C Stoke
Biographic Data
| ID | 2719 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Stoke |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Stoke |
| SIGNATURE | STOKE C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9389-2826 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1332 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Building Tolerance for Backsliding by Trash-Talking Democracy: Theory and Evidence From Mexico
Leaders who seek to build public toleration for democratic backsliding have a little-noticed strategy at their disposal: degrading their democracies in the eyes of their citizens. If voters can be induced to believe that their democracy is already broken, then nothing of value is lost when leaders attack the courts, vilify the press, or undermine confidence in elections. We call this strategy trash-talking democracy , and study it in the context …
Why Is Participation Low in Referendums? Lessons from Latin America
Whether referendums, initiatives, and other mechanisms of direct democracy enhance representative systems is a matter of debate. Skeptics note-among other criticisms-that turnout tends to be low in referendums, often lower than in candidate elections in the same country. If citizens do not care enough to participate, how useful can these mechanisms be for improving the quality of democratic systems? We argue that low referendum turnout has as muc…
Who will defend democracy? Evaluating tradeoffs in candidate support among partisan donors and voters
Scholars and pundits fear that the American public’s commitment to democracy is declining and that citizens are willing to embrace candidates who would trample democratic principles. We examine whether violations of those principles generate resistance from voters and/or top campaign donors and whether such resistance extends across partisan lines. In a conjoint survey experiment, we investigate how regular Americans and donor elites trade off pa…
The Effect of Electoral Inversions on Democratic Legitimacy: Evidence from the United States
When a party or candidate loses the popular vote but still wins the election, do voters view the winner as legitimate? This scenario, known as an electoral inversion , describes the winners of two of the last six presidential elections in the United States. We report results from two experiments testing the effect of inversions on democratic legitimacy in the US context. Our results indicate that inversions significantly decrease the perceived le…
Presidential Rhetoric and Populism
Scholars and the general public have been struck by the norm‐shattering rhetoric of President Donald J. Trump. His “rhetorical signature” is heavy with Manichean good‐versus‐evil messages, vilification of his opponents, and disdain for institutions and for evidence. But many politicians vilify their opponents and style themselves as uniquely able to solve their society's problems. In fact, Trump's Manichean discourse is typical of populist leader…
When Do the Wealthy Support Redistribution? Inequality Aversion in Buenos Aires
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Beyond Opportunity Costs: Campaign Messages, Anger and Turnout among the Unemployed
Are people under economic stress more or less likely to vote, and why? With large observational datasets and a survey experiment involving unemployed Americans, we show that unemployment depresses participation. But it does so more powerfully when the unemployment rate is low, less powerfully when it is high. Whereas earlier studies have explained lower turnout among the unemployed by stressing the especially high opportunity costs these would-be…
Searching for Bright Lines in the Trump Presidency
Is American democracy under threat? The question is more prominent in political debate now than at any time in recent memory. However, it is also too blunt; there is widespread recognition that democracy is multifaceted and that backsliding, when it occurs, tends to be piecemeal. To address these concerns, we provide original data from surveys of political science experts and the public measuring the perceived importance and performance of U.S. d…
Why Bother: Rethinking Participation in Elections and Protests
Why do vote-suppression efforts sometimes fail? Why does police repression of demonstrators sometimes turn localized protests into massive, national movements? How do politicians and activists manipulate people's emotions to get them involved? The authors of Why Bother? offer a new theory of why people take part in collective action in politics, and test it in the contexts of voting and protesting. They develop the idea that just as there are cos…
Why Do People Join Backlash Protests? Lessons from Turkey
When people learn that demonstrators are being subjected to harsh treatment by the police, sometimes their reaction is to join demonstrations. What explains the potentially mobilizing power of repression? Information-oriented theories posit that repression changes people’s beliefs about the likely success of the protests or the type of the government, thus encouraging them to join. Social–psychological theories posit that repression provokes a mo…
Accountability for Realists
In Democracy for Realists, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels argue that voters are shortsighted and punish incumbents for politically irrelevant outcomes. These failings, in the authors’ view, mean that voters are incapable of holding politicians to account. But Achen and Bartels overstate voters’ failure to engage in effective retrospective voting. The authors also understate the degree to which accountability can be compatible with voters’ be…
Protests and Repression in New Democracies
Elected governments sometimes deal with protests by authorizing the police to use less-lethal tools of repression: water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets, and the like. When these tactics fail to end protests and instead spark larger,backlash movements, some governments reduce the level of violence but others increase it, causing widespread injuries and loss of life. We study three recent cases of governments in new democracies facing backlash m…
Catalyst or Cause? Legislation and the Demise of Machine Politics in Britain and the United States
In the nineteenth century, British and American parties competed by hiring electoral agents to bribe and treat voters. British parties abruptly abandoned this practice in the 1880s. The conventional explanation is that legislation put an end to agent‐mediated distribution. But this explanation leaves many questions unanswered. Why did the parties use agents for decades, even though they imposed great expense on candidates and were viewed as untru…
Roundtable on Political Epistemology
On August 30, 2013, the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on political epistemology as part of its annual meetings. Co-chairing the roundtable were Jeffrey Friedman, Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin; and Hélène Landemore, Department of Political Science, Yale University. The other participants were Scott Althaus, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Mark Be…
Clientelism and Poverty
INTRODUCTION: POVERTY OF NATIONS AND OF VOTERS Part II of this book constructs a model of clientelism that pivots around the behavior of types of individuals – party leaders, brokers, and voters. Part III examines macro-dynamics of clientelism: why it persists and what forces may undermine it, with an emphasis on historical developments at the national level. The current chapter marks a transition between micro and macro concerns. Here we study t…
Overview of Comparative Politics
This article discusses several crucial questions that comparative political scientists address. These questions also form part of the basis of the current volume. The article first studies the theory and methods used in gathering data and evidence, and then focuses on the concepts of states, state formation, and political consent. Political regimes, political conflict, mass political mobilization, and political instability are other topics examin…
Political Clientelism
This article studies political clientelism. In the first section, the term clientelism can be defined as giving material goods in return for electoral support, where the criterion of distribution that the patron uses is simply: did you/will you support me? This section includes definitions of vote buying and patronage. The two waves of studies of clientelism and the link between clientelism and commitment are discussed in the subsequent sections.…
Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism: The Puzzle of Distributive Politics
"Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism addresses major questions in distributive politics. Why is it acceptable for parties to try to win elections by promising to make certain groups of people better off, but unacceptable, and illegal, to pay people for their votes? Why do parties often lavish benefits on loyal voters, whose support they can count on anyway, rather than on responsive swing voters? Why is vote buying and machine politics common in tod…
Democracy, interrupted: Regime change and partisanship in twentieth-century Argentina
The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics
The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics offers a critical survey of the field of empirical political science through the collection of a set of articles written by forty-seven scholars in the discipline of comparative politics. Part I includes articles surveying the key research methodologies employed in comparative politics (the comparative method, the use of history, the practice and status of case-study research, and the contributions of f…
The Social Bases of Political Parties in Argentina, 1912–2003
To what extent has the Argentine party system been polarized along class lines? The political historiography gives mixed and contradictory answers to this question. We explore the social bases of Argentina's political parties using an original database, the most comprehensive database of Argentine elections yet assembled, and new methods of ecological inference that yield more reliable results than previous analyses. We identify two distinct part…
Is Vote Buying Undemocratic?
Reditos Y Peligros Electorales Del Gasto Publico En La Argentina
Eleições e representação
O artigo indaga o quanto o mecanismo eleitoral pode, de fato, tornar mais representativas as instituições da democracia. Os autores diagnosticam sérias limitações no voto como mecanismo capaz de alavancar algum controle do representado sobre o representante
The Quality of Democracy
For the past two decades the main topic of research in comparative politics has been democratization. The question troubling scholars has been why some countries become and stay democratic, while others either do not democratize or waver between democracy and authoritarianism. This research program has been both pro lific and successful. Today, a considerable amount is known about why democracies are distributed around the world the way they are.…
Perverse Accountability: A Formal Model of Machine Politics with Evidence from Argentina
Political machines (or clientelist parties) mobilize electoral support by trading particularistic benefits to voters in exchange for their votes. But if the secret ballot hides voters' actions from the machine, voters are able to renege, accepting benefits and then voting as they choose. To explain how machine politics works, I observe that machines use their deep insertion into voters' social networks to try to circumvent the secret ballot and i…
Endogenous Democratization
The authors show that economic development increases the probability that a country will undergo a transition to democracy. These results contradict the finding of Przeworski and his associates, that development causes democracy to last but not to come into existence in the first place. By dealing adequately with problems of sample selection and model specification, the authors discover that economic growth does cause nondemocracies to democratiz…
Political Parties and Democracy
A central claim of democratic theory is that democracy induces governments to be responsive to the preferences of the people. Political parties organize politics in every modern democracy, and some observers claim that parties are what induce democracies to be responsive. Yet, according to others, parties give voice to extremists and reduce the responsiveness of governments to the citizenry. The debate about parties and democracy takes on renewed…
Why Do People Join Backlash Protests? Lessons from Turkey
When people learn that demonstrators are being subjected to harsh treatment by the police, sometimes their reaction is to join demonstrations. What explains the potentially mobilizing power of repression? Information-oriented theories posit that repression changes people’s beliefs about the likely success of the protests or the type of the government, thus encouraging them to join. Social–psychological theories posit that repression provokes a mo…
Searching for Bright Lines in the Trump Presidency
Is American democracy under threat? The question is more prominent in political debate now than at any time in recent memory. However, it is also too blunt; there is widespread recognition that democracy is multifaceted and that backsliding, when it occurs, tends to be piecemeal. To address these concerns, we provide original data from surveys of political science experts and the public measuring the perceived importance and performance of U.S. d…
Public Opinion and Market Reforms: The Limits of Economic Voting
The broadly held view that promarket reforms are good for most people is in conflict with the equally broadly held view that, in democracies, reforms will generate widespread resistance. Resistance is expected because reforms typically produce economic downturns, at least over the short term. Under normal circumstances, we expect citizens to withdraw support from governments during periods of economic decline. If citizens withdraw support, then g…
Economic Reform and Public Opinion in Peru, 1990-1995
Even if they are confident that prosperity lies just over the horizon, politicians who embark on promarket reforms know they are in for some stormy weather. How will they fare in voters' eyes once the pain is felt? Will voters inevitably turn against politicians who impose painful measures without an electoral mandate to do so? The story of economic reform and public opinion in Peru under Alberto Fujimori (1990-1995) poses just these questions. T…
Democracy, interrupted: Regime change and partisanship in twentieth-century Argentina
Protests and Repression in New Democracies
Elected governments sometimes deal with protests by authorizing the police to use less-lethal tools of repression: water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets, and the like. When these tactics fail to end protests and instead spark larger,backlash movements, some governments reduce the level of violence but others increase it, causing widespread injuries and loss of life. We study three recent cases of governments in new democracies facing backlash m…
Reditos Y Peligros Electorales Del Gasto Publico En La Argentina
Beyond Opportunity Costs: Campaign Messages, Anger and Turnout among the Unemployed
Are people under economic stress more or less likely to vote, and why? With large observational datasets and a survey experiment involving unemployed Americans, we show that unemployment depresses participation. But it does so more powerfully when the unemployment rate is low, less powerfully when it is high. Whereas earlier studies have explained lower turnout among the unemployed by stressing the especially high opportunity costs these would-be…
Eleições e representação
O artigo indaga o quanto o mecanismo eleitoral pode, de fato, tornar mais representativas as instituições da democracia. Os autores diagnosticam sérias limitações no voto como mecanismo capaz de alavancar algum controle do representado sobre o representante
Democratic Accountability and Policy Change: Economic Policy in Fujimori's Peru
Ask a political theorist what distinguishes democracy from other systems of government and the answer is likely to include terms like and accountability. For Robert Dahl, continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens [is] a key characteristic of democracy. Citizens' ability to vote leaders out of office is the sharpest difference between dictatorship and democracy and enables the citizens to hold the policymakers …
Presidential Rhetoric and Populism
Scholars and the general public have been struck by the norm‐shattering rhetoric of President Donald J. Trump. His “rhetorical signature” is heavy with Manichean good‐versus‐evil messages, vilification of his opponents, and disdain for institutions and for evidence. But many politicians vilify their opponents and style themselves as uniquely able to solve their society's problems. In fact, Trump's Manichean discourse is typical of populist leader…
Hegemony, Consciousness, and Political Change in Peru
Catalyst or Cause? Legislation and the Demise of Machine Politics in Britain and the United States
In the nineteenth century, British and American parties competed by hiring electoral agents to bribe and treat voters. British parties abruptly abandoned this practice in the 1880s. The conventional explanation is that legislation put an end to agent‐mediated distribution. But this explanation leaves many questions unanswered. Why did the parties use agents for decades, even though they imposed great expense on candidates and were viewed as untru…
When Do the Wealthy Support Redistribution? Inequality Aversion in Buenos Aires
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Quality of Democracy
For the past two decades the main topic of research in comparative politics has been democratization. The question troubling scholars has been why some countries become and stay democratic, while others either do not democratize or waver between democracy and authoritarianism. This research program has been both pro lific and successful. Today, a considerable amount is known about why democracies are distributed around the world the way they are.…
Constituency influence and representation
The Effect of Electoral Inversions on Democratic Legitimacy: Evidence from the United States
When a party or candidate loses the popular vote but still wins the election, do voters view the winner as legitimate? This scenario, known as an electoral inversion , describes the winners of two of the last six presidential elections in the United States. We report results from two experiments testing the effect of inversions on democratic legitimacy in the US context. Our results indicate that inversions significantly decrease the perceived le…
Accountability for Realists
In Democracy for Realists, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels argue that voters are shortsighted and punish incumbents for politically irrelevant outcomes. These failings, in the authors’ view, mean that voters are incapable of holding politicians to account. But Achen and Bartels overstate voters’ failure to engage in effective retrospective voting. The authors also understate the degree to which accountability can be compatible with voters’ be…
Building Tolerance for Backsliding by Trash-Talking Democracy: Theory and Evidence From Mexico
Leaders who seek to build public toleration for democratic backsliding have a little-noticed strategy at their disposal: degrading their democracies in the eyes of their citizens. If voters can be induced to believe that their democracy is already broken, then nothing of value is lost when leaders attack the courts, vilify the press, or undermine confidence in elections. We call this strategy trash-talking democracy , and study it in the context …
Roundtable on Political Epistemology
On August 30, 2013, the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on political epistemology as part of its annual meetings. Co-chairing the roundtable were Jeffrey Friedman, Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin; and Hélène Landemore, Department of Political Science, Yale University. The other participants were Scott Althaus, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Mark Be…
Politics and Latin America's Urban Poor: Reflections from a Lima Shantytown
In the early 1970s, Wayne Cornelius asked, “Are the migrant masses revolutionary? Definitely not, at least in Latin America and many other parts of the developing world.” These words summarized an emerging revisionist view of the political character of Latin America's new urban poor. Careful empirical research had proved wrong previous scholars and observers who had expected the new migrant populations in Latin America's cities to become sources …
Hegemony, Consciousness, and Political Change in Peru
Cultures in Conflict: Social Movements and the State in Peru
Cultures in Conflict: Social Movements and the State in Peru
Cultures in ConflictSocial Movements and the State in Peru: Social movements and the state in Peru
This ethnography set in contemporary Peru provides an analysis of the making and unmaking of class consciousness among the urban poor. The author's research strategy is multifaceted; through interviews, participant observation, and survey research she digs deeply into the popular culture of the social activists and shantytown residents she studies. The result is a penetrating look at how social movements evolve, how poor people construct independ…
Economic Reform and Public Opinion in Peru, 1990-1995
Even if they are confident that prosperity lies just over the horizon, politicians who embark on promarket reforms know they are in for some stormy weather. How will they fare in voters' eyes once the pain is felt? Will voters inevitably turn against politicians who impose painful measures without an electoral mandate to do so? The story of economic reform and public opinion in Peru under Alberto Fujimori (1990-1995) poses just these questions. T…
Public Opinion and Market Reforms: The Limits of Economic Voting
The broadly held view that promarket reforms are good for most people is in conflict with the equally broadly held view that, in democracies, reforms will generate widespread resistance. Resistance is expected because reforms typically produce economic downturns, at least over the short term. Under normal circumstances, we expect citizens to withdraw support from governments during periods of economic decline. If citizens withdraw support, then g…
Democratic Accountability and Policy Change: Economic Policy in Fujimori's Peru
Ask a political theorist what distinguishes democracy from other systems of government and the answer is likely to include terms like and accountability. For Robert Dahl, continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens [is] a key characteristic of democracy. Citizens' ability to vote leaders out of office is the sharpest difference between dictatorship and democracy and enables the citizens to hold the policymakers …
Opinión pública y reformas de mercado: Las limitaciones de la interpretación económica del voto
Constituency influence and representation
Elections and Representation
The claim connecting democracy and representation is that under democracy governments are representative because they are elected: if elections are freely contested, if participation is widespread, and if citizens enjoy political liberties, then governments will act in the best interest of the people. In one – the "mandate" – view, elections serve to select good policies or policybearing politicians. Parties or candidates make policy proposals du…
Political Parties and Democracy
A central claim of democratic theory is that democracy induces governments to be responsive to the preferences of the people. Political parties organize politics in every modern democracy, and some observers claim that parties are what induce democracies to be responsive. Yet, according to others, parties give voice to extremists and reduce the responsiveness of governments to the citizenry. The debate about parties and democracy takes on renewed…
Mandates and Democracy: Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America
Sometimes politicians run for office promising one set of policies, and if they win, switch to very different ones. Latin American presidents in recent years have frequently run promising to avoid pro-market reforms and harsh economic adjustment, then win and transform immediately into enthusiastic market reformers. Does it matter when politicians ignore the promises they made and the preferences of their constituents? If politicians want to be r…
Economic Reform and Public Opinion in Fujimori's Peru
On August 8, 1990, the finance minister of the newly installed Fujimori government announced price increases. Gasoline would go up more than 3,000%, kerosene almost 7,000%, bread more than 1,500%, and medicines, on average, 1,400%. The inflation rate in August, reflecting these increases, was 400%.
Public Support for Market Reforms in New Democracies
Do people in new democracies undergoing market reforms turn against these reforms when the economic adjustment is painful? The conventional wisdom is that they will. According to 'economic voting' models, citizens punish elected governments for bad economic performance. The contributors to this collection, in contrast, begin with the insight that citizens in new democracies have good reasons to depart from the predictions of economic voting. If t…
Endogenous Democratization
The authors show that economic development increases the probability that a country will undergo a transition to democracy. These results contradict the finding of Przeworski and his associates, that development causes democracy to last but not to come into existence in the first place. By dealing adequately with problems of sample selection and model specification, the authors discover that economic growth does cause nondemocracies to democratiz…
Vote Buying in Argentina
We analyze vote buying in Argentina—the payment by political parties of minor benefits (food, clothing, cash) to citizens in exchange for their votes. How widespread is vote buying in Argentina, and what is the profile of the typical vote "seller"? Did the shift toward a neoliberal economic model in the 1990s increase or reduce vote buying? Why do parties attempt to buy votes when the ballot is secret and people could simply accept campaign hando…
The Quality of Democracy
For the past two decades the main topic of research in comparative politics has been democratization. The question troubling scholars has been why some countries become and stay democratic, while others either do not democratize or waver between democracy and authoritarianism. This research program has been both pro lific and successful. Today, a considerable amount is known about why democracies are distributed around the world the way they are.…
Perverse Accountability: A Formal Model of Machine Politics with Evidence from Argentina
Political machines (or clientelist parties) mobilize electoral support by trading particularistic benefits to voters in exchange for their votes. But if the secret ballot hides voters' actions from the machine, voters are able to renege, accepting benefits and then voting as they choose. To explain how machine politics works, I observe that machines use their deep insertion into voters' social networks to try to circumvent the secret ballot and i…
Reditos Y Peligros Electorales Del Gasto Publico En La Argentina
Eleições e representação
O artigo indaga o quanto o mecanismo eleitoral pode, de fato, tornar mais representativas as instituições da democracia. Os autores diagnosticam sérias limitações no voto como mecanismo capaz de alavancar algum controle do representado sobre o representante
Is Vote Buying Undemocratic?
The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics
The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics offers a critical survey of the field of empirical political science through the collection of a set of articles written by forty-seven scholars in the discipline of comparative politics. Part I includes articles surveying the key research methodologies employed in comparative politics (the comparative method, the use of history, the practice and status of case-study research, and the contributions of f…
The Social Bases of Political Parties in Argentina, 1912–2003
To what extent has the Argentine party system been polarized along class lines? The political historiography gives mixed and contradictory answers to this question. We explore the social bases of Argentina's political parties using an original database, the most comprehensive database of Argentine elections yet assembled, and new methods of ecological inference that yield more reliable results than previous analyses. We identify two distinct part…
Democracy, interrupted: Regime change and partisanship in twentieth-century Argentina
Political science (41 works) · Law (36 works) · Politics (36 works) · Political economy (28 works) · Economics (24 works) · Law (21 works) · Democracy (20 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (19 works) · Politics and Society in Latin America (16 works) · Sociology (15 works)