Morgenstern
Biographic Data
| ID | 46475 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Morgenstern |
| FAMILY NAME | Morgenstern |
| SIGNATURE | MORGENSTERN |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pittsburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7258-8657 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 602 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Nudging attention to evidence resources in Latin America: What works
Many observers call for more efforts to integrate scientifically rigorous impact evaluations into policy streams, though government officials frequently self-report that they rarely utilize such evidence. Previous research has found that small “nudges” in communications content, style, or source can affect behavior in a wide variety of contexts. To test how nudges might impact bureaucrats’ willingness to investigate evidence resources, researcher…
Emergency without backsliding
What Legislators Tell Us About Legislatures: Evidence From Pela ‐ Usal
Presidential threats and bureaucrats' support for democracy in Brazil
Frustrated marriage? The ideological distance of members of congress from their parties in Latin America
Are legislators ideologically close to their co-partisans? And, when not, what policies drive the lack of party unity? To address these questions, we propose two measures of intra-party ideological cohesion: dissonance and frustration. Based on a survey of legislators across 18 Latin American countries, we show that half of the region’s representatives self-identify as substantially far from the mean of their parties (dissonance) and almost 40% p…
How germane are moral and economic policies to ideology? Evidence from Latin American legislators
How do legislators, many of whom hold policy positions that are not consistently conservative or progressive, position themselves on the left–right ideological scale? Analyzing data from the Parliamentary Elites in Latin America (PELA) survey, this paper leverages combinations of moral and economic policy positions to determine the weight—germaneness—of each policy on that scale. Using bi‐ and multivariate models on a database of about 5000 legis…
Party Cohesion, Congruence, and Foreign Powers: Latin American Views About China and the United States
While Latin America's parties suffer from notoriously incongruent relations between legislators and voters, we use mass and legislator-level surveys to show that many parties’ voters and/or legislators coalesce around a singular view about the United States and China. The data indicate frequent congruence between the two levels, and in most of those cases, attitudes towards both countries are positive. Presuming that policies towards the superpow…
Legislators’ Religiosity and Same-Sex Marriage in Latin America
Same-sex marriage has risen to the top of political agendas across Latin America, but it is still illegal in many countries. Public support about the issue varies greatly, and the roles of the courts, presidents, and legislatures have also differed. This article focuses on legislators because they are charged with representing the public and converting demands into policy. Although many legislatures have now voted on the issue, the literature has…
Battling for the Hearts and Minds of Latin Americans: Covariance of Attitudes toward the United States and China
Although the US preserves a dominant position in Latin America, China’s rise poses economic and political challenges and has set up a potential battle for the hearts and minds of the Latin American populace. To explore this theme, this article considers the level of support among Latin Americans toward China and the United States at the country and individual levels, the causes of variance thereof, and whether the views of China, the newcomer, co…
Democratic Reforms, Institutional Fixes, and Political Failures
This essay reviews the following works
Revisiting Shugart and Carey’s Relation of Executive Powers and Democratic Breakdown
This work reassesses the central thesis of Shugart and Carey’s Presidents and Assemblies, that weak presidencies make stronger, more lasting democracies. We argue that a thorough review of the literature that has evaluated this thesis thus far reveals a persistent methodological flaw that has hindered an adequate conclusion on its accuracy. While many scholars have revisited the role of presidential systems in democratic failure, comparative anal…
Are Politics Local?: The Two Dimensions of Party Nationalization around the World
Are politics local? Why? Where? When? How do we measure local versus national politics? And what are the effects? This book provides answers to these questions, within an explicitly comparative framework, including both advanced and developing democracies. It does so by using a statistically-based and graphical account of party nationalization, providing methodology and data for legislative elections covering scores of parties across dozens of co…
How party nationalization conditions economic voting
Party Nationalization
While ethnicity and other social divisions have the potential to drive politics, they are much more central to elections in some countries than in others. One factor that they sometimes drive is party and party system nationalization. Nationalization fits along with concepts such as number of parties, institutionalization, and polarization, as a defining characteristic of parties and party systems. Together, these ideas and concepts shape critica…
Refining the theory of partisan alignments: Evidence from Latin America
In this article we provide a theoretical and empirical evaluation of the evolution of partisan alignments in Latin America since the beginning of the Third Wave of democratization. We first point to a series of limitations of the conventional framework of partisan alignments, namely their disregard of party systems that are only partially or non-institutionalized. Second, we propose a refined framework that is more universally applicable. We then…
Ni Chicha ni Limoná: Party Nationalization in Pre- and Post-Authoritarian Chile
Chile’s parties have been characterized as ‘European’ in their development and institutionalization, but ‘Latin American’ in their high degree of political localism. Yet the specialized literature has not tested these tendencies nor developed a theory as to how they may coexist. Using the concept of party nationalization, we establish the veracity of the claims in the literature and propose a theory of static and dynamic nationalization developme…
Seven imperatives for improving the measurement of party nationalization with Evidence from Chile
Tall, Grande, or Venti: Presidential Powers in the United States and Latin America
Comparative constitutional studies rank the US president as relatively weak and most Latin American presidents as strong. However, specialized studies suggest that US presidents have great abilities to implement their agendas. We argue that presidents with weak formal powers “reinforce” their ability to impose an agenda (scope), as well as their ability to make those decisions stick (force). These reinforced powers, however, have diminishing retu…
Explaining hydrocarbon nationalization in Latin America: Economics and political ideology
Recent hydrocarbon nationalizations in Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador have renewed debates about the dangers of radicals, populists, or leftists. But, while some of these presidents have acted aggressively towards multinational owners, as a group their policies have not differed greatly from non-leftists facing similar circumstances. To test our hypothesis, we provide a detailed three-variable coding of every Mexican and South American president…
Grupos organizados y partidos desorganizados: Incentivos electorales en Uruguay
El presente artículo aplica el estudio de la organización de partidos y el voto legislativo a sistemas de partidos con facciones. Tras desarrollar una clasificación de los diferentes tipos de facciones, se argumenta que las facciones jerárquicamente organizadas responden a un sistema competitivo de incentivos. Pese a que las facciones tienen intereses que las empujan a trabajar juntas por el bien del partido, al mismo tiempo, tienen interés en di…
Legislative Voting and Accountability by John M. Carey
Party Nationalization and Institutions
Party nationalization has two distinct components: the first is based on the degree of homogeneity in the geographic distribution of a party's vote, and the other is defined by the degree to which national events are reflected in the change in a party's electoral support in all regions of the country. In spite of literature tying the static/distributional and the dynamic components together, we show theoretically and empirically that there is a n…
Campaigning in an Electoral Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Mexico
Parliamentary Opposition in Non-Parliamentary Regimes: Latin America
While the opposition is clearly defined in a parliamentary system, the definition is murky in multiparty presidential regimes. As a result, the role of opposition parties is not always clear. In this article, therefore, we evaluate coalition politics in Latin America, firstly to analyse the presidents' legislative support and secondly to consider the role of the opposition in lawmaking and oversight of the executive. The data suggest several conc…
Candidate Recruitment and Selection in Latin America: A Framework for Analysis
This article provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the recruitment and selection of legislative candidates in Latin America. It argues that political recruitment and candidate selection are undertheorized for Latin America yet have determinative impacts on political systems, often overriding the influence of more commonly studied institutional variables. The article elucidates a typology of legislative candidates based on the legal and p…
Latin America's Reactive Assemblies and Proactive Presidents
Democratic assemblies insert themselves into the policymaking process in one or more of three basic ways: originative, by making and breaking executives, who then shoulder most of the policymaking burden; proactive, by initiating and passing their own legislative proposals; and reactive, by amending and/or vetoing executive proposals. European parliaments are the primary examples of originative/reactive assemblies. The U.S. congress and the assem…
Party Nationalization and Institutions
Party nationalization has two distinct components: the first is based on the degree of homogeneity in the geographic distribution of a party's vote, and the other is defined by the degree to which national events are reflected in the change in a party's electoral support in all regions of the country. In spite of literature tying the static/distributional and the dynamic components together, we show theoretically and empirically that there is a n…
Better the Devil You Know Than the Saint You Don't? Risk Propensity and Vote Choice in Mexico
This paper argues that personal attitudes toward risk influence vote choice in Mexico. Great uncertainty over the political stances and capabilities of the opposition parties makes risk propensity a key determinant of vote choice. Not all voters who are disenchanted with the status quo take a chance on the less known opposition; risk acceptant voters gamble on these parties, whereas risk averse individuals stick with the "devil they know." Using …
The Increasing Advantage of Incumbency in the U. S. States
This paper uses district-level electoral returns to estimate the size of the incumbency advantage in 24 U.S. states over the period from 1970 to 1986. Our major findings are two: first, the incumbency advantage in the median state roughly doubled over the time period investigated; second, this increase can be explained in terms of the growth of legislative operating budgets and, by inference, in casework and other particularistic services provide…
The Incumbency Advantage in Multimember Districts: Evidence from the U. S. States
Studies of the incumbency advantage in U.S. state legislative elections have usually been limited to the relatively few states that use single-member districts exclusively. In this paper we provide a method for computing the incumbency advantage in multimember districts, based on the Gelman-King (1990) estimator for single-member districts, and use it to estimate the incumbency advantage in 40 U.S. states over the period 1970-86. We find that the…
Are Politics Local: An Analysis of Voting Patterns in 23 Democracies
This article measures, compares, and analyzes the degree to which local factors, be they candidate qualities or district characteristics, affect electoral politics. It applies Morgenstern and Potthoff’s components-of-variance model to 56 parties or coalitions to measure the “local vote” and shows that only in some cases do local factors manifest themselves in voting patterns. To explain this finding, the authors argue that the type of executive s…
The components of elections: District Heterogeneity, District-Time Effects, and Volatility
Parliamentary Opposition in Non-Parliamentary Regimes: Latin America
While the opposition is clearly defined in a parliamentary system, the definition is murky in multiparty presidential regimes. As a result, the role of opposition parties is not always clear. In this article, therefore, we evaluate coalition politics in Latin America, firstly to analyse the presidents' legislative support and secondly to consider the role of the opposition in lawmaking and oversight of the executive. The data suggest several conc…
Organized Factions and Disorganized Parties: Electoral Incentives in Uruguay
This paper extends the study of party organization and legislative voting to factionalized party systems. After developing a typology of factional types, it argues that hierarchically organized factions respond to a competing incentive system. Factions have interests that push them to work together for the good of the party, but at the same time they have interests in distinguishing themselves for electoral purposes. Further, the electoral cycle …
Refining the theory of partisan alignments: Evidence from Latin America
In this article we provide a theoretical and empirical evaluation of the evolution of partisan alignments in Latin America since the beginning of the Third Wave of democratization. We first point to a series of limitations of the conventional framework of partisan alignments, namely their disregard of party systems that are only partially or non-institutionalized. Second, we propose a refined framework that is more universally applicable. We then…
Seven imperatives for improving the measurement of party nationalization with Evidence from Chile
Tall, Grande, or Venti: Presidential Powers in the United States and Latin America
Comparative constitutional studies rank the US president as relatively weak and most Latin American presidents as strong. However, specialized studies suggest that US presidents have great abilities to implement their agendas. We argue that presidents with weak formal powers “reinforce” their ability to impose an agenda (scope), as well as their ability to make those decisions stick (force). These reinforced powers, however, have diminishing retu…
Candidate Recruitment and Selection in Latin America: A Framework for Analysis
This article provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the recruitment and selection of legislative candidates in Latin America. It argues that political recruitment and candidate selection are undertheorized for Latin America yet have determinative impacts on political systems, often overriding the influence of more commonly studied institutional variables. The article elucidates a typology of legislative candidates based on the legal and p…
Explaining hydrocarbon nationalization in Latin America: Economics and political ideology
Recent hydrocarbon nationalizations in Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador have renewed debates about the dangers of radicals, populists, or leftists. But, while some of these presidents have acted aggressively towards multinational owners, as a group their policies have not differed greatly from non-leftists facing similar circumstances. To test our hypothesis, we provide a detailed three-variable coding of every Mexican and South American president…
Electoral Laws, Parties, and Party Systems in Latin America
With a focus on Latin America, this literature review considers the extent to which electoral systems affect different aspects of parties and party systems. We find that standard electoral system variables fail many empirical tests that try to tie them to any facet of parties or party systems. Still, methodological considerations regarding interactions with party strategies, party organization, and many contextual variables loom large, so we cann…
Campaigning in an Electoral Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Mexico
Ni Chicha ni Limoná: Party Nationalization in Pre- and Post-Authoritarian Chile
Chile’s parties have been characterized as ‘European’ in their development and institutionalization, but ‘Latin American’ in their high degree of political localism. Yet the specialized literature has not tested these tendencies nor developed a theory as to how they may coexist. Using the concept of party nationalization, we establish the veracity of the claims in the literature and propose a theory of static and dynamic nationalization developme…
Revisiting Shugart and Carey’s Relation of Executive Powers and Democratic Breakdown
This work reassesses the central thesis of Shugart and Carey’s Presidents and Assemblies, that weak presidencies make stronger, more lasting democracies. We argue that a thorough review of the literature that has evaluated this thesis thus far reveals a persistent methodological flaw that has hindered an adequate conclusion on its accuracy. While many scholars have revisited the role of presidential systems in democratic failure, comparative anal…
How party nationalization conditions economic voting
Legislaturas reactivas y presidentes proactivos en América Latina
Las legislaturas democrdticas se insertan en el proceso de toma de decisiones segOn tres modalidades basicas: una modalidad generativa, por la cual dichas legislaturas forman y remueven gobiernos y, a su vez, que cargan con la responsabilidad principal de la toma de decisiones; una modalidad proactiva, por la cual propician y sancionan sus propias propuestas legislativas; y una modalidad reactiva, por la cual enmiendan y/ o vetan las propuestas d…
Scope and Trade Agreements
With a focus on NAFTA, we offer an alternative model of trade negotiations that explains why the dominant partner is able to force concessions only on some issues. Key to our model is the concept ofscope. The environment side agreement excited wide swaths of society; thus, scope was high and international power asymmetries appear to explain the result. Power asymmetries seemed unimportant, however, when bargaining over issues that affected small …
Presidential threats and bureaucrats' support for democracy in Brazil
Frustrated marriage? The ideological distance of members of congress from their parties in Latin America
Are legislators ideologically close to their co-partisans? And, when not, what policies drive the lack of party unity? To address these questions, we propose two measures of intra-party ideological cohesion: dissonance and frustration. Based on a survey of legislators across 18 Latin American countries, we show that half of the region’s representatives self-identify as substantially far from the mean of their parties (dissonance) and almost 40% p…
Battling for the Hearts and Minds of Latin Americans: Covariance of Attitudes toward the United States and China
Although the US preserves a dominant position in Latin America, China’s rise poses economic and political challenges and has set up a potential battle for the hearts and minds of the Latin American populace. To explore this theme, this article considers the level of support among Latin Americans toward China and the United States at the country and individual levels, the causes of variance thereof, and whether the views of China, the newcomer, co…
The PRI’s Choice: Balancing Democratic Reform and its Own Salvation
This article explores the puzzle of why Mexico’s long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) implemented a series of electoral reforms in 1996 that precipitated its own downfall. Previous work explaining the process of Mexican democratization focuses on foreign pressures, interparty bargaining and a unified PRI. Alternatively, we argue that internal divisions in the PRI–conjoined with the threat of a presidential deal with the opposition–…
The Increasing Advantage of Incumbency in the U. S. States
This paper uses district-level electoral returns to estimate the size of the incumbency advantage in 24 U.S. states over the period from 1970 to 1986. Our major findings are two: first, the incumbency advantage in the median state roughly doubled over the time period investigated; second, this increase can be explained in terms of the growth of legislative operating budgets and, by inference, in casework and other particularistic services provide…
The Incumbency Advantage in Multimember Districts: Evidence from the U. S. States
Studies of the incumbency advantage in U.S. state legislative elections have usually been limited to the relatively few states that use single-member districts exclusively. In this paper we provide a method for computing the incumbency advantage in multimember districts, based on the Gelman-King (1990) estimator for single-member districts, and use it to estimate the incumbency advantage in 40 U.S. states over the period 1970-86. We find that the…
Better the Devil You Know Than the Saint You Don't? Risk Propensity and Vote Choice in Mexico
This paper argues that personal attitudes toward risk influence vote choice in Mexico. Great uncertainty over the political stances and capabilities of the opposition parties makes risk propensity a key determinant of vote choice. Not all voters who are disenchanted with the status quo take a chance on the less known opposition; risk acceptant voters gamble on these parties, whereas risk averse individuals stick with the "devil they know." Using …
Organized Factions and Disorganized Parties: Electoral Incentives in Uruguay
This paper extends the study of party organization and legislative voting to factionalized party systems. After developing a typology of factional types, it argues that hierarchically organized factions respond to a competing incentive system. Factions have interests that push them to work together for the good of the party, but at the same time they have interests in distinguishing themselves for electoral purposes. Further, the electoral cycle …
Latin America's Reactive Assemblies and Proactive Presidents
Democratic assemblies insert themselves into the policymaking process in one or more of three basic ways: originative, by making and breaking executives, who then shoulder most of the policymaking burden; proactive, by initiating and passing their own legislative proposals; and reactive, by amending and/or vetoing executive proposals. European parliaments are the primary examples of originative/reactive assemblies. The U.S. congress and the assem…
Legislaturas reactivas y presidentes proactivos en América Latina
Las legislaturas democrdticas se insertan en el proceso de toma de decisiones segOn tres modalidades basicas: una modalidad generativa, por la cual dichas legislaturas forman y remueven gobiernos y, a su vez, que cargan con la responsabilidad principal de la toma de decisiones; una modalidad proactiva, por la cual propician y sancionan sus propias propuestas legislativas; y una modalidad reactiva, por la cual enmiendan y/ o vetan las propuestas d…
Patterns of Legislative Politics: Roll-Call Voting in Latin America and the United States
Using the United States as a basis of comparison, this book, first published in 2004, makes extensive use of roll call data to explore patterns of legislative politics in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. It distinguishes among parties, factions, coalitions and delegations based on the extent to which they are unified in their voting and/or willing to form policy coalitions with other legislative 'agents'. It discusses the voting unity and ba…
Are Politics Local: An Analysis of Voting Patterns in 23 Democracies
This article measures, compares, and analyzes the degree to which local factors, be they candidate qualities or district characteristics, affect electoral politics. It applies Morgenstern and Potthoff’s components-of-variance model to 56 parties or coalitions to measure the “local vote” and shows that only in some cases do local factors manifest themselves in voting patterns. To explain this finding, the authors argue that the type of executive s…
The components of elections: District Heterogeneity, District-Time Effects, and Volatility
The PRI’s Choice: Balancing Democratic Reform and its Own Salvation
This article explores the puzzle of why Mexico’s long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) implemented a series of electoral reforms in 1996 that precipitated its own downfall. Previous work explaining the process of Mexican democratization focuses on foreign pressures, interparty bargaining and a unified PRI. Alternatively, we argue that internal divisions in the PRI–conjoined with the threat of a presidential deal with the opposition–…
Scope and Trade Agreements
With a focus on NAFTA, we offer an alternative model of trade negotiations that explains why the dominant partner is able to force concessions only on some issues. Key to our model is the concept ofscope. The environment side agreement excited wide swaths of society; thus, scope was high and international power asymmetries appear to explain the result. Power asymmetries seemed unimportant, however, when bargaining over issues that affected small …
Electoral Laws, Parties, and Party Systems in Latin America
With a focus on Latin America, this literature review considers the extent to which electoral systems affect different aspects of parties and party systems. We find that standard electoral system variables fail many empirical tests that try to tie them to any facet of parties or party systems. Still, methodological considerations regarding interactions with party strategies, party organization, and many contextual variables loom large, so we cann…
Parliamentary Opposition in Non-Parliamentary Regimes: Latin America
While the opposition is clearly defined in a parliamentary system, the definition is murky in multiparty presidential regimes. As a result, the role of opposition parties is not always clear. In this article, therefore, we evaluate coalition politics in Latin America, firstly to analyse the presidents' legislative support and secondly to consider the role of the opposition in lawmaking and oversight of the executive. The data suggest several conc…
Candidate Recruitment and Selection in Latin America: A Framework for Analysis
This article provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the recruitment and selection of legislative candidates in Latin America. It argues that political recruitment and candidate selection are undertheorized for Latin America yet have determinative impacts on political systems, often overriding the influence of more commonly studied institutional variables. The article elucidates a typology of legislative candidates based on the legal and p…
Legislative Voting and Accountability by John M. Carey
Party Nationalization and Institutions
Party nationalization has two distinct components: the first is based on the degree of homogeneity in the geographic distribution of a party's vote, and the other is defined by the degree to which national events are reflected in the change in a party's electoral support in all regions of the country. In spite of literature tying the static/distributional and the dynamic components together, we show theoretically and empirically that there is a n…
Campaigning in an Electoral Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Mexico
Explaining hydrocarbon nationalization in Latin America: Economics and political ideology
Recent hydrocarbon nationalizations in Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador have renewed debates about the dangers of radicals, populists, or leftists. But, while some of these presidents have acted aggressively towards multinational owners, as a group their policies have not differed greatly from non-leftists facing similar circumstances. To test our hypothesis, we provide a detailed three-variable coding of every Mexican and South American president…
Grupos organizados y partidos desorganizados: Incentivos electorales en Uruguay
El presente artículo aplica el estudio de la organización de partidos y el voto legislativo a sistemas de partidos con facciones. Tras desarrollar una clasificación de los diferentes tipos de facciones, se argumenta que las facciones jerárquicamente organizadas responden a un sistema competitivo de incentivos. Pese a que las facciones tienen intereses que las empujan a trabajar juntas por el bien del partido, al mismo tiempo, tienen interés en di…
Tall, Grande, or Venti: Presidential Powers in the United States and Latin America
Comparative constitutional studies rank the US president as relatively weak and most Latin American presidents as strong. However, specialized studies suggest that US presidents have great abilities to implement their agendas. We argue that presidents with weak formal powers “reinforce” their ability to impose an agenda (scope), as well as their ability to make those decisions stick (force). These reinforced powers, however, have diminishing retu…
Ni Chicha ni Limoná: Party Nationalization in Pre- and Post-Authoritarian Chile
Chile’s parties have been characterized as ‘European’ in their development and institutionalization, but ‘Latin American’ in their high degree of political localism. Yet the specialized literature has not tested these tendencies nor developed a theory as to how they may coexist. Using the concept of party nationalization, we establish the veracity of the claims in the literature and propose a theory of static and dynamic nationalization developme…
Seven imperatives for improving the measurement of party nationalization with Evidence from Chile
Party Nationalization
While ethnicity and other social divisions have the potential to drive politics, they are much more central to elections in some countries than in others. One factor that they sometimes drive is party and party system nationalization. Nationalization fits along with concepts such as number of parties, institutionalization, and polarization, as a defining characteristic of parties and party systems. Together, these ideas and concepts shape critica…
Refining the theory of partisan alignments: Evidence from Latin America
In this article we provide a theoretical and empirical evaluation of the evolution of partisan alignments in Latin America since the beginning of the Third Wave of democratization. We first point to a series of limitations of the conventional framework of partisan alignments, namely their disregard of party systems that are only partially or non-institutionalized. Second, we propose a refined framework that is more universally applicable. We then…
Are Politics Local?: The Two Dimensions of Party Nationalization around the World
Are politics local? Why? Where? When? How do we measure local versus national politics? And what are the effects? This book provides answers to these questions, within an explicitly comparative framework, including both advanced and developing democracies. It does so by using a statistically-based and graphical account of party nationalization, providing methodology and data for legislative elections covering scores of parties across dozens of co…
Political science (35 works) · Law (28 works) · Politics (26 works) · Economics (22 works) · Political economy (22 works) · Law (21 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (20 works) · Politics and Society in Latin America (19 works) · Latin Americans (16 works) · Sociology (16 works)