Globalization and electoral outcomes: Evidence from Italy

We study whether and to what extent the electoral dynamics in Italy over the 1994–2008 period can be explained by the development of economic factors associated with globalization. To measure the level of exposure to globalization for local labor markets, our main unit of analysis, we use the intensity of import competition from China and the presence of immigrants. Looking at parties’ political positions and employing an estimation strategy that accounts for endogeneity and time‐invariant unobserved effects across local labor markets, we find that both immigration intensity and exposure to import competition from China have contributed positively to the electoral outcomes of far‐right parties, whereas only immigration intensity has increased the vote shares of right‐wing and traditionalist/authoritarian/nationalist parties. Some evidence, albeit not robust, shows that immigration may have also had a positive impact on far‐left parties, thus possibly further contributing toward political polarization. Moreover, electoral turnout has responded negatively to an increased presence of migrants. While the above effects seem to work through the mediation of labor markets, our results, especially those related to immigration, suggest that other mechanisms at the level of local communities are also at play.     

Information and strategic voting

We theoretically and experimentally study voter behavior in a setting characterized by plurality rule and mandatory voting. Voters choose from three options. We are interested in the occurrence of strategic voting in an environment where Condorcet cycles may occur and focus on how information about the preference distribution affects strategic behavior. We also vary the relative importance of the second preferred option. Quantal response equilibrium analysis is used to analyze the game and derive predictions. Our results indeed show that strategic voting arises. Its extent depends on (i) information availability; (ii) the relative importance of the intermediate candidate; (iii) the electorate’s relative support for one’s preferred candidate; (iv) the relative position of the plurality-supported candidate in one’s preference ordering. Our results show that information serves as a coordination device where strategic voting does not harm the plurality-preferred candidate’s chances of winning.     

Education and electoral participation: reported versus actual voting behaviour

Using survey data of voters in Tanzania, this article shows that while education does not affect self-reported voting in general elections, it increases actual voting. The less educated are more likely to claim to have voted without having done so, which may explain why previous studies of voting in developing countries fail to find an effect of education. We demonstrate the importance of this finding by using our survey data to generate predicted voting probabilities for the respondents to the 2012 Afrobarometer survey in Tanzania and show that while mean self-reported voting does not differ much at different levels of education, the differences become significant when taking into account voting misrepresentation.     

Creative accounting and electoral motives: Evidence from OECD countries

Using an unbalanced panel of 27 OECD countries over the period 1970–2011, I examine whether electoral motives influenced creative accounting. Governments engage in “below-the-line” operations, such as transactions in financial assets, that do not show up in the deficit figures but give rise to changes in debt. I use the difference between the change in public debt and the deficit (stock-flow adjustment) to measure creative accounting. The results suggest that governments strategically engaged in creative accounting before regular elections so as to sugarcoat the budget balance. I also provide an overview of government interventions that gave rise to large stock-flow adjustments.     

Legislators' behaviour and electoral rules: Evidence from an Italian reform

We explore how electoral rules and the degree of civicness of the voters interact in shaping elected officials' behaviour. We examine the expenditure proposals sponsored by Italian Senators from 1994 to 2013 and exploit the 2005 electoral reform that transformed a mainly majoritarian system into a mainly proportional one. First, we find that legislators elected in first-past-the-post districts are more likely to sponsor pork-barrel bills and to put effort into legislative activity than those elected with a closed-list proportional system. Second, more importantly, we show that the effects of the electoral rules are muted in areas with high civicness.     

Expressive voting with booing and cheering: Evidence from Britain

Previous work on Expressive Voting has focused on the desire of voters to express what they are for and thus who they are. But, often also as important, is the desire of voters to express what they are against, and who they are not. In this paper we extend the standard formulation of Expressive Voting to account for this possibility. Using data for the UK we find empirical evidence that the desire to boo has been increasingly important at recent elections. The implications of this for recent trends in political polarization are discussed.     

Patronage and ideology in electoral behavior: Evidence from Egypt's first presidential elections

This paper investigates the impact of patronage and ideology on voter behavior and election outcomes. Egypt's first free presidential elections represent a good case study to answer the question whether private gain outweighs ideology in voter behavior on a broader level. First, we combine election results with household surveys and national statistics to estimate the impact of patronage (measured by public employment) on voting for the pre-revolution regime candidate. Second, using results of the first round of elections as a proxy for ideology, we test for the effect of ideological preferences on voting behavior. Additionally, we test for candidates' ability to mobilize supporters. Our results suggest that patronage has a stronger effect than secularist ideology but a weaker effect than pro-change ideology. Results show that the number of public sector and government employees in each electoral district has a positive impact on participation rates.     

Evidence on the equivalence of the strategic and extensive form representation of games

Our experiment tests whether strategically equivalent representations of games produce equivalent behavior when actually played. We examine representative members of the class of generic 2×2 extensive form games of perfect information and the equivalent strategic form games. Systematic differences exist between subjects’ choices in the strategic and extensive form representations. These differences cannot be attributed to differences in subjects’ ability to do backwards induction, in the salience of interpersonal preferences, or in optimization premiums between the two game forms. Instead, subjects in the extensive form are consistently more likely to allow the other player to make a meaningful choice.     

Culture,democracy, and market reforms: Evidence from transition countries

Transition countries differed widely in the extent to which they implemented market reforms. This paper empirically investigates the role of culture as a potential determinant of market reform adoption among the post-socialist economies of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. I examine an unbalanced panel of up to 21 transition countries over the period 1989–2001 and estimate the relationship between different cultural typologies and the adoption of liberalizing reforms. I report that a sense of individualism and intolerance for unequal dispersion of power within societies are robustly associated with greater market reform efforts. Only limited evidence exists for the influence of other cultural attitudes.     

Economic reform, voting, and local political intervention: Evidence from India

This paper uses the Indian tariff reforms of the early nineties to estimate how voters hurt by economic reforms respond. Regions more hurt by the tariff reform increased their support for both the party that initiated their suffering and parties with similar preferences in favor of poverty-centric policies. This response is surprisingly sophisticated, where voters did not simply punish incumbents for negative income shocks and correctly discounted initial anti-reform stances by opposition parties that later turned out to be false. Furthermore, the strength of this voting response varied with both geography and local political incentives, suggesting that the economic effects of reforms might vary substantially in large and decentralized democracies.     

The impact of gender quotas on electoral participation: Evidence from Italian municipalities

We analyze the effect of gender quotas on electoral participation by using a dataset regarding Italian municipal elections. Gender quotas were in force in Italy from 1993 to 1995. Given the short period covered by the reform, some municipalities never voted using a gender quota. We identify a treatment and a control group and estimate the effects of gender quotas by using a Difference-in-Differences estimation strategy. Electoral turnout shows a decreasing trend, but turnout decreased significantly less in municipalities affected by the reform, suggesting that gender quotas produced an increase in electoral participation. The effect on electoral turnout is driven by an increase in valid ballots. The effect is smaller in the southern part of the country, which typically manifests more traditional gender roles. We also find that female electors react more than males.     

Employment to output elasticities and reforms towards flexicurity: Evidence from OECD countries

Labor market reforms in the direction of “flexicurity” have been widely endorsed as a means to increase an economy's ability to adjust to negative shocks while offering adequate social safety nets. This paper empirically examines how such reforms influence employment's responsiveness to output fluctuations (employment–output elasticity). To address this question, we employ a single equation error correction model with policy interactions on a panel of OECD countries, which also incorporates the period of the Great Recession, and distinguish between passive and active labor market policy types. Flexicurity is represented by three policy measures: unemployment benefit generosity, the flexibility of hiring and firing rules, and spending on active labor market policies. We find that the effects of any single policy change are shaped by the broader existing policy mix within which it takes place. A hypothetical flexicurity reform towards the policy mix of Denmark, a well-known example of the flexicurity regime, is found to increase or leave unchanged countries' short-run employment–output elasticities, depending on the initial policy mix. These results are robust to accounting for a large set of additional labor market institutions.     

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.     

Exit polls,turnout, and bandwagon voting: Evidence from a natural experiment

We exploit a voting reform in France to estimate the causal effect of exit poll information on turnout and bandwagon voting. Before the change in legislation, individuals in some French overseas territories voted after the election result had already been made public via exit poll information from mainland France. We estimate that knowing the exit poll information decreases voter turnout by about 11 percentage points. Our study is the first clean empirical design outside of the laboratory to demonstrate the effect of such knowledge on voter turnout. Furthermore, we find that exit poll information significantly increases bandwagon voting; that is, voters who choose to turn out are more likely to vote for the expected winner.     

The effects of economic reforms on manufacturing dualism: Evidence from India

Dualism is a pervasive feature of the manufacturing sectors of less-developed countries, with large differences in productivity between the informal and the formal sectors. Policy distortions are viewed as an important factor behind the prevalence of manufacturing dualism. We examine whether tariff reforms, industrial de-licensing and the withdrawal of reservation of products for small firms implemented since the mid-1980s have had any effects on efficiency differentials between informal and formal firms in Indian manufacturing. We find strong evidence that economic reforms have exacerbated dualism by increasing the productivity differentials between the more efficient formal firms and the less efficient informal firms.     

Attitudes towards euro area reforms: Evidence from a randomized survey experiment

This paper provides insights into the determinants of euro area reform preferences by means of a randomized survey experiment in Germany. Respondents are confronted with a pro and a contra argument to reform proposals on a European Unemployment Benefit Scheme and a Sovereign Insolvency Procedure, respectively, with the contra argument being varied across respondents. Our results for the control group suggest that there is a low willingness to accept fiscal risk-sharing through common unemployment insurance, while a sovereign insolvency procedure aimed at strengthening market discipline is supported by a majority of the survey participants. Our randomized treatments highlighting specific potential adverse effects of the reforms lead to significant downward shifts in approval rates. Altruism, EU support, nationalism, political preferences and income are important predictors of support for the reform proposals. We also show that there is a striking contrast between the low level of support for transfers to other euro area member states and a broad acceptance of inner German transfers.     

Competition,benchmarking, and electoral success: Evidence from 69 years of the German Bundestag

The German electoral system ensures that there is always at least one federal legislator per constituency. This legislator can face competition from additionally elected competitors to the Bundestag from precisely the same constituency. The existence of several legislators per constituency allows voters to benchmark their quality against each other. We analyze the causal impact of having more elected competitors from the same constituency on legislators’ personal success versus the success of their parties. Our data cover the legislative terms in the German Bundestag and federal elections in the period 1953–2021. In our analysis, we rely on exogenous variation in elected competitors by investigating changes induced by legislators who leave the Bundestag during the legislative period and their respective replacement candidates as instrumental variables. We find that legislators are less successful in elections when they are exposed to elected competitors from the same constituency. The results suggest that benchmarking possibilities are relevant for voters to evaluate their representatives.     

Local industrial policy and productivity: Evidence from China

Subnational governments played key roles in China's past rapid growth, and local industrial policy was among their most frequently used tools. Using a plausible comprehensive local industrial policies variable constructed using local Five-Year Plans and a comprehensive dataset of all medium and large firms in China between 1998 and 2013, this paper attempts to understand whether such interventions are helpful for China's growth. Our results indicate that although local industrial policies attract more low productivity firms, they do achieve their purpose of improving the productivity of the targeted sectors, at firm and city levels, especially in the long run.