Exposure to corruption and political participation: Evidence from Italian municipalities

This paper aims to study the effects of exposure to corruption on all the aspects of political participation. Focusing on Italian municipalities in the period 1999–2014, we generate a daily and local measure of exposure to corruption, screening newspaper articles of the main Italian press agency. We concentrate on local elections and, in an event-study analysis, we find three main results. First, corruption exposure affects citizens' participation in election by reducing voter turnout. Second, corruption impacts on politicians’ participation: the number of candidates and electoral lists decreases after a scandal and candidates with political tenure are more likely to run. Finally, these changes affect local political outcomes as tenured politicians are more likely to be elected, while freshmen lose ground. These results suggest that exposure to corruption has general and negative effects on political participation, leading people to lose interest in politics.     

The influence of political fragmentation on public enterprises: Evidence from German municipalities

This study investigates the influence of politically fragmented municipal councils on the investment behaviour of municipally owned public enterprises. We argue that common public choice theories can also be applied to public enterprises. For our observation period (2002–2014), we use a data set encompassing 8,685 municipally owned enterprises subject to commercial accounting located in 3,237 municipalities drawn from all 13 German federal area states. On average, our results point to a negative effect of fragmentation on investment per capita, supporting a war of attrition or veto player approach. Effects are heterogeneous among different sectors, possibly due to higher visibility to voters. Thus, veto players might actively try to block prestigious and publicly perceivable investment projects to hinder their opponents. Political budget cycles additionally influence this effect for some sectors. However, testing non-linearities reveal that the common-pool hypothesis cannot be completely ruled out.     

Gender quotas and the selection of local politicians: Evidence from French municipal elections

Using data on the universe of elected politicians in French municipalities, this paper studies the impact of a gender quota law on the political representation of women and on the composition of municipal councils. The empirical strategy, a Difference-in-Discontinuities design, takes advantage of the fact that the policy applies to cities above a population threshold, and that this threshold has been modified over time. I find that the quota policy has a substantial impact on the share of female candidates and elected politicians, but fails to promote female mayors and list leaders, even in cities that have been exposed to the policy for 13 years. Women do not reach leadership positions because they are more likely to resign than male politicians. This higher propensity of women to leave politics is correlated with local gender norms concerning the place of women in society, and also varies with individual characteristics such as age and professional background. In a second part, I show that quotas have little effect on the composition of municipal councils in terms of socio-economic background, age, and political experience.     

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.     

Political bargaining in a federation: Buchanan meets Coase

In recent decades, the issues of federalism and political integration have gained prominence in public debate as well as in the academic realm. A frequently made point is that allowing free secession may protect the minority's interests, thus providing it with an incentive to enter the federation. This paper explicitly considers the political process in the federation arguing that the option to secede may distort the political choices made by the individual regions to improve their bargaining positions. As a result, the allocation of resources in the federation could well end up being inefficient and unattractive for the minority region. In contrast, limiting the secession possibilities by requiring the consent of a majority of voters through a regional referendum, rather than leaving it to the discretion of the legislature, restores efficiency.     

Term limit extension and electoral participation. Evidence from a diff-in-discontinuities design at the local level in Italy

We study the effect of term limits on voter turnout in Italian local elections. Since 2014 the Italian law allows mayors in municipalities with a population size lower than 3,000 inhabitants to re-run for a third term, whereas mayors in cities with a number of residents above the cut-off still face a two-term limit. The introduction of the reform permits us to implement a difference-in-discontinuities design exploiting the before/after with the discontinuous policy change. We find that voters negatively react to the introduction of the reform: electoral participation decreases by about 5 percentage points in municipalities eligible to the treatment compared to municipalities in the control group. This negative effect is essentially driven by a decrease in the political competition. We also find that relaxing term limits does not improve the quality of politicians running for election.     

Corruption and legislature size: Evidence from Brazil

This paper studies whether and how legislatures affect political corruption. Using a regression discontinuity design in the context of Brazilian municipalities, we find a positive causal impact of council size on corruption levels, as detected by random federal audits. This indicates that an extra councilor represents an additional political actor potentially interested in diverting public resources, which we define as a rent extraction effect. However, we find further evidence that, in some contexts, larger councils enhance the representation of opposition parties and effectively increase monitoring over the executive, attenuating the rent extraction effect. Namely, in municipalities where opposition parties are typically underrepresented, the additional seat in the council is absorbed by the opposition and corruption outcomes do not worsen. In addition, only in such context, mayors are more commonly sentenced for misconduct in office by judicial authorities, whose investigations anecdotally often originates from councilors denouncing mayors to local courts. Overall, our findings show that legislature size is detrimental to corruption outcomes but less so where the representation of opposition parties improves with the enlargement of the legislature.     

Expressive and Instrumental Voting: The Scylla and Charybdis of Constitutional Political Economy

Brennan and Hamlin [(2002) Constitutional Political Economy 13(4): 299–311] noted that expressive voting still holds at the constitutional phase. The argument, when taken to its necessary conclusion, proves quite problematic for Constitutional Political Economy. Veil mechanisms following Buchanan induce expressive voting at the constitutional phase, removing the normative benefits ascribed to the hypothetical unanimity principle. If the constitution is authored by a small group and the veil is thereby removed, instrumental considerations come to bear and the authors of the constitution establish themselves as Oligarch.     

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.     

Political Accountability,Electoral Control and Media Bias

Are anti‐establishment mass media really useful in preventing politicians from behaving dishonestly? This paper models the direction of media bias, and shows that the probability of a dishonest action by an incumbent is higher (than that in the case of no media bias) if and only if the mass media have some degree of “anti‐incumbent” bias (i.e. information favourable to the incumbent is converted into unfavourable news about the incumbent with a positive probability), provided that the incumbent is less likely to be opportunistic than a challenger in the upcoming election. This result holds irrespective of the degree of “pro‐incumbent” bias.     

Intergovernmental transfers and political competition measured by pivotal probability - Evidence from Hungary

I estimate the effects of political competition on the allocation of intergovernmental transfers to Hungarian municipalities between 1998 and 2006. The intergovernmental transfers were intended to finance schooling, elder care, and administrative needs in municipalities. Rather than use closeness of the dominant blocks' vote share, which is the standard measure of political competition, I instead employ (Myerson, 2000)'s pivotal probabilities, calculated at the municipality level. As a result, the number of voters, in addition to the vote difference, is taken into account when describing political competition at the municipal level. I argue that under mixed-member proportional systems, as well as under proportional systems in general, pivotal probability reflects the political reality better than closeness can. I find evidence that swing municipalities in villages are targeted and, ceteris paribus, that poorer regions receive larger transfer amounts than other areas.     

Social Conflict and Gradual Political Succession: An Illustrative Model*

This paper studies the evolution of political institutions in the face of conflict. We examine institutional reform in a class of pivotal mechanisms—institutions that behave as if the resulting policy were determined by a “pivotal” decision maker drawn from the potential population of citizens and who holds full policy‐making authority at the time. A rule‐of‐succession describes the process by which pivotal decision makers in period t + 1 are, themselves, chosen by pivotal decision makers in period t. Two sources of conflict—class conflict, arising from differences in wealth, and ideological conflict, arising from differences in preferences—are examined. In each case, we characterize the unique Markov‐perfect equilibrium of the associated dynamic political game, and show that public decision‐making authority evolves monotonically downward in wealth and upward in ideological predisposition toward the public good. We then examine rules‐of‐succession when ideology and wealth exhibit correlation.     

Independent fiscal councils: Recent trends and performance

Countries increasingly rely on independent fiscal councils to constrain policymakers’ discretion and curb the bias towards excessive deficits and pro-cyclical policies. Since fiscal councils are often recent and heterogeneous across countries, assessing their impact is challenging. Using the latest (2016) vintage of the IMF Fiscal Council Dataset, we focus on two tasks expected to strengthen fiscal performance: the preparation or assessment of forecasts, and the monitoring of compliance with fiscal rules. Tentative econometric evidence suggests that the presence of a fiscal council is associated with more accurate and possibly less optimistic fiscal forecasts, as well as greater compliance with fiscal rules.     

False claims in politics: Evidence from the US

In this paper, we use data on 2459 public claims made by 444 politicians from the leading US fact-checking site (PolitiFact) to provide an empirical analysis of false claims in politics, shedding light on their characteristics within an advanced democracy. The frequency of falsehoods differs according to party affiliation and topic, with false claims more likely on such topics as elections, health, labor, taxes and values. For Republican politicians, falsehood pays off in the short run, as it is associated with greater political support.     

On the determinants of local government performance: A two-stage nonparametric approach

This article analyzes the efficiency of local governments in the Comunitat Valenciana (Spain) and their main explanatory variables. The analysis is performed in two stages. Firstly, efficiency is measured via (nonparametric) activity analysis techniques. Specifically, we consider both Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Free Disposable Hull (FDH) techniques. The second stage identifies some critical determinants of efficiency, focusing on both political and fiscal policy variables. In contrast to previous two-stage research studies, our approach performs the latter attempt via nonparametric smoothing techniques, rather than econometric methods such as OLS or Tobit related techniques. Results show that efficiency scores, especially under the nonconvexity assumption (FDH), are higher for large municipalities. Thus, there is empirical evidence to suggest that resources may be better allocated by large municipalities. However, the inefficiency found is not entirely attributable to poor management, as second-stage analysis reveals both fiscal and political variables to be explicably related to municipality performance. Moreover, the explanatory variables’ impact on efficiency is robust to the chosen technique—either convex DEA or nonconvex FDH.     

Political favoritism by powerful politicians: Evidence from chief ministers in India

We study whether in single-member-district legislative systems, powerful politicians engage in political favoritism towards their constituents. The focus is on the chief ministers of Indian state governments. Using night light intensity as a measure of economic activity, we find that a constituency represented by a sitting chief minister exhibits about 13 percentage increase in luminosity relative to all other constituencies. The effect comes predominantly from the cases where the chief minister's constituency lies outside their birth region. Neighboring constituencies, particularly those with strategic political value, also benefit from this windfall, suggesting the mechanism at play is likely to be political expediency rather than in-group favoritism.     

Income Inequality and Political Polarization: Time Series Evidence Over Nine Decades

Rising income inequality and political polarization have led some to hypothesize that the two are causally linked. Properly interpreting such correlations is complicated by multiple factors driving these phenomena, potential feedback between inequality and polarization, measurement issues, and the statistical challenges of modeling non‐stationary variables. We find that a more precise measure of inequality (the inverted Pareto–Lorenz coefficient) is more consistently and statistically related to polarization in the short and long runs than the less precise top 1 percent share of income. We find bi‐directional causality between polarization and inequality, consistent with theoretical conjecture and less formal evidence in previous studies.     

Parties,divided government,and infrastructure expenditures: Evidence from U.S. states

This paper examines the impact of parties and divided government on infrastructure expenditures for transportation, education, and social services in U.S. states. As infrastructure expenditures are considered a bi-partisan priority, we hypothesize that divided governments expand infrastructure spending compared to governments under true Democratic or Republican control. We test this hypothesis using U.S. state-level data over the period 1970 to 2008 and find that divided governments indeed increase expenditures for these budget categories. Specifically, divided governments spend more on transportation than unified Democratic governments, and more on education and social services than unified Republican governments. The effect is most pronounced for the core infrastructure of transportation and even stronger when only looking at capital outlays instead of total expenditures.     

Does political competition lessen ethnic discrimination? Evidence from Sri Lanka

The impact of political competition on ethnic discrimination remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, this paper explores the relationship between the level of political competition and the probability of receiving government transfers among ethnic minorities in Sri Lanka in the run up to the national elections of 2000. The paper shows that making politicians dependent on the votes of members of ethnic groups other their own can encourage moderation in discriminatory practices towards ethnic minorities. Specifically we find that political competition positively influenced the distribution of government food stamps among Sri Lankan Tamils, who otherwise are less likely to receive food stamps relative to the Sinhalese majority. The negative impact of political competition on discrimination is higher when minorities form part of swing constituencies than when they form part of the base support for political parties. Lessons learnt here suggest that having built-in incentives in the design of the electoral process for intergroup bargaining and cooperation in countries with ethnically heterogeneous societies can be an effective restraint on ethnic discrimination. This is consistent with other research that considers political institutions to be a key lever for making ethnically divided societies more inclusive.     

Birthplace favoritism and the distribution of budget amendments in Brazil: Evidence from nondistrict elections

In this paper, we investigate whether federal deputies in Brazil display birthplace favoritism in allocating discretionary resources to municipalities via budgetary amendments. The data include information on three electoral cycles and on more than five thousand municipalities. Unlike previous research, we match data on an elected deputy’s share of votes by municipality and the value of the legislative amendments per capita obtained for each municipality by that deputy. Our results suggest that although resource distribution through amendments is smaller than targeted pork spending, birthplace favoritism is still an important driver of local politicians’ behavior. On average, when a Brazilian municipality is the place of birth of a deputy, it obtains 8.7% more amendments per capita than its counterparts. Additionally, our findings suggest that some deputies display birthplace favoritism because they plan to run for mayor in their hometown in subsequent elections.