Rewards from public office and the selection of politicians by parties

We investigate the relationship between the quality of politicians, defined in terms of their competence (skills), and rewards from public office in a game between parties and citizens in which parties play a crucial role in the selection of politicians. Parties shape the selection of politicians by manipulating information about the quality of their candidates. An increase in the rewards from public offices leads to two opposing effects on the average quality of politicians. The first is a selection effect, whereby more skilled citizens enter politics, leading to an increase in average quality. The second is a manipulation effect, as parties have the incentive to further manipulate information to increase the probability of election for their unskilled candidates, from whom they can extract higher rents in the form of service duties. We find that the second effect dominates when (i) parties’ costs of manipulating information are sufficiently low; (ii) even in the absence of manipulation, the quality of information available to citizens about candidates is sufficiently poor; and (iii) the net gains from becoming a politician for unskilled citizens are sufficiently larger than those for skilled citizens. These findings provide a rationale for the ambiguous sign of the empirical relationship between the quality and pay of politicians.     

Masculinity cues,perceptions of politician attributes,and political behavior*

How are masculine‐looking politicians perceived by voters? Are these judgments accurate? We asked Australian survey participants to rate images of unknown‐to‐them Swiss politicians. We find that politicians with prominent markers of masculinity (including facial hair, baldness, and higher facial width‐to‐height ratio) are perceived as less honest and competent. To determine whether these perceptions correlate with political behavior, we exploit two unique features of Swiss politics. First, to check for politician–voter congruence, we match each politician's voting record to that of their constituents on identically worded legislative proposals. We find that bearded politicians are less likely to behave according to constituents' preferences. Second, by exploiting the mandatory disclosure of lobby group affiliations, we show that bearded politicians are less likely to be captured by interest groups. Our results suggest that more masculine‐looking politicians are recognized by both voters and lobby groups as less amenable to being controlled.     

Moonlighting politicians

In most modern democracies elected officials can work in the private sector while appointed in parliament. We show that when the political and market sectors are not mutually exclusive, a trade-off arises between the quality of elected officials and the time they devote to political life. If high-ability citizens can keep earning money outside of parliament, they will be more likely to run for election; for the same reason, they will also be more likely to shirk once elected. These predictions are confronted with a dataset about members of the Italian Parliament from 1996 to 2006. The empirical evidence shows that bad but dedicated politicians come along with good but not fully committed politicians. There is in fact a non-negligible fraction of citizens with remarkably high pre-election income who are appointed in parliament. These citizens are those who gain relatively more from being elected in terms of outside income. At the same time, they are less committed to the parliamentary activity in terms of voting attendance.     

The size and scope of government:: Comparative politics with rational politicians

We try to demonstrate how economists may engage in research on comparative politics, relating the size and composition of government spending to the political system. A Downsian model of electoral competition and forward-looking voting indicates that majoritarian – as opposed to proportional – elections increase competition between parties by focusing it into some key marginal districts. This leads to less public goods, less rents for politicians, more redistribution and larger government. A model of legislative bargaining and backward-looking voting indicates that presidential – as opposed to parliamentary – regimes increase competition between both politicians and voters. This leads to less public goods, less rents for politicians, less redistribution, and smaller government. We confront these predictions with cross-country data from around 1990, controlling for economic and social determinants of government spending. We find strong and robust support for the prediction that the size of government is smaller under presidential regimes, and weaker support for the prediction that majoritarian elections are associated with less public goods.     

Political Motivations

Are politicians motivated by policy outcomes or by the perks of office? To shed light on this important question, I develop a simple model of two candidate electoral competitions in which candidates may be either office or policy motivated . In a second departure from standard formulations, the model incorporates both campaign and post-election behaviour of candidates. In this environment, I find that office-motivated candidates are favoured in electoral competition but that their advantage is limited by the electoral mechanism itself and policy-motivated candidates win a significant fraction of elections. More importantly, I show that the competitive interaction among candidates of different motivations affects the incentives of all candidates—both office and policy motivated—and that this competition affects policy outcomes. I also extend the model to explore the decision of citizens to enter politics and show that in all equilibria policy-motivated citizens compose a majority of the candidate pool.     

Political objectives and privatization decisions

In early Romanian privatization a group of firms was explicitly banned from privatization. We use this institutional feature to test which factors contributed to the selection of firms for long‐term state ownership, and find that politicians sheltered from privatization large and inefficient firms which paid low wages and had high overdue payments. These results are consistent with minimization of employment losses, even if efficiency enhancement of privatization had to be sacrificed. We conjecture that the unfavourable economic conditions bringing large employment losses motivated Romanian politicians to fear the possible negative employment effects of privatization.     

Conservative Politicians and Voting on Same‐sex Marriage

We examine whether conservative politicians are less likely to support same‐sex marriage when they run for office in safe rather than in contested districts using new data based on a roll‐call vote in the national German parliament. The results show that the margin of the majority for the incumbent in the previous election was a strong predictor for supporting same‐sex marriage. When the majority increased by a 1 percentage point, the likelihood of voting in favour of same‐sex marriage decreased by around 1.3 percentage points. We conjecture that politicians are election‐motivated – even when submitting roll‐call votes on a matter of conscience.     

SCHOOL CHOICE AND STUDENT SORTING: EVIDENCE FROM ADACHI WARD IN JAPAN*

We examine whether the school choice programme of public junior high schools in Adachi ward has caused student sorting and has thus increased the differences in scores between the schools. We find that students are sorted in the sense that the students living in the school attendance areas where there is a higher proportion of high‐status occupations are more likely to select private schools even after the introduction of the school choice programme, or they select public schools with higher scores. Adachi's average scores relative to the Tokyo average have improved, while the between school differences in scores have not expanded.     

To Segregate or to Integrate: Education Politics and Democracy

How is the quality of public education affected by the presence of private schools for the rich? Theory and evidence suggest that the link depends crucially on the political system. We develop a theory that integrates private education and fertility decisions with voting on public schooling expenditures. We find that the presence of a large private education sector benefits public schools in a broad-based democracy where politicians are responsive to low-income families but crowds out public education spending in a society that is politically dominated by the rich. The main predictions of the theory are consistent with state-level data and micro data from the U.S. as well as cross-country evidence from the Programme for International Student Assessment study.     

Political salaries,electoral selection and the incumbency advantage: Evidence from a wage reform

Incumbents tend to gain solid electoral advantage in many voting systems. In this study, we examine the relationship between salaries prescribed to politicians and the incumbency advantage by exploiting a political wage reform and data from close elections in a proportional semi-open list system in the Czech Republic. We show that higher salaries reduce the average incumbency advantage, as they increase the probability to run again for previously non-elected candidates much more than for incumbents. Still, we find that higher wages improve candidate selection, especially by encouraging repeated candidacy from university-educated incumbents. Higher wages also improve relative positions of re-running incumbents on candidate lists compared to previously non-elected re-running candidates. Our results overall suggest that incumbency per se changes the relationship between political wages and candidate selection.     

PROXIMITY AND VOTING FOR PROFESSIONAL SPORTING STADIUMS: THE PATTERN OF SUPPORT FOR THE SEAHAWK STADIUM REFERENDUM

This paper evaluates voting behavior on the Seahawk Stadium referendum in the State of Washington. For our empirical strategy, we implement both the linear probability model and a group logit model, which gives greater weight to voting areas with greater number of votes cast. We find that voting support was lowest among those living closest to the proposed stadium site, while voting support was highest among those within “easy access” of the stadium. This nonlinear distance effect differs from the typical “proximity” effect found in most professional sporting stadiums in the United States; however, it is consistent with a referendum‐voting outcome for a professional soccer stadium in Germany and public projects such as national forests. (JEL R53, H71, L83)     

Pro-social motivation,effort and the call to public service

We investigate the interaction of pro-social motivation and wages in pro-social organizations with a novel subject pool, 1700 students destined for the private and public sectors in Indonesia, using a measure of pro-social motivation that exactly matches the mission of the organization. Three novel conclusions emerge. Consistent with a common, but untested, assumption in the theoretical literature, workers with greater pro-social motivation exert higher real effort. However, high pay attracts less pro-socially motivated individuals. Furthermore, we also test whether a real world pro-social organization (the Indonesian Ministry of Finance) attracts pro-socially motivated workers. We find that prospective entrants into the Indonesian Ministry of Finance exhibit higher levels of pro-social motivation than a comparable sample of general workers.     

Committees and Special Interests

This paper studies the aggregation of decentralized information in committees under open and closed voting in the presence of external influence. We show that under one‐sided influence decision quality may be nonmonotonic in the committee members' ability. Furthermore, restricting the information of interest groups may reduce the bias toward special interest politics. This result holds in a single and in a common agency setting, where opposing interest groups' activities do not cancel out in equilibrium. Moreover, there are cases where benefits from increasing the number of decision makers can only be reaped if the committee's sessions are not public.     

A Preference-Utilitarian Foundation for the Generality Principle

The generality principle advocated by Buchanan and Congleton (1998), stating that only legislation which treats all citizens equally as citizens is permissible, is normally motivated on contractarian grounds. It is shown that the generality principle can also be motivated on preference-utilitarian grounds. This is in line with Hayek (1960), who defends the rule of law by reference to consequentialist considerations. Using Hare's (1981) terminology, on a critical level we realize that everyday political decisionmaking tends to generate rash and non-general outcomes and that a rule limiting the action space of politicians can induce a higher degree of total preference satisfaction.     

A vote at the opera? The political economy of public theaters and orchestras in the German states

Policymakers generally have powerful incentives to attract votes by strategically manipulating public policies, for instance by increasing public spending during election periods or by implementing ideologically valued policies for their electoral base. At first sight, public theaters and orchestras appear an unlikely domain for such tactics. Highbrow culture is elitist and provides few jobs to artists as voters (patronage). However, we argue that policymakers indirectly target a larger highbrow culture-consuming voting public, as this public is more likely to go voting, to actively engage in politics, and to influence other voters' political behavior through political and sociological multiplier effects. We find evidence of such manipulation tactics in Germany, 1993–2010. Artist numbers increase during state-level, and even more during municipal-level, election years (electioneering). More tentatively, leftwing party power increases cultural subsidies and jobs in Eastern states.     

Fostering civil society to build institutionsWhy and when1

We revisit the ubiquitous claim that aiding civil society improves institutional outcomes. In our model, a vibrant civil society initiates public debate in a reform process otherwise dominated by partisan interest groups and politicians. Civil society involvement can alleviate or aggravate adverse selection problems that arise because interest groups are better informed about reform consequences than politicians. Since aid increases the cost to the politician of excluding civil society, it affects institution building. We show analytically, and illustrate empirically, that the welfare implications of fostering civil society critically depend on the specifics of local politics, thereby casting new light on the experience of civil society aid in transition and developing countries.     

Private investment with social benefits under uncertainty: The dark side of public financing

We develop a game‐theoretic model of private–public contribution to a long‐term project with sequential actions and moral hazard. A private agent is one who is in charge of both the financial contribution and the management effort, these two actions entailing private costs and uncertain ex‐post private and social benefits. A public agent is one who decides the amount of public funding to this quasi‐public good, knowing that the size and the probability of attaining a surplus ex post depend on the private agent's effort. We consider four public‐funding scenarios: benefit‐sharing versus cost‐sharing crossed with ex‐ante versus ex‐interim government intervention. We test our theoretical predictions by means of an experiment that confirms the main result of the model: Cost‐sharing public intervention is more effective than benefit‐sharing in boosting private financial contribution to the project. Furthermore, when public intervention comes after private contribution ( ex‐interim government intervention), both public‐funding scenarios have a negative impact on the private management effort. In our model, the latter result is explained by the private agent's high degree of risk aversion. These results have policy implications for strategic investments with long‐term social consequences. In deciding the optimal timing and method of the contribution, governments should also consider the indirect effects on agents’ long‐term management efforts.     

A RETROSPECTIVE VOTING MODEL WITH HETEROGENEOUS POLITICIANS

This paper extends the performance-based voting models of Barro (1973), Ferejohn (1986), and Austen-Smith and Banks (1990) by including heterogeneous politicians. The introduction of heterogeneous politicians has three major implications. First, the act of voting must now simultaneously address both "moral hazard" and "adverse selection" problems. Accordingly, this paper demonstrates that voters will usually have to trade off the twin goals of (i) securing the optimal performance from a given type of politician, and (ii) insuring that only the best types of politicians are selected to office. Second, both equilibrium reelection rates and the tenure-performance relationship are shown to depend on the value of holding office. For example, when the value of holding political office is large relative to other employment opportunities. incumbents will experience very high reelection rates: and longer-serving politicians will perform poorer, on average, than shorter-serving politicians. Finally, we demonstrate the surprising result that increased heterogeneity of politicians can make voters worse off.     

Endogenous Public Expenditures on Education

We construct a model of the determination of public funding of education through majority voting. Households have the option of privately supplementing public education. Alternatively, they can opt out of public education completely and choose private education. We find that in general the single‐crossing property cannot be used to establish existence of a majority voting equilibrium. Numerical solutions of the model reveal (i) when public education inputs and private supplements are substitutes, private school enrollment is often zero; and (ii) the funding level for public education is very sensitive to the productivity of private supplements and the elasticity of substitution between public inputs and private supplements.     

Crime,incentives and political effort: Evidence from India

Political representatives with criminal backgrounds are considered a great problem in many countries. In India, public disclosure of the large share of politicians currently facing criminal charges has sparked a heated public debate and emerging literature assessing the causes and effects. We develop two hypotheses based on our theoretical considerations. Based on the coding of published affidavits and a comprehensive set of three proxies to measure effort in the 14th Lok Sabha over the 2004–2009 legislative period, we put these hypotheses to an empirical test. Members of the parliament (MPs) facing criminal accusations exhibit on average about 5% lower attendance rates and lower utilization rates in a local area development fund, but only insignificantly lower parliamentary activity. In line with our hypotheses, these differences decline in the development level of the constituency - a proxy for higher rent-seeking possibilities and monitoring intensity. We argue and demonstrate why these negative relations should constitute an upper bound estimate of the causal effect, and show that even under conservative assumptions the effect is unlikely to be caused by unaccounted selection-bias.