Voting for Democracy: Campaign Effects in Chiles Democratic Transition

In a global context in which authoritarian regimes often hold elections, defeating dictators at the polls can play a key role in transitions to democracy. When the opposition is allowed to campaign for votes in such elections, there are strong reasons to believe that its efforts will be more persuasive than those of the authoritarian incumbent. This article examines the effect of televised campaign advertising on vote choice in the 1988 plebiscite that inaugurated Chile’s transition to democracy. Using matching to analyze postelectoral survey data, it shows that the advertising of the opposition’s no campaign made Chileans more likely to vote against dictator Augusto Pinochet, whereas the advertising of the government’s yes campaign had no discernible effect. These findings suggest that the no campaign played an important causal role in the change of political regime. T predominant form of nondemocratic rule in the modern world is electoral authoritarianism, a regime type in which autocrats submit to the polls while ensuring that the rules of the game are rigged in their favor. Such contests may be fought on an unlevel playing field, but they are also distinct from sham elections in which dictators run unopposed and have their re-election rubber-stamped (Levitsky and Way 2010). Incumbents and opposition candidates both campaign for votes in authoritarian elections, and sometimes the opposition scores a surprising victory, eventually leading to a democratic transition. The effects of these campaigns on voting behavior are therefore a question of great substantive as well as theoretical importance. Can an opposition campaign, despite the uphill battles it faces, persuade citizens to vote for democracy? Despite their potential importance, campaigns and campaign effects have received little attention in the study of electoral authoritarianism and transitions to democracy. Even the recent literature on “democratization by elections” (Lindberg 2009) typically assumes that authoritarian incumbents lose elections because a long-hostile public has been waiting to throw them out. Yet dictators might be defeated partly because an opposition campaign persuades initially apathetic or ambivalent voters to take a chance on democratization. Whether the process ends with a dictator conceding defeat or attempting to steal the election and being driven from power by mass protests, such transitions might never have gotten underway if not for an effective campaign. © 2015 University of Miami DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-2456.2015.00267.x Taylor C. Boas is an assistant professor of political science at Boston University.