The autocratic roots of social distrust

This paper presents evidence that autocratic culture adversely affects social trust and political participation. We find that individuals whose ancestors migrated from countries with higher autocracy levels are less likely to trust others and to vote in presidential elections in the U.S. The impact of autocratic culture on trust can last for at least three generations while the impact on voting disappears after one generation. These impacts on trust and voting are also significant across Europe. We further access the robustness of our findings concerning selection into migration and other confounders such as home countries’ economic conditions, human capital stocks, and the strength of family ties.     

Rationalizing the Political Business Cycle: A Workhorse Model

An incumbent policymaker has incentives to expand the money supply prior to elections to stimulate the economy and thereby further her chances of re-election. In its original formulation, the Nordhaus political business cycle hypothesis relies on adaptive inflation expectations and naive retrospective voting.
This article develops a simple model of a political cycle in inflation and output growth, assuming rational inflation expectations and rational retrospective voting. Voter scrutiny of the incumbent's economic performance has policy and selection effects, with ambiguous consequences for welfare: the policymaker manipulates the money supply for electoral purposes, but an incumbent of above average quality is more likely to remain in office.     

转型期中国县级政府的客观治理绩效与政治信任——从“经济增长合法性”到“公共产品合法性”

善治是中国政府的执政要务,政治信任反映着公民对政府治理的认可和支持。文章利用2008年中国公民意识调查及政府统计数据,实证分析了政府治理绩效的主观和客观维度对政治信任的影响。研究发现,公民对政府在经济增长、民生福利、纯公共产品领域治理绩效的回顾性和前瞻性积极评价都正相关于政治信任;纯公共产品提供的主观评价对政治信任的影响大于经济增长和民生福利。县级政府的客观治理绩效对政治信任有重要影响,在高人均福利支出、低基尼系数和低失业率的县级单位,政治信任更高,而人均GDP反而微弱地负作用于政治信任。因此,尽管经济增长仍然是政治信任的重要来源,但民生福利和纯公共产品正赶上并超越经济增长,成为公民提供政治信任的新源泉。     

Migration and political institutions: Other side of the hill

The present paper examines the effect of migrant population on political institutions in their host societies using data from the local elections in Hong Kong. The share of the population that has migrated from mainland China is found to have a positive effect on the pro-government votes in local elections. This effect continues to exist after demographic characteristics are controlled. Further investigation suggests that the effect of migrant population on voting patterns varies across periods of migration to Hong Kong. These findings contribute to the published literature in two ways. First, they provide evidence that the effects of migration on political development are two-way. Migration not only influences the political institutions in migrants’ home countries, but also shapes the political institutions in their host regions. Second, they also pave the way for future research on why and how periods of migration influence migrant populations’ voting patterns in their host regions.     

Local governance and public goods provision in rural China

In developing countries, identifying the most effective community-level governance mode is a key issue in rural development; therefore, empirical evaluation of these different modes is desperately needed. Since the 1980s, tens of thousands of villages in rural China have held local government elections, providing a good opportunity to investigate the effect of democratization on the level of public goods provision. Using a recent village survey conducted over a significant period of time, this article compares two different governance modes. It finds that elections affect little on the size of revenue but significantly shift the distribution of taxation from individuals to enterprises if possible. However, privatization has made taxation or levies on rural enterprises more difficult. It also shows that elections and power sharing are conducive to improve the allocation of public expenditures.     

累积投票制与投资者保护

 基于近年来频发的个股崩盘现象,本文运用2013-2018年上市公司的数据,对大股东减持前的业绩预告信息进行分析,探究业绩预告、大股东减持与股价崩盘风险之间的内在联系,并针对不同市场环境和股份性质进行实证检验。结果表明,上市公司倾向于在减持前公布积极业绩预告。其在一定程度上提高股价崩盘现象的发生率,在熊市和民营公司中作用更加明显,消极业绩预告影响不显著。本文的研究丰富了信息披露与股价反应的相关文献,对投资者和监管部门做出决策具有一定的启示意义。     

Coordinated voting in sequential and simultaneous elections: some experimental evidence

This paper studies a situation wherein a set of voters choose between two alternatives in the presence of a payoff externality. Specifically, regardless of her intrinsic preference, a voter’s payoff is maximized should she vote for the alternative that garners a majority of the votes cast. Are votes coordinated on a single alternative? Using laboratory experiments, we examine voting patterns in sequential voting and simultaneous voting elections. Across both election types, we also vary the amount of information that an individual voter has regarding the intrinsic preferences of the other voters. Our main findings are as follows. In the “low” information treatment, sequential voting elections facilitate coordinated voting. However, in the “high” information treatment, voting patterns are not dependent on how the election is structured.     

Low-wage import competition and populist backlash: The case of Italy

This paper studies empirically the role of trade globalization in shifting the electoral base towards populism. We proxy the trade shock with swiftly rising import competition from China and compare voting patterns at the national parliamentary elections from 1992 to 2013 in about 8000 Italian municipalities differently exposed to the trade shock. We instrument import competition from China with Chinese export flows to other high-income countries and estimate the model in first differences. Our results indicate that trade globalization increases support for populist parties, as well as invalid votes and abstentionism. To rationalize these findings, we offer evidence that import competition worsens local labor market conditions – higher unemployment, lower income and durable consumption – and increases inequality. Finally, we point out that local public expenditure may play a role in mitigating the political consequences of the trade shock, arguably because it alleviates economic distress.     

Political budget cycles and voting within a federal country: The influence of political alignment

We study how distributive politics affects political budget cycles and voting within a federal country. Our model predicts not only that the president favors politically aligned governors with larger transfers, but also that voters favor gubernatorial candidates aligned with the expected presidential incumbent because larger transfers are expected in the future. These predictions are upheld by the data from Argentinean provinces during the 1984–2014 period. Our findings imply that political alignment can trump the selection effect of voting the most competent candidate. This can help explain in particular coattail effects when gubernatorial and presidential elections are concurrent.     

Bipolar Multicandidate Elections with Corruption

The goals of democratic competition are not only to implement a majority's preference on policy questions, but also to provide a deterrent against corrupt abuse of power by political leaders. We consider a simple model of multicandidate elections in which different electoral systems can be compared according to these two criteria. Among a wide class of single‐winner scoring rules, only approval voting is found to satisfy both effectiveness against corruption and majoritarianism for this model.     

Voting as a signaling device

In this paper, citizens vote in order to influence the election outcome and in order to signal their unobserved characteristics to others. The model is one of rational voting and generates the following predictions: (i) The paradox of not voting does not arise, because the benefit of voting does not vanish with population size. (ii) Turnout in elections is positively related to the importance of social interactions. (iii) Voting may exhibit bandwagon effects and small changes in the electoral incentives may generate large changes in turnout due to signaling effects. (iv) Signaling incentives increase the sensitivity of turnout to voting incentives in communities with low opportunity cost of social interaction, while the opposite is true for communities with high cost of social interaction. Therefore, the model predicts less volatile turnout for the latter type of communities.     

Does violence against civilians depress voter turnout? Evidence from Bosnia and Herzegovina

We investigate the effect of violence against civilians on voting. Using data from elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1990 and 2014 and exploiting variation in war intensity across municipalities, we estimate a negative impact on voter turnout. The effect is stable and persistent over twenty years after the war resolution. Our results are robust to the inclusion of pre- and post-war socioeconomic and political characteristics, to instrumental variable estimations based on terrain ruggedness, and to restricting the sample to voters who were too young to be selectively targeted. Distinguishing between civilian and military victims, we show that violence against civilians drives the negative effect. Next, we examine different mediating mechanisms including forced migration and demographic selection, ethnic composition, physical capital damage, post-conflict reconstruction, and labor market conditions. Our results support the hypothesis that violence affects voting through a “moral” dis-utility from showing allegiance to politics and the society by casting a vote. Using survey data, we show that respondents in more affected municipalities report lower generalized trust, trust in institutions, and voting.     

How does historical trauma affect political participation? Evidence from the send‐down movement in China

Taking advantage of China's send‐down movement as a natural experiment, we investigate how experiencing a political movement during adolescence affects political participation decades later. Using data from the China Family Panel Survey and the regression discontinuity design, we find that the send‐down experience significantly reduces individuals’ political participation, measured by their participation in community committee elections, time spent on community service activities and how much they care about public news. Further analysis suggests that the send‐down experience negatively affects political participation through poorer mental health and less trust in local government.     

Vox Populi,Vox Dei? Tacit collusion in politics

We study competition between political parties in repeated elections with probabilistic voting. This model entails multiple equilibria, and we focus on cases where political collusion occurs. When parties hold different opinions on some policy, they may take different policy positions that do not coincide with the median voter's preferred policy platform. In contrast, when parties have a mutual understanding on a particular policy, their policy positions may converge (on some dimension) but not to the median voter's preferred policy. That is to say, parties can tacitly collude with one another, despite political competition. Collusion may collapse, for instance, after the entry of a new political party. This model rationalizes patterns in survey data from Sweden, where politicians on different sides of the political spectrum take different positions on economic policy but similar positions on refugee intake—diverging from the average voter's position, but only until the entry of a populist party.     

Yardstick competition to tame the Leviathan

This papers analyzes the disciplining role of elections under asymmetric information, when voters can rely on relative performance evaluation to tame a Leviathan. When elections are held in different regions, voters are able to reduce political rents below the Leviathan level by retrospective voting strategies. The paper compares a multi-candidate model with a two-party system with either independent or coordinated policies in the various jurisdictions. In general, voters prefer the multi-candidate system. However, the disciplining ability of voters under the two-party system is strengthened if each party has a uniform leadership that determines policies in all regions.     

Constitutional Implications of Electoral Assumptions

The paper discusses the implications of three models of elections (the median voter model, the proportional representation model, and the probabilistic voting model) on three functions of constitutional rules (constraining the majority of the people, monitoring political and bureaucratic agents, and keeping separate the levels of constitutional rules and of ordinary politics).     

公司治理投票机制优化设计初探

借鉴一般性政治投票机制,并结合公司治理目的及其利益主体特性,提出两种改进公司治理投票机制的方案——可转移的累积投票和贮存式投票,并对这两种改进方案的积极意义进行评估和分析。最后,对公司治理投票机制优化设计的后续研究问题进行了展望。     

China’s rural institutions and governance since the beginning of the rural reform

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at how China governs its vast rural territories. The structure of rural governance relies not only on the extent and form of the state’s authority, but also on the principal–agent relationship between the state and local stakeholders, as well as the role of the informal institutional arrangements that serve as the foundation for rural governance. China’s 40 years of reform and opening have led to the transformation of rural China into urban and rural China. The rules and order of informal institutions have evolved and changed significantly, and the cost-benefit structure of formal state governance has been amended. The appropriate rural governance system for village transformation improves the performance of the country’s direct governance and the entrustment–agent system for village governance. Further, the rural governance system balances formal and informal institutions to achieve an effective institutional arrangement.     

Voting in small networks with cross-pressure

We present a model of participation in elections in small networks, in which citizens suffer from cross-pressures if voting against the alternative preferred by some of their social contacts. We analyze how the existence of cross-pressures may shape voting decisions, and so, political outcomes; and how parties may exploit this effect to their interest. We characterize the strong perfect equilibria of the game and show that, in equilibrium, the social network determines which party wins the election. We also show that to dispose of the citizens better connected in the network with the other faction is not a guarantee to win the election.      

Searching for the Downsian Voter with a Simple Structural Model

Studies of voter turnout consistently find that turnout responds to the closeness of the election, yet it is widely claimed that the probability of casting the deciding vote is too minute to be of consequence. We provide evidence on this puzzle by deriving a structural rational voting model in the form of a relatively simple regression equation, and fitting it to data from a large sample of US congressional elections.