Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. The two-week OxTalks freeze period starts on Monday 2nd March. During this time, there will be no facility to publish or edit events. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period. Once Oxford Events launches, you will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
Electoral accountability relies, in part, on voters willingness to cross party lines to select a competent opposition politician. Knowing when voters will cross party lines is essential for democratic representation. I argue that two critical constituency-level factors will jointly influence the likelihood that a voter will vote for an opponent: the partisan geography and the level of electoral competition. Regarding the first, voters have an incentive to vote for opponents in partisan non-segregated districts because, in these settings, politicians cannot channel goods to home areas. Concerning the second, I suggest that voters only have an incentive to vote for opponents when this behavior is pivotal, that is when there is a high level of competition.
In other electoral settings, partisans have minimal incentive to vote for opponents because either their vote is not essential or they do not expect to benefit from the goods that she will provide (or both). I find support for my argument using data from a conjoint experiment alongside survey responses of citizens (N=2,020) located in a stratified, representative sample of electoral districts in Ghana.
