabinet portfolios, and bargaining delays in government formation that c…
Fiscal Policy and the Democratic Process in the European Union
The construction of a monetary union with a single currency in Europe raises serious concerns for those who understand the democratic process as one in which social groups compete on different ideological programs. This is because it increasingly constrains national governments of different partisan hues to follow similar fiscal and monetary policies. Recent empirical studies indicate that these concerns might be somewhat misplaced since there is…
Pre-electoral coalitions in comparative perspective: A test of existing hypotheses
Pre-Electoral Coalition Formation in Parliamentary Democracies
Political parties that wish to exercise executive power in parliamentary democracies are typically forced to enter some form of coalition. Parties can either form a pre-electoral coalition prior to election or they can compete independently and form a government coalition afterwards. While there is a vast literature on government coalitions, little is known about pre-electoral coalitions. A systematic analysis of these coalitions using a new data…
Measuring government duration and stability in Central Eastern European democracies
Existing studies of government duration in parliamentary democracies typically measure the length of a government's tenure in office without accounting for delays in the government formation process. By assuming that a cabinet leaves office on the day prior to the new cabinet taking office, these measures ignore periods during which a government has lost its mandate but is still legally in power as a caretaker government. A consequence is that go…
Bargaining Delays in the Government Formation Process
In parliamentary democracies, the transfer of power from one government to the next is sometimes characterized by long periods of negotiations in which party leaders bargain over the composition and policy objectives of a new cabinet. Although these delays can have substantial political and economic consequences, surprisingly little is known about their determinants. Moreover, the few studies that exist reach contradictory conclusions. In this ar…
Who “Wins”? Determining the Party of the Prime Minister
The prime ministership is the preeminent political post in parliamentary democracies. Yet few studies examine PM party choice, perhaps under the assumption that the choice is a simple function of party size. In this article, we argue that key strategic actors and the context in which government negotiations take place can play a critical role in PM party choice. We test our hypotheses using a mixed logit with random coefficients on an original da…
Modeling the Institutional Foundation of Parliamentary Government Formation
That neither the assumptions nor the predictions of standard government formation models entirely correspond to empirical findings has led some to conclude that theoretical accounts of government formation should be reconsidered from the bottom up. We take up this challenge by presenting a zero-intelligence model of government formation. In our model, three or more parties that care about office and policy make random government proposals. The on…
New Empirical Strategies for the Study of Parliamentary Government Formation
In recent years, a consensus has developed that the conditional logit (CL) model is the most appropriate strategy for modeling government choice. In this paper, we reconsider this approach and make three methodological contributions. First, we employ a mixed logit with random coefficients that allows us to take account of unobserved heterogeneity in the government formation process and relax the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) assum…
Domestic Institutions and Credible Signals1: Domestic Institutions and Credible Signals
Audience costs are a central feature of many prominent theories of international conflict. We advance the understanding of audience costs by specifying the domestic institutions necessary to generate them. In our conceptualization, audience cost capacity (ACC) is a function of the availability of alternative rulers and the cost of mobilizing against the incumbent. This conceptualization leads to the first measure of ACC that has variation between…
Monetary Institutions and the Political Survival of Democratic Leaders: Political Survival of Democratic Leaders
According to the political business cycle literature, survival-maximizing leaders will manipulate whatever macroeconomic policy instruments they have at their disposal in order to retain power. However, an obvious implication of the political business cycle literature has not previously been adequately tested: does having the ability to manipulate macroeconomic policy instruments actually allow leaders to stay in office longer? We argue that elec…
Response to Martin and Vanberg: Evaluating a Stochastic Model of Government Formation
In a 2012 Journal of Politics article, we presented a zero-intelligence model of government formation. Our intent was to provide a “null” model of government formation, a baseline upon which other models could build. We made two claims regarding aggregate government formation outcomes: first, that our model produces aggregate results on the distributions of government types, cabinet portfolios, and bargaining delays in government formation that c…
Portfolio Allocation and the Vote of No Confidence
There is a contradiction between theory and empirics with respect to portfolio allocation in parliamentary democracies. While the canonical model of legislative bargaining predicts the existence of a ‘formateur bonus’, empirical studies show that portfolios are allocated in a manner that favours smaller parties. This article argues that the difference between the empirical pattern and the theoretical predictions can be explained by the vote of no…
Government Formation and Cabinets
The government in a parliamentary (or semi‐presidential ) democracy refers to the prime minister and the other cabinet ministers, whereas the government in a presidential democracy refers to the president's cabinet. The members of the government cabinet determine national policy and arguably hold the most important political positions in their country. Most governments comprise two or more parties, which means that the government formation proces…
The EuroVotePlus experiment
This paper reports on an online experiment that took place in several European countries during the three weeks before the 2014 elections for the European Parliament. We created a website where visitors could obtain information about the electoral rules used in different European Member States for this election. Participants were then invited to cast (simulated) ballots for the election according to three voting rules: closed list proportional re…
A New Approach to the Study of Parties Entering Government
Previous studies of the factors that influence the ability of parties to join governments have estimated binary choice models using the parties as the unit of analysis, which inappropriately treats each party in a government formation opportunity as an independent observation (a problem that clustered standard errors do not solve) and does not allow researchers to control for important coalition-level effects. This article demonstrates that a pre…
Organized Section Update
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Addressing Europe’s democratic deficit: An experimental evaluation of the pan-European district proposal
Many academics and commentators argue that Europe is suffering from a democratic deficit. An interesting proposal that has been put forward to address this problem is to elect some members of the European parliament in a pan-European district. In this article, we evaluate this proposal using an online experiment, in which thousands of Europeans voted on a pan-European ballot we created. We find that the voting behaviour of European citizens would…
Multi-Level Electoral Politics
National-level elections receive more attention from scholars and the media than elections at other levels, even though in many European countries the importance of both regional and European levels of government has grown in recent years. The growing importance of multiple electoral arenas suggests that scholars should be cautious about examining single levels in isolation. Taking the multi-level structure of electoral politics seriously require…
Accountability across Elections: Beyond the Second-Order Election Model
How do voters use elections as mechanisms of accountability in the multi-level systems in France, Germany, and Spain? The extent to which the voters attribute blame or credit for economic outcomes to the government at any one level depends on whether the voter believes that the government at that level plays an important role in shaping the economy. Also examined are voter opinions about corruption in government across all three levels. This is a…
Votes for Women: Electoral Systems and Support for Female Candidates
It is a well-established finding that proportional representation (PR) electoral systems are associated with greater legislative representation for women than single member systems. However, the degree to which different types of PR rules affect voting for female candidates has not been fully explored. The existing literature is also hampered by a reliance on cross-national data in which individual vote preferences and electoral system features a…
The British Academy Brian Barry Prize Essay: An Exit, Voice and Loyalty Model of Politics
Political scientists typically develop different models to examine distinct political phenomena such as lobbying, protests, elections and conflict. These specific models can provide important insights into a particular event, process or outcome of interest. This article takes a different tack. Rather than focus on the specificities of a given political phenomenon, this study constructs a model that captures the key elements common to most politic…
Partisan Portfolio Allocation in African Democracies
What determines partisan portfolio allocation in African democracies? Despite the vast literature on government formation in Europe and Latin America, there have been no studies of partisan portfolio allocation in Africa. Although coalition governments are increasingly common in Africa, most studies focus on national leaders, and, thus, we know little about how ministerial posts are divided among cabinet parties. Using an original dataset of coal…
Legislative representation and gender (bias)
In nearly all countries, women are underrepresented and men are overrepresented in national legislatures. This distortion in representation might occur for several reasons. One set of explanations suggests that parties, voters, or both, might discriminate against women. In this analysis we examine potential discrimination by parties and ask if elected officials discriminate against women who are thinking about a career in politics. Evaluating whe…
Permissive electoral systems and descriptive representation
Electoral coalition signals and voter perceptions
How do electoral coalition signals affect voters' perceptions of party positions and coalition behavior in parliamentary democracies? Scholars have found that coalition signals can influence how voters view policy positions of parties. Extending research on the impact of government coalition participation on voter perceptions, a recent study found that Spanish voters update their perceptions of party positions when they receive a signal that a pa…
Economics (24 works) · Law (24 works) · Political science (24 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (22 works) · Politics (22 works) · Law (20 works) · Political economy (14 works) · Democracy (12 works) · Government (linguistics (11 works) · Public Administration (11 works)