Greta Schenke

How do electoral rules shape legislators' parliamentary speechmaking? This paper studies how a change of legislators' mandate type in a mixed-member (MM) electoral system – from election through proportional representation (PR) to winning in single-member districts (SMDs) and vice versa – affects parliamentary speech. I test whether MPs respond to divergent incentives leading to a “mandate divide” or rather tailor their speeches to benefit from “contamination” between electoral tiers, catering to both local voters and co-partisans. Using data on mandate switches of dual candidates in the German Bundestag between 1990 and 2021, I examine effects on dissent, linguistic complexity, and the use of emotional language. The results of a staggered difference-in-differences design indicate that legislators diverge in using positive and negative emotional appeals despite contamination. These findings suggest that, despite incentives to compete on both electoral tiers, representatives respond to a distinct electoral connection depending on who conferred their mandate.

What explains institutional trust in democratic institutions in Mongolia? Institutional trust facilitates establishing democratic institutions in post-transition countries and has been accounted for by institutional performance and social capital approaches in previous research. We argue that particularly in post-transition systems, partisanship, the evaluation of corruption and the quality of democracy also impacts institutional trust. To contribute to the study of political culture in Mongolia, the only Asian post-communist country to have developed towards democracy, we investigate determinants of citizens' trust in the president, parliament, and judiciary. To test the various explanatory factors of trust, we run ordered logit models using Asian Barometer data from 2014. The results suggest that, apart from institutional and social capital factors, partisanship strongly influences trust in the president and courts. This implies that Mongolians' perceptions of the justice system are informed by political preference, which partially originates in attempts to seize courts' autonomy.