Public opinion surveys suggest rising levels of distrust in parties and anti-elite preferences among voters around the globe. In this context, challengers to the political establishment have emerged and gained prominence by mobilizing voters who have become skeptical of existing political institutions and parties. In my dissertation, I develop a theory about the different strategies adopted by outsider candidates and the determinants of their electoral success. I argue that when entering electoral races, these candidates find it attractive to mobilize voters on the basis of valence issues, which are defined as those on which there is some consensus among voters. In particular, appeals to anti-corruption and anti-establishment sentiment allow candidates to reach a broad range of voters across the policy space. However, the extent to which candidates can credibly mobilize voters on such issues depends on the candidate and the contextual characteristics in which the election takes place. I show that disenchanted voters tend to be evenly distributed across the policy space and are also the least likely to turn out to vote. In doing so, I draw particular attention to how the institutional and informational environments shape one of the major hurdles that outsider candidates face when appealing to disenchanted voters: how to bring them to the voting booth.
In the first empirical chapter, I posit that certain institutional arrangements may be more conducive to the electoral success of anti-establishment candidates. Specifically, I argue that compulsory voting may boost anti-establishment candidates by encouraging turnout among voters who would have otherwise abstained. At the voting booth, these voters are more likely to vote for candidates who align with their anti-establishment sentiment. I test this theory in the context of Brazil’s 2018 presidential election, leveraging age thresholds that make voting compulsory at the individual level as well as randomized variation in the proportion of compulsory voters across voting booths. I demonstrate that compulsory voting led to a sizable increase in electoral support for anti-establishment presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. My findings underscore how critical turnout is for the prospects of anti-establishment candidates, as well as the unexpected effect of an institution often thought to bolster the quality of democracy.
Next, testing another part of my theory, I study the effect of shifts in the salience of corruption on outsider candidates' strategies. While corruption revelations have been shown to influence citizens' voting, less is known about how candidates take advantage of the heightened opportunity to campaign on this issue and their decision to enter the electoral race. Underpinning the link between these salience shocks and outsider entrance lies the assumption that these candidates enjoy a comparative advantage when campaigning on valence issues, such as corruption. Therefore, they should be more likely to rely on anti-corruption appeals when running for office. I demonstrate that outsider candidates are more likely to campaign on this (what I show to be) valence issue. To do so, I construct a rich database of corpora on over 50,000 mayoral candidates' manifestos, which I process to compute measures of anti-corruption leaning at the candidate level. Then, I test whether outsider candidates running in the municipalities exposed to those revelations are more likely to take advantage of shifts in the salience of corruption. I explore this using the yearly randomized audits conducted by the federal government in Brazil, whereby I leverage the revelation of corruption in mayoral accounts in municipalities. The evidence shows that outsiders are more likely to enter mayoral races in places exposed to shocks that increase voters' awareness of corruption.
Finally, I also assess how shifts in voters' awareness of valence issues can not only influence voters but also candidates' strategies. In many weakly institutionalized democracies, citizens' disregard of existing parties---and even of democratic institutions, such as elections---is largely motivated by rampant corruption and the pervasiveness of clientelism, both of which can hinder political accountability. Thus, in the third empirical chapter, co-authored with Mateo Montenegro, I use a large-scale field experiment to assess the effects of encouraging citizens to report electoral irregularities through an existing website hosted by a well-known NGO using a Facebook ad campaign. We also randomized the delivery of letters to the universe of mayoral candidates in the selected municipalities, informing some mayors about our citizen ad campaign. As expected, we find that the ads significantly increased the number of reports made during the 2019 mayoral elections. Interestingly, they also produced a large increase in the vote share of candidates perceived to be less corrupt and away from those perceived to be more corrupt. On the supply side, we show that the municipalities where candidates were informed about the campaign were less likely to report electoral misdeeds.
The three chapters of this dissertation delve into the conditions under which political outsiders gain prominence and break through the barriers they face when entering the electoral competition. In doing so, each of these essays sheds light on how contextual and institutional settings are more or less favorable to the rise of political outsiders. The broader implications of this dissertation contribute to advancing our understanding of the threats of democratic backsliding.
