Shigeo Hirano
Biographic Data
| ID | 3627520 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shigeo Hirano |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shigeo |
| FAMILY NAME | Hirano |
| SIGNATURE | HIRANO S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 484 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
How Partisan Are U.S. Local Elections? Evidence from 2020 Cast Vote Records
Analyzing nominally partisan contests, previous literature has argued that state and local politics have nationalized. Here we use individual ballots from the 2020 general elections covering over 50 million voters to study the relationship between individual national partisanship and voting in over 5,700 contested down-ballot contests, including nonpartisan races and ballot measures. Voting in partisan contests can be explained by voter’s nationa…
Measuring the Partisan Behavior of U.S. Newspapers, 1880 to 1980
In this paper, we study newspaper partisan behavior and content, which we measure using coverage of and commentary on partisan activities, institutions, and actors. We use this measure to describe the levels of relative partisan behavior during the period 1880 to 1900, and to describe changes over the period 1880 to 1980. We find that, on average, newspapers were initially highly partisan, but gradually became less partisan over time. Importantly…
The Growth of Campaign Advertising in the United States, 1880–1930
When did candidate-centered campaign advertising take off in the United States, and what accounts for this growth? In this article, we analyze a novel data set of political advertisements in newspapers between 1880 and 1930. We show that there was a sharp increase in candidates' newspaper advertising beginning around 1910. We exploit the panel structure of these data to investigate the impact of political reforms on advertising. The results sugge…
Primary Elections and the Provision of Public Goods
We develop a theory of primary elections and the provision of public and private goods. In our model, candidates from two parties compete for the support of "core" party voters in their respective primary elections and "swing" voters in a general election. Candidates within a party share a fixed ideology and offer platforms that distribute a unit of public spending across group-specific private goods and public goods. Without primaries, candidate…
Partisan Imbalance in Regression Discontinuity Studies Based on Electoral Thresholds
Many articles use regression discontinuity designs (RDDs) that exploit the discontinuity in “close” election outcomes to identify various political and economic outcomes of interest. One of the most important types of diagnostic tests in an RDD is checking for balance in observable variables within the window on either side of the threshold. Finding an imbalance raises concerns that an unobservable variable may exist that affects whether a case e…
Voter Learning in State Primary Elections
When voters learn about candidates' issue positions during election campaigns, does it affect how they vote? This basic question about voters remains unanswered in part because of a methodological obstacle: learning candidates' issue positions may influence not only voters' vote choice but also their issue positions. To surmount this obstacle, we attempt to answer this question by examining statewide primary elections, which are arguably less vul…
Direct and Indirect Representation
How much can a constituency influence the power of its representative in the legislature? This article develops a theoretical model of the constituency basis of legislator influence. The key players in the model are interest groups that may receive targeted transfers from the legislature. The model predicts that the amount of transfers that such groups receive is increasing in their ability to help a party win a legislative seat in the next elect…
Primary Elections and the Quality of Elected Officials
In this paper we argue that the literature underestimates the value of primaries because it focuses on overall average effects. We argue that primary elections are most needed in safe constituencies, where the advantaged party’s candidate can usually win the general election — even if she is low quality. If the main role of elections is to select good candidates, then advantaged party primaries in open seat races are particularly consequential. W…
What Happens to Incumbents in Scandals
One key role of elections is to allow voters to remove politicians who perform poorly in office. We analyze the extent to which incumbents who are involved in relatively serious political scandals lose elections. More importantly, we assess the relative importance of primary and general elections in removing such incumbents. How often do incumbents involved in relatively serious scandals lose in the primary election? How often do they lose in the…
Elections and reform: The adoption of civil service systems in the U.S. states
Most government bureaucracies in developed countries use civil service systems. What accounts for their adoption? We develop and test a model of bureaucratic reforms under repeated partisan competition. In the model, two political parties composed of overlapping generations of candidates compete for office. Under a spoils system, an incumbent politician can either continue to “politicize” the bureaucracy, which allows her to direct benefits to vo…
Patronage and Elections in U.S. States
Does control of patronage jobs significantly increase a political party's chances of winning elections in U.S. states? We employ a differences-in-differences design, exploiting the considerable variation in the dates that different states adopted civil service reforms. Our evidence suggests that political parties in U.S. states were able to use state-level patronage to increase the probability of maintaining control of state legislatures and stat…
Do Individual Representatives Influence Government Transfers? Evidence from Japan
Conventional wisdom is that during the second half of the twentieth century, Japanese Diet members served as “pipelines” between the national treasury and their constituents. This article employs two identification strategies to estimate how much individual Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) incumbents in the Lower House of the Diet influenced the distribution of government transfers during the period 1977 to 1992. The first exploits the changes in r…
Primary Elections and Partisan Polarization in the U.S. Congress
Many observers and scholars argue that primary elections contribute to ideological polarization in U.S. politics. We test this claim using congressional elections and roll call voting behavior. Many of our findings are null. We find little evidence that the introduction of primary elections, the level of primary election turnout, or the threat of primary competition are associated with partisan polarization in congressional roll call voting. We a…
More Democracy: The Direct Primary and Competition in U.S. Elections
This article offers a first-ever comprehensive empirical assessment of a key Progressive reform, the direct primary, and its impact on competition in American elections. We begin with a review of the problems Progressives diagnosed in the American electoral system and reasons to expect the direct primary to be a pro-competitive, democratizing reform. We then consider prior research into the direct primary and electoral contestation and describe t…
Why Primaries in Latin American Presidential Elections
In a context where primaries are not mandated, why do some parties use them to select presidential candidates? In this paper, we argue that the use of primary elections is likely to reflect the existence and intensity of divisions within political parties. We focus on several characteristics of political parties and party systems that are often associated with intraparty divisions. We find that these characteristics are correlated with the decisi…
Distributive Politics with Primaries
We develop a model of electoral competition in which two parties compete for votes amongst three groups of voters. Each party first internally selects one of two candidates to run in a general election. Candidates within a party share a fixed ideological platform and can promise a distribution of a unit of public spending across groups. Without primary elections, the selection process is random. With primary elections, an ideologically friendly s…
Using Multimember District Elections to Estimate the Sources of the Incumbency Advantage
In this article we use a novel research design that exploits unique features of multimember districts to estimate and decompose the incumbency advantage in state legislative elections. Like some existing related studies we also use repeated observations on the same candidates to account for unobserved factors that remain constant across observations. Multimember districts have the additional feature of copartisans competing for multiple seats wit…
Third Parties, Elections, and Roll‐Call Votes: The Populist Party and the Late Nineteenth‐Century U.S. Congress
What effect do electorally successful third parties have on congressional roll‐call votes? There is widespread belief among scholars that third parties influence the policies of the major parties, but there is little systematic evidence of this influence. I exploit the unique historical context surrounding the Populist Party formation in 1892 to examine the effect of the Populist Party's electoral success on congressional roll‐call votes related …
The incumbency advantage in U.S. primary elections
The Decline of Third-Party Voting in the United States
This paper documents and investigates a prominent but little discussed pattern in U.S. politics, which is the decline of third-party electoral support over the past century. We find evidence consistent with the claim that electoral support for third parties—mainly left-wing third parties—declined because the Democratic Party co-opted the left-wing policy position beginning with the passage of the New Deal agenda. We note first that most of the th…
Electoral Institutions, Hometowns, and Favored Minorities: Evidence from Japanese Electoral Reforms
This article presents evidence that electoral institutions affect the geographic distribution of both candidate electoral support and government resources. The author exploits two electoral reforms in Japan to identify the effect of institutional incentives: (1) the 1994 electoral reform from a multimember single nontransferable vote (SNTV) system to a mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system with a single-member district (SMD) component and a prop…
Electoral Institutions, Hometowns, and Favored Minorities: Evidence from Japanese Electoral Reforms
This article presents evidence that electoral institutions affect the geographic distribution of both candidate electoral support and government resources. The author exploits two electoral reforms in Japan to identify the effect of institutional incentives: (1) the 1994 electoral reform from a multimember single nontransferable vote (SNTV) system to a mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system with a single-member district (SMD) component and a prop…
The Decline of Third-Party Voting in the United States
This paper documents and investigates a prominent but little discussed pattern in U.S. politics, which is the decline of third-party electoral support over the past century. We find evidence consistent with the claim that electoral support for third parties—mainly left-wing third parties—declined because the Democratic Party co-opted the left-wing policy position beginning with the passage of the New Deal agenda. We note first that most of the th…
Why Primaries in Latin American Presidential Elections
In a context where primaries are not mandated, why do some parties use them to select presidential candidates? In this paper, we argue that the use of primary elections is likely to reflect the existence and intensity of divisions within political parties. We focus on several characteristics of political parties and party systems that are often associated with intraparty divisions. We find that these characteristics are correlated with the decisi…
Patronage and Elections in U.S. States
Does control of patronage jobs significantly increase a political party's chances of winning elections in U.S. states? We employ a differences-in-differences design, exploiting the considerable variation in the dates that different states adopted civil service reforms. Our evidence suggests that political parties in U.S. states were able to use state-level patronage to increase the probability of maintaining control of state legislatures and stat…
Using Multimember District Elections to Estimate the Sources of the Incumbency Advantage
In this article we use a novel research design that exploits unique features of multimember districts to estimate and decompose the incumbency advantage in state legislative elections. Like some existing related studies we also use repeated observations on the same candidates to account for unobserved factors that remain constant across observations. Multimember districts have the additional feature of copartisans competing for multiple seats wit…
Primary Elections and Partisan Polarization in the U.S. Congress
Many observers and scholars argue that primary elections contribute to ideological polarization in U.S. politics. We test this claim using congressional elections and roll call voting behavior. Many of our findings are null. We find little evidence that the introduction of primary elections, the level of primary election turnout, or the threat of primary competition are associated with partisan polarization in congressional roll call voting. We a…
Elections and reform: The adoption of civil service systems in the U.S. states
Most government bureaucracies in developed countries use civil service systems. What accounts for their adoption? We develop and test a model of bureaucratic reforms under repeated partisan competition. In the model, two political parties composed of overlapping generations of candidates compete for office. Under a spoils system, an incumbent politician can either continue to “politicize” the bureaucracy, which allows her to direct benefits to vo…
The incumbency advantage in U.S. primary elections
Voter Learning in State Primary Elections
When voters learn about candidates' issue positions during election campaigns, does it affect how they vote? This basic question about voters remains unanswered in part because of a methodological obstacle: learning candidates' issue positions may influence not only voters' vote choice but also their issue positions. To surmount this obstacle, we attempt to answer this question by examining statewide primary elections, which are arguably less vul…
Primary Elections and the Quality of Elected Officials
In this paper we argue that the literature underestimates the value of primaries because it focuses on overall average effects. We argue that primary elections are most needed in safe constituencies, where the advantaged party’s candidate can usually win the general election — even if she is low quality. If the main role of elections is to select good candidates, then advantaged party primaries in open seat races are particularly consequential. W…
What Happens to Incumbents in Scandals
One key role of elections is to allow voters to remove politicians who perform poorly in office. We analyze the extent to which incumbents who are involved in relatively serious political scandals lose elections. More importantly, we assess the relative importance of primary and general elections in removing such incumbents. How often do incumbents involved in relatively serious scandals lose in the primary election? How often do they lose in the…
More Democracy: The Direct Primary and Competition in U.S. Elections
This article offers a first-ever comprehensive empirical assessment of a key Progressive reform, the direct primary, and its impact on competition in American elections. We begin with a review of the problems Progressives diagnosed in the American electoral system and reasons to expect the direct primary to be a pro-competitive, democratizing reform. We then consider prior research into the direct primary and electoral contestation and describe t…
Do Individual Representatives Influence Government Transfers? Evidence from Japan
Conventional wisdom is that during the second half of the twentieth century, Japanese Diet members served as “pipelines” between the national treasury and their constituents. This article employs two identification strategies to estimate how much individual Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) incumbents in the Lower House of the Diet influenced the distribution of government transfers during the period 1977 to 1992. The first exploits the changes in r…
Partisan Imbalance in Regression Discontinuity Studies Based on Electoral Thresholds
Many articles use regression discontinuity designs (RDDs) that exploit the discontinuity in “close” election outcomes to identify various political and economic outcomes of interest. One of the most important types of diagnostic tests in an RDD is checking for balance in observable variables within the window on either side of the threshold. Finding an imbalance raises concerns that an unobservable variable may exist that affects whether a case e…
Distributive Politics with Primaries
We develop a model of electoral competition in which two parties compete for votes amongst three groups of voters. Each party first internally selects one of two candidates to run in a general election. Candidates within a party share a fixed ideological platform and can promise a distribution of a unit of public spending across groups. Without primary elections, the selection process is random. With primary elections, an ideologically friendly s…
Third Parties, Elections, and Roll‐Call Votes: The Populist Party and the Late Nineteenth‐Century U.S. Congress
What effect do electorally successful third parties have on congressional roll‐call votes? There is widespread belief among scholars that third parties influence the policies of the major parties, but there is little systematic evidence of this influence. I exploit the unique historical context surrounding the Populist Party formation in 1892 to examine the effect of the Populist Party's electoral success on congressional roll‐call votes related …
Primary Elections and the Provision of Public Goods
We develop a theory of primary elections and the provision of public and private goods. In our model, candidates from two parties compete for the support of "core" party voters in their respective primary elections and "swing" voters in a general election. Candidates within a party share a fixed ideology and offer platforms that distribute a unit of public spending across group-specific private goods and public goods. Without primaries, candidate…
Measuring the Partisan Behavior of U.S. Newspapers, 1880 to 1980
In this paper, we study newspaper partisan behavior and content, which we measure using coverage of and commentary on partisan activities, institutions, and actors. We use this measure to describe the levels of relative partisan behavior during the period 1880 to 1900, and to describe changes over the period 1880 to 1980. We find that, on average, newspapers were initially highly partisan, but gradually became less partisan over time. Importantly…
The Growth of Campaign Advertising in the United States, 1880–1930
When did candidate-centered campaign advertising take off in the United States, and what accounts for this growth? In this article, we analyze a novel data set of political advertisements in newspapers between 1880 and 1930. We show that there was a sharp increase in candidates' newspaper advertising beginning around 1910. We exploit the panel structure of these data to investigate the impact of political reforms on advertising. The results sugge…
Direct and Indirect Representation
How much can a constituency influence the power of its representative in the legislature? This article develops a theoretical model of the constituency basis of legislator influence. The key players in the model are interest groups that may receive targeted transfers from the legislature. The model predicts that the amount of transfers that such groups receive is increasing in their ability to help a party win a legislative seat in the next elect…
Electoral Institutions, Hometowns, and Favored Minorities: Evidence from Japanese Electoral Reforms
This article presents evidence that electoral institutions affect the geographic distribution of both candidate electoral support and government resources. The author exploits two electoral reforms in Japan to identify the effect of institutional incentives: (1) the 1994 electoral reform from a multimember single nontransferable vote (SNTV) system to a mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system with a single-member district (SMD) component and a prop…
The incumbency advantage in U.S. primary elections
The Decline of Third-Party Voting in the United States
This paper documents and investigates a prominent but little discussed pattern in U.S. politics, which is the decline of third-party electoral support over the past century. We find evidence consistent with the claim that electoral support for third parties—mainly left-wing third parties—declined because the Democratic Party co-opted the left-wing policy position beginning with the passage of the New Deal agenda. We note first that most of the th…
Third Parties, Elections, and Roll‐Call Votes: The Populist Party and the Late Nineteenth‐Century U.S. Congress
What effect do electorally successful third parties have on congressional roll‐call votes? There is widespread belief among scholars that third parties influence the policies of the major parties, but there is little systematic evidence of this influence. I exploit the unique historical context surrounding the Populist Party formation in 1892 to examine the effect of the Populist Party's electoral success on congressional roll‐call votes related …
Why Primaries in Latin American Presidential Elections
In a context where primaries are not mandated, why do some parties use them to select presidential candidates? In this paper, we argue that the use of primary elections is likely to reflect the existence and intensity of divisions within political parties. We focus on several characteristics of political parties and party systems that are often associated with intraparty divisions. We find that these characteristics are correlated with the decisi…
Distributive Politics with Primaries
We develop a model of electoral competition in which two parties compete for votes amongst three groups of voters. Each party first internally selects one of two candidates to run in a general election. Candidates within a party share a fixed ideological platform and can promise a distribution of a unit of public spending across groups. Without primary elections, the selection process is random. With primary elections, an ideologically friendly s…
Using Multimember District Elections to Estimate the Sources of the Incumbency Advantage
In this article we use a novel research design that exploits unique features of multimember districts to estimate and decompose the incumbency advantage in state legislative elections. Like some existing related studies we also use repeated observations on the same candidates to account for unobserved factors that remain constant across observations. Multimember districts have the additional feature of copartisans competing for multiple seats wit…
Primary Elections and Partisan Polarization in the U.S. Congress
Many observers and scholars argue that primary elections contribute to ideological polarization in U.S. politics. We test this claim using congressional elections and roll call voting behavior. Many of our findings are null. We find little evidence that the introduction of primary elections, the level of primary election turnout, or the threat of primary competition are associated with partisan polarization in congressional roll call voting. We a…
More Democracy: The Direct Primary and Competition in U.S. Elections
This article offers a first-ever comprehensive empirical assessment of a key Progressive reform, the direct primary, and its impact on competition in American elections. We begin with a review of the problems Progressives diagnosed in the American electoral system and reasons to expect the direct primary to be a pro-competitive, democratizing reform. We then consider prior research into the direct primary and electoral contestation and describe t…
Patronage and Elections in U.S. States
Does control of patronage jobs significantly increase a political party's chances of winning elections in U.S. states? We employ a differences-in-differences design, exploiting the considerable variation in the dates that different states adopted civil service reforms. Our evidence suggests that political parties in U.S. states were able to use state-level patronage to increase the probability of maintaining control of state legislatures and stat…
Do Individual Representatives Influence Government Transfers? Evidence from Japan
Conventional wisdom is that during the second half of the twentieth century, Japanese Diet members served as “pipelines” between the national treasury and their constituents. This article employs two identification strategies to estimate how much individual Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) incumbents in the Lower House of the Diet influenced the distribution of government transfers during the period 1977 to 1992. The first exploits the changes in r…
What Happens to Incumbents in Scandals
One key role of elections is to allow voters to remove politicians who perform poorly in office. We analyze the extent to which incumbents who are involved in relatively serious political scandals lose elections. More importantly, we assess the relative importance of primary and general elections in removing such incumbents. How often do incumbents involved in relatively serious scandals lose in the primary election? How often do they lose in the…
Elections and reform: The adoption of civil service systems in the U.S. states
Most government bureaucracies in developed countries use civil service systems. What accounts for their adoption? We develop and test a model of bureaucratic reforms under repeated partisan competition. In the model, two political parties composed of overlapping generations of candidates compete for office. Under a spoils system, an incumbent politician can either continue to “politicize” the bureaucracy, which allows her to direct benefits to vo…
Primary Elections and the Quality of Elected Officials
In this paper we argue that the literature underestimates the value of primaries because it focuses on overall average effects. We argue that primary elections are most needed in safe constituencies, where the advantaged party’s candidate can usually win the general election — even if she is low quality. If the main role of elections is to select good candidates, then advantaged party primaries in open seat races are particularly consequential. W…
Partisan Imbalance in Regression Discontinuity Studies Based on Electoral Thresholds
Many articles use regression discontinuity designs (RDDs) that exploit the discontinuity in “close” election outcomes to identify various political and economic outcomes of interest. One of the most important types of diagnostic tests in an RDD is checking for balance in observable variables within the window on either side of the threshold. Finding an imbalance raises concerns that an unobservable variable may exist that affects whether a case e…
Voter Learning in State Primary Elections
When voters learn about candidates' issue positions during election campaigns, does it affect how they vote? This basic question about voters remains unanswered in part because of a methodological obstacle: learning candidates' issue positions may influence not only voters' vote choice but also their issue positions. To surmount this obstacle, we attempt to answer this question by examining statewide primary elections, which are arguably less vul…
Direct and Indirect Representation
How much can a constituency influence the power of its representative in the legislature? This article develops a theoretical model of the constituency basis of legislator influence. The key players in the model are interest groups that may receive targeted transfers from the legislature. The model predicts that the amount of transfers that such groups receive is increasing in their ability to help a party win a legislative seat in the next elect…
Primary Elections and the Provision of Public Goods
We develop a theory of primary elections and the provision of public and private goods. In our model, candidates from two parties compete for the support of "core" party voters in their respective primary elections and "swing" voters in a general election. Candidates within a party share a fixed ideology and offer platforms that distribute a unit of public spending across group-specific private goods and public goods. Without primaries, candidate…
The Growth of Campaign Advertising in the United States, 1880–1930
When did candidate-centered campaign advertising take off in the United States, and what accounts for this growth? In this article, we analyze a novel data set of political advertisements in newspapers between 1880 and 1930. We show that there was a sharp increase in candidates' newspaper advertising beginning around 1910. We exploit the panel structure of these data to investigate the impact of political reforms on advertising. The results sugge…
Measuring the Partisan Behavior of U.S. Newspapers, 1880 to 1980
In this paper, we study newspaper partisan behavior and content, which we measure using coverage of and commentary on partisan activities, institutions, and actors. We use this measure to describe the levels of relative partisan behavior during the period 1880 to 1900, and to describe changes over the period 1880 to 1980. We find that, on average, newspapers were initially highly partisan, but gradually became less partisan over time. Importantly…
How Partisan Are U.S. Local Elections? Evidence from 2020 Cast Vote Records
Analyzing nominally partisan contests, previous literature has argued that state and local politics have nationalized. Here we use individual ballots from the 2020 general elections covering over 50 million voters to study the relationship between individual national partisanship and voting in over 5,700 contested down-ballot contests, including nonpartisan races and ballot measures. Voting in partisan contests can be explained by voter’s nationa…
Political science (18 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (15 works) · Economics (14 works) · Political economy (12 works) · Fiscal Policies and Political Economy (10 works) · General election (7 works) · Democracy (6 works)