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A banana republic? The effects of inconsistencies in the counting of votes on voting behavior

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Abstract

We examine whether local inconsistencies in the counting of votes influence voting behavior. We exploit the case of the second ballot of the 2016 presidential election in Austria. The ballot needed to be repeated because postal votes were counted carelessly in individual electoral districts (“scandal districts”). We use a difference-in-differences approach comparing election outcomes from the regular and the repeated round. The results do not show that voter turnout and postal voting declined significantly in scandal districts. Quite the contrary, voter turnout and postal voting increased slightly by about 1 percentage point in scandal districts compared to non-scandal districts. Postal votes in scandal districts also were counted with some greater care in the repeated ballot. We employ micro-level survey data indicating that voters in scandal districts blamed the federal constitutional court for ordering a second election, but did not seem to blame local authorities.

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Notes

  1. Section 6.3 includes survey information on voters’ attitudes toward the repeated elections and the scandal.

  2. See, e.g., the comment of Anneliese Rohrer in the newspaper Die Presse, 18 June 2016, or the interview with Chancellor Christian Kern in OE24.at, 11 June 2016, http://www.oe24.at/oesterreich/politik/Christian-Kern-Wir-haben-eine-Chance-vergeben/239273674.

  3. Cantú (2014) elaborates on the extent rather than on the consequences of electoral manipulation in the counting of votes in Mexico.

  4. See Puglisi and Snyder (2011) on newspaper coverage of political scandals.

  5. See Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 7 February 2016, “Wenigstens der österreichische Wein taugt noch was”.

  6. Inferences do not change when we exclude those districts from the control group that were subject to constitutional court summons, but electoral inconsistencies were not confirmed (n = 6).

  7. On voter turnout and electoral institutions in the Austrian states. see, for example, Gaebler et al. (2017) and Potrafke and Roesel (2018).

  8. See Der Standard, 14 July 2016, http://derstandard.at/2000041085212/Disziplinarstellen-ermitteln-gegen-Beamte.

  9. Vienna accounts for 23 of Austria’s 117 electoral districts.

  10. See the 1 July 2016 press release of the Austrian constitutional court: “In the districts of Innsbruck-Land, Südoststeiermark, Stadt Villach, Villach-Land, Schwaz, Wien-Umgebung, Hermagor, Wolfsberg, Freistadt, Bregenz, Kufstein, Graz-Umgebung, Leibnitz and Reutte the rules governing the implementation of the postal voting system were not complied with…. In the districts of Kitzbühel, Landeck, Hollabrunn, Liezen, Gänserndorf and Völkermarkt the system of postal voting was implemented in accordance with the rules.”

  11. We have no information on treatment intensity (e.g., number of affected votes).

  12. In an earlier working paper version, we use Huber-White sandwich standard errors robust to heteroscedasticity (Huber 1967; White 1980). The treatment effects do not turn out to be significant when we use robust standard errors and do not include district fixed effects. We return to this issue in Sect. 5.3.

  13. We divide all variables by 100 making sure that the variables assume values between 0 and 1.

  14. We used the same specification in an earlier version of this paper. See footnote 12.

  15. It is worth noting that we cannot address a global decline in trust.

  16. See, for example, Die Presse, „Wahlanfechtung: ‚Vorwürfe zusammengebrochen‘“, 26 June 2016, http://diepresse.com/home/politik/innenpolitik/5035340/Wahlanfechtung_Vorwuerfe-zusammengebrochen.

  17. We are grateful to an anonymous referee who suggested this explanation.

  18. Trust also has been shown to be correlated with, for example, income equality and education (Knack and Keefer 1997). On social trust—as measured by the degree to which people believe that strangers can be trusted—and governance, see Bjørnskov (2010): social trust was positively associated with economic-judicial governance, but has not been shown to be associated with electoral institutions.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the editors William F. Shughart II and Keith Dougherty, as well as Clemens Fuest, Monika Koeppl-Turyna, Andreas Steinmayr, Kaspar Wüthrich, the participants of seminar at the Technische Universität Dresden and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. We also thank Christina Matzka for sharing the micro-level survey data and Lisa Giani-Contini for proof-reading. Felix Roesel gratefully acknowledges DFG funding (Grant Number 400857762). A previous version of this paper circulated as CESifo Working Paper 6254 under the title “A Banana Republic? Trust in Electoral Institutions in Western Democracies—Evidence from a Presidential Election in Austria”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ifo Institute, ifo Center for Public Finance and Political Economy, Poschingerstrasse 5, 81679, Munich, Germany

    Niklas Potrafke

  2. University of Munich, Munich, Germany

    Niklas Potrafke

  3. ifo Institute, Dresden Branch, Einsteinstrasse 3, 01069, Dresden, Germany

    Felix Roesel

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  1. Niklas Potrafke
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  2. Felix Roesel
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Correspondence to Felix Roesel.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 9, 10, 11 and Fig. 3.

Fig. 3
figure 3

Trends of outcome variables (Vienna excluded). Notes The figure shows election outcomes of districts (Vienna excluded) which were subject to constitutional court summons (upper panel, n = 20), and districts where inconsistencies were confirmed (lower panel, n = 14). Vertical lines represent the timing of the scandal. Total number of districts: 94. 1998, 2004, 2010, 2016 (two rounds): Presidential elections. 1994, 1995, 1999, 2002, 2006, 2008, 2013: Parliamentary elections

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Table 9 Variation in control-treatment group definition
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Table 10 Balancedness of micro data
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Table 11 Changes in voting decision (Probit estimation—extended output)
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Potrafke, N., Roesel, F. A banana republic? The effects of inconsistencies in the counting of votes on voting behavior. Public Choice 178, 231–265 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-018-00626-8

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