Publications

2024

1. Outcome Isn’t Everything: Electoral Consequences of Implementing or Withdrawing Unpopular Policies

   Simon Gren, and Elena Leuschner

   Political Behavior, May 2024

   Abs

   Incumbents often make unpopular policy decisions. But can they remedy their negative electoral consequences? We extend the wide literature concerning retrospective voting to the case of unpopular policies and examine whether voters reward a responsive withdrawal of an unpopular policy proposal or punish the disclosed policy intention despite the withdrawal. To test this, we use granular data on Swedish local election results from 2002 to 2018 and the case of widely unpopular school closure proposals, some of which were implemented and others not. We exploit within municipality variation in voting over time to causally estimate the consequences for incumbents in the neighborhood surrounding the schools. Our results confirm that even if a school remains open, voters punish the incumbent and consider the initial proposal as informative for their vote. Our findings have implications for the understanding of democratic accountability and which information voters take into account when casting their vote.

2. State Concessions and Protest Mobilization in Authoritarian Regimes

   Elena Leuschner, and Sebastian Hellmeier

   Comparative Political Studies, Jan 2024

   Abs

   Autocrats typically respond with coercion when citizens take to the streets demanding political reform. Sometimes, however, they tolerate mass protests and even give in to protesters’ demands. While the effect of coercion on mobilization is well-studied, we know less about the role of concession-making. We argue that accommodating demands is rarely an effective strategy in demobilizing opposition movements. Authoritarian rulers are usually neither willing nor able to fully address protesters’ dynamic demands, nor can they offer credible commitments. We conduct a quantitative analysis using multiple cross-national data sets to empirically assess the relationship between concessions by the government and subsequent mass mobilization. By analyzing protest events in temporal and spatial proximity, we estimate the effect of making concessions on protest mobilization at the subnational level in 18 autocracies from 1991 to 2012. Our results indicate that concessions are associated with a significant and substantive increase in subsequent protest activity.

3. Institutional design and biases in evaluation reports by international organizations

   Steffen Eckhard, Vytautas Jankauskas, and Elena Leuschner

   Public Administration Review, May 2024

   Abs

   Governments spend hundreds of millions on evaluations to assess the performance of public organizations. In this article, we scrutinize whether variation in the institutional design of evaluation systems leads to biases in evaluation findings. Biases may emerge because influence over evaluation processes could enable the bureaucracy to present its work in a more positive way. We study evaluation reports published by nine international organizations (IOs) of the United Nations system. We use deep learning to measure the share of positive assessments at the sentence level per evaluation report as a proxy for the positivity of evaluation results. Analyzing 1082 evaluation reports, we find that reports commissioned by operative units, as compared to central evaluation units, systematically contain more positive assessments. Theoretically, this link between institutional design choices and evaluation outcomes may explain why policymakers perceive similar tools for evidence‐based policymaking as functional in some organizations, and politicized in others.

4. Elections and autocratization

   Sebastian Hellmeier, and Elena Leuschner

   In The Routledge Handbook of Autocratization, May 2024

2023

1. The performance of international organizations: a new measure and dataset based on computational text analysis of evaluation reports

   Steffen Eckhard, Vytautas Jankauskas, Elena Leuschner, and 3 more authors

   The Review of International Organizations, Oct 2023

   Abs

   International organizations (IOs) of the United Nations (UN) system publish around 750 evaluation reports per year, offering insights on their performance across project, program, institutional, and thematic activities. So far, it was not feasible to extract quantitative performance measures from these text-based reports. Using deep learning, this article presents a novel text-based performance metric: We classify individual sentences as containing a negative, positive, or neutral assessment of the evaluated IO activity and then compute the share of positive sentences per report. Content validation yields that the measure adequately reflects the underlying concept of performance; convergent validation finds high correlation with human-provided performance scores by the World Bank; and construct validation shows that our measure has theoretically expected results. Based on this, we present a novel dataset with performance measures for 1,082 evaluated activities implemented by nine UN system IOs and discuss avenues for further research.