Government on the brink: the effects of political crisis on elites and voters

Cheng Matsuno, Vanessa (2024) Government on the brink: the effects of political crisis on elites and voters. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

My PhD journey was filled with inspiring experiences that have helped me mature as a person, for which I will be eternally grateful. However, along the way and as part of this journey, I had to say goodbye to a number of essential people in my life. I would like to pay tribute to their lives with this dissertation. My father, Jaime, along with my grandmother Mami, Uncle Toto, and Aunt Tere, are in my heart. Before anything else, I would like to thank my supervisors for their invaluable support throughout my doctoral journey. I am truly fortunate to have Dr Florian Foos as my first supervisor. More significantly, I consider him my mentor in this academic journey that we have chosen as our career. I want to thank him in particular for being such an exemplary model of integrity, rigour, and kindness. This dissertation would not have been possible without his unwavering support and intellectual debate. Dr Foos always encouraged me to strive for excellence. I am also grateful for his guidance in developing different aspects of my character as an academic. He consistently encouraged me to meet and discuss with numerous visiting scholars and guest speakers, experiences that I greatly appreciate and value. I hope we will continue collaborating in the future. I will never be able to thank Florian enough. I am also incredibly grateful to Professor Rafael Hortala-Vallve, my second supervisor. I am grateful to Professor Hortala-Vallve for always encouraging me to aspire for excellence as an academic researcher. He frequently challenged me to think carefully about the bigger questions that I wanted to answer and provided me with novel insights that I had not considered. I am especially grateful for his big-picture perspective, which was invaluable whenever I got entangled in the details. I would like to thank Professor Peter John and Dr Daniel Berliner for believing in me and inviting me as a co-author from the beginning. Furthermore, I would like to cement a political legacy using a novel semi-structured and nationally representative survey of 3,594 bureaucrats. Finally, the third paper looks at how voters respond to heightened political uncertainty and whether they hold politicians accountable. It leverages transnational corruption scandals, and finds that voters punish transnational corruption cases more severely than domestic ones through a country-based discrimination channel. In conclusion, this dissertation provides novel evidence regarding the use of public resources by politicians to safeguard their legacy during times of crisis or heightened political uncertainty induced by constitutional rules. Conversely, it demonstrates under which conditions the electorate holds elected politicians accountable for their involvement in political scandals.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Vanessa Cheng Matsuno
Library of Congress subject classification:	J Political Science > JA Political science (General) J Political Science > JF Political institutions (General)
Sets:	Departments > Government
Supervisor:	Foos, Florian and Hortala-Vallve, Rafael
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4723

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