Joshua Tucker
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Joshua Tucker

Joshua Tucker is a professor of Politics at New York University with an affiliate appointment in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies and New York University-Abu Dhabi. His major field is comparative politics with an emphasis on mass politics, including elections and voting, the development of partisan attachment, public opinion formation, and, political protest.

Recent Articles

If Same-Sex Marriage Is so Popular, Why Does It Always Lose at the Ballot Box? (Includes state-level data on support and legislation)

Joshua TuckerMay 15, 2012

With the continuing debate regarding the electoral implications of Obama’s announcement regarding his support for gay marriage, we are very pleased to welcome the following guest post from Gregory B. Lewis of the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University:

Since all 31 states that have voted on constitutional amendments to ban same-sex marriage (SSM) have passed them, typically by overwhelming popular votes, should we be skeptical that half of Americans really support same-sex marriage?  Probably not.  Most bans passed when opposition to SSM was much stronger, and SSM opponents have targeted constitutional amendments for votes in states where support for SSM is weakest.

Opposition to SSM was quite strong and reasonably stable until 2004.  Since 2004, the rise in support has been remarkable.  My estimate is 16 percentage points.  Nate Silver estimates perhaps two or three percentage points a year and, according to a leaked memo, Republican pollster Jan van Lohuizen finds support rising one point a year until 2009 and 5 points a year since.  Seventeen states passed constitutional amendments by the end of 2004, and 27 did so by 2006.  Even in 2008, when next three states passed amendments, support for SSM nationally was probably 8+ percentage points lower than it is today.

Opposition to SSM varies widely by state.  Seong Soo Oh and I concluded that support was 30 points higher in Massachusetts than in Mississippi in 2006.   Jeffrey Lax and Justin Phillips found a 40 point split between Massachusetts and Utah in 2009.  My most current estimates find nearly a 50 point division between Massachusetts and Mississippi.

Implications of Finding that Webcams Shift Locus of Electoral Fraud

Joshua TuckerMay 14, 2012

This previous Monkey cage guest post reported on new research from Fredrik Sjoberg suggesting that when Azerbaijani authorities installed webcams in some precincts in a recent election, it likely reduced overt forms of electoral fraud such as ballot stuffing while simultaneously increasing more subtle fraud such as falsification of precinct level results.

This result turns out to overlap very well with a speculation I made here at The Monkey Cage regarding Putin’s incentives for installing webcams in all of Russia’s polling places for the 2012 Russian presidential election. At the time I wrote:

An alternative explanation, however, might be that the Kremlin was seeking to avoid the mechanism by which fraud was revealed following the parliamentary elections, that is the use of individual of cell phones to capture visible fraud in polling places by polling workers who believed they were not being observed. If we assume that the motivation for local level officials to manipulate vote totals (e.g., to win the favor of the Kremlin) had not changed, then the webcams would provide a very powerful incentive for local officials to find other ways of manipulating results than the blatant forms of ballot stuffing that appeared online following the December parliamentary election.

2012 Greek Parliamentary Elections

Joshua TuckerMay 07, 2012

The following post-election report on the 2012 Greek Parliamentary Elections is provided by Harris Mylonas, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University and an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. (His pre-election report is available here.) His book, The Politics of Nation-Building: Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

This is a historic low for the two dominant parties ruling Greece since the collapse of the Junta in 1974, PASOK and Nea Demokratia.  Together they garnered only 33% of the vote. The result was hard to anticipate—especially the second place for the Coalition of Radical Left (SYRIZA), with 16,77%. Less unexpected was the electoral success of Independent Hellenes (10,6%) on the right and Golden Dawn on the far right (7%). A coalition government seems highly unlikely at the moment if one considers tonight’s statements by party leaders. It is interesting to note that more than 19% (!) of the vote was garnered by parties that did not ultimately make it to the parliament. These include: Popular Orthodox Rally-LAOS, Democratic Alliance, DRASI (Action), Dimiourgia Xana (Recreate Greece), Social Agreement (Koinoniki Symfonia), and the Green Party (Oikologoi Prasinoi). Finally, 35% of the Greek electorate—more than 3 million people—did not go to vote. These people may now be regretting their choice to not participate.

There are many messages that one can draw. People voted against the two-party system—that can no longer fulfill its side of the “patronage contract”—and against austerity measures. Yet, they voted—at least nominally—in favor of a European future. Another thing that is apparent is that the current electoral law produces odd and hardly representative results. For instance New Democracy received 2 percentage points more than the Coalition of Radical Left but this difference resulted in 56 more seats for the former party. Moreover, as a result of fragmentation of the party system, parties that did not make it to the parliament have collectively received a higher percentage than the first party, which receives 108 seats!

The European leaders are numb and will probably wait and see whether a government can be formed before they react to the result. This electoral result was not really expected and it increases the uncertainty surrounding the future of the Eurozone since a stable government in Greece seems unlikely. If we combine the Greek result with Hollande’s victory in France—and the expected friction in Franco-German relations—the markets will most likely react negatively and remain volatile until things clear out.

Survey Research Can Save Your Life!

Joshua TuckerApr 19, 2012

Literally. As NBC news reports:

Most people may not enjoy getting phone calls from pollsters, but one Manhattan woman’s life was saved by such a call Monday night.

Bobby Berlin was going into diabetic shock in her Upper West Side apartment when she received a call from a Marist College student conducting a public opinion poll about Mayor Bloomberg.

When Berlin answered the phone, the Marist student on the other end of the line sensed something wasn’t right.

“Something just sounded off,” he said. “It was just really heavy breathing and panting.”

He called in his supervisor Daniela Carter, who asked Berlin if she was OK.

Carter stayed on the line and called 911. Responders determined the address Berlin had given authorities was incorrect, but the FDNY was able to track down the right address using her phone number.

“The man from the ambulette said I would have died during the night,” Berlin said later.

Why did the Russian Government Install Webcams in Polling Stations?

Joshua TuckerMar 09, 2012

Continuing the discussion regarding the (perhaps) counter-intuitive decision of the Russian government to install webcams with freely available live-feeds in polling stations throughout the country in last Sunday’s presidential election, NYU Ph.D. candidate Andrew Little sends along the following comments:

It may seem puzzling that Russian government spent 300 million dollars installing webcams in every polling station for the presidential election this past week. As mentioned in a Monkey Cage post back before the election, I have a theoretical paper that seeks to explain why governments voluntarily invite international election monitors, which can easily be adapted to this question. In short, installing webcams can serve as a very visible mechanism to make certain types of fraud more visible/difficult. So, for a fixed election result, the government will seem more popular when there are monitors and webcams, while spending less effort to commit fraud.

The paper is here, below is a short summary of the logic of the formal model and how it applies to webcams.

Consider an election where everyone knows the incumbent leader will win. The incumbent still has an incentive to commit fraud if they want to seem as popular or strong as possible to some domestic audience. For Putin, this audience may be citizens more apt to protest if they think the election result shows his popularity is slipping. While Putin easily would have won a runoff round, dissident oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky wrote that “A second round would confirm that the change we all seek is on its way; that an evolutionary and not a revolutionary approach can be the way forward.” In Erik Herron’s article that he links to in his Monkey Cage post, he makes a similar claim that in the 2008 presidential election in Azerbaijan “the election of Aliyev for a second term was a fait accompli; the main question was whether or not he would be able to claim a mandate through high turnout.”

Committing fraud to seem more popular is not cheap: poll workers have to be bought off, voters have to be bused from one polling station to the next, etc. Further, a problem facing Putin and others in his situation is that the domestic audience they are trying to impress are aware that these activities are going on. They may over- or under-estimate how much fraud takes place, but for simplicity suppose they form a correct conjecture of how much cheating there is. If so, the incumbent regime spends lots of money and effort to cheat without convincing anyone that they are actually strong.

If it doesn’t work, why commit the fraud? In the model, this happens because how much fraud they commit is only partially observed. So, if they falsify fewer votes than their audience conjectures, they will seem weaker and more unpopular than they really are. Conversely, there is always a benefit to committing a bit more fraud than expected. Loosely speaking, for the equilibrium amount of fraud to be 15%, it must be the case that the marginal benefit of being seen as 1% more popular is equal to the marginal cost of going from falsifying 15% to 16% of the vote. This may not be true at 15%, but the model demonstrates some conditions under which there is some nonzero amount of fraud where the marginal benefit meets the marginal cost.

Now suppose there are lots of international monitors present and/or webcams in every polling station. This makes fraud more visible, and hence makes it more difficult to seem more popular by committing more fraud than expected. This leads to a lower equilibrium level of fraud—-and hence cost paid to commit the fraud—-but does not affect how popular and strong the leader ends up seeming. So, inviting monitoring, in the form of the OSCE or installing webcams, can unambiguously leave the leader better off.

As with any model, this likely does not tell the whole story of why webcams were used in Azerbaijan or Russia. As suggested by Josh, webcams may lead local officials to commit fraud in less embarrassing ways. In addition, having eyes on the polling station can help national party officials figure out which of the local party agents are particularly good at generating favorable results without cheating (or who is particularly good at cheating without getting caught!). Still, I think the effects described above at least render the decision to install webcams less surprising.

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