Professor Pons studies questions in political economy and development with the goal of understanding how democratic systems function, and how they can be improved.
He decomposes the electoral cycle into four essential steps: the factors affecting voter participation, those shaping preferences, the representativeness of results, and the effects of election outcomes on policies and on countries’ economic performance. While his individual papers focus on just one or two of these steps at a time, his research as a whole seeks to paint a fresh and articulated picture of how democracy works, from the inputs of voter decisions to the output of elections.
The first strand of his research seeks to help solve the puzzle of voter abstention by identifying its causes and searching for remedies. Professor Pons and two friends convinced the incumbent president of the region including Paris to run an experiment during his 2010 bid for reelection. They organized a door-to-door effort and trained activists from the Socialist Party in exchange for being allowed to randomly select the addresses covered. The resulting study proved that voter outreach methods commonly used in the U.S. could also be effective in other countries. Professor Pons has shown in subsequent work that their effects often come from reducing voting costs, such as those created by voter registration requirements.
The second strand of his research asks how we form our vote choices and preferences. In 2012, he had the opportunity to work as one of the three national coordinators of François Hollande’s field campaign for president of France. Together with the same two friends, he organized a total of 80,000 canvassers who knocked on five million doors across all France. He showed that the door-to-door visits won over a large fraction of voters and significantly contributed to Hollande’s victory. In two later projects, he zoomed out: he used survey data from 10 countries since 1952, then data covering the universe of U.S. voters, to assess the overall effects of all campaign information (not just a unique contact) and of all contextual factors (not just campaigns).
The third strand of his research explores two challenges to fair and representative electoral outcomes: failed coordination and imbalance. The fact that failed coordination within one side of the political spectrum can generate an undesirable outcome was clear in the 2002 French presidential election: Jospin was eliminated in the first round though left-wing candidates obtained far more votes in total than far-right ones. Another example is the 2000 U.S. presidential election, in which the 3% of votes earned by third-party candidate Ralph Nader in Florida was sufficient to sway the entire election in favor of George W. Bush. Professor Pons has estimated how frequent such electoral failures are and identified devices facilitating the coordination of voters as well as parties. Imbalance across sides may further bias the democratic process and tilt the result towards the incumbent. He has tested whether coordination failures tend to be larger on one side or the other and whether campaign finance regulations help level the playing field between incumbents and their challengers. Identifying the conditions that make incumbents’ defeat possible is essential: as Przeworski (1991) observed, what differentiates democracy from autocracy is, ultimately, that it is “a system in which parties lose elections.”
A fourth strand of research looks at the consequences of elections bringing a new party to power. One might worry that democratic power transitions open periods of uncertainty and instability. However, using data on all presidential and parliamentary elections in the world since 1945, Professor Pons finds that electoral turnovers tend to improve countries’ economic indicators as well as their performance on many other dimensions. Interestingly, these effects are weaker when internal and external constraints limit leaders’ ability to enact change. He has complemented this research with case studies in Spain, Bolivia and Zambia that explore the different ways in which globalization and foreign powers influence and constrain domestic policymaking.
