Exploiting The Coattail Effect: Ethical Considerations

Causal identification of coattail effects is challenging because popularity shocks typically affect parties in both concurrent elections. In this article i estimate the magnitude of such coattail effects from governors onto other concurrently elected statewide executive officers using a unique dataset of county election returns for all statewide executive office elections in the united states from 1987 to 2010. In this paper, we start by describing the empirical difficulties involved in consistently estimating coattail effects.

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We then exploit the unique characteristics of the mexican electoral system to recover what we believe to be an unbiased estimate of the magnitude of coattail effects from municipal to state legislative elections. Although the presidential coattail effect has been an object of frequent study, the question of whether popular congressional candidates boost vote shares in return for their parties presidential candidates remains unexplored. American political science review 107 (4): 10. 1017/s0003055413000439. crossref google scholar

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Causal identification of coattail effects is challenging because popularity shocks typically affect parties in both concurrent elections.

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