A comparative analysis of the voting behavior of constituents and their representatives for public debts

We explore the quality of political representation of constituents?? preferences for budgetary decisions within a quasi-experimental setting. In the Swiss referendum process, constituents reveal their preferences for budgetary proposals which are either expected to increase or decrease public debts. We match individual politicians?? voting behavior on debt increasing and debt reducing legislative proposals with eight real referendum decisions on exactly the same issues from 2008 to 2011. Thereby, we directly explore deviations of politicians from constituents?? preferences with respect to budgetary policies.     

Judicial Branch, Checks and Balances and Political Accountability

This paper attempts to combine the political economics models on separation of powers between the legislature and the executive with public choice theories on the behavior of the judicial branch. We obtain a model of political accountability and checks and balances with up to three government branches: the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. We conclude that an independent judiciary improves the political accountability of democratic systems relative to the political economics models with two government branches. An accommodating judiciary, however, changes the distribution of political rents without improving accountability.     

The law of large districts: How district magnitude affects the quality of political representation

It is well established that individual parliamentary representatives are less likely to decide according to the preferences of their constituency when the number of representatives per district, i.e. district magnitude, increases. However, we propose that for majority decisions of district representatives the opposite holds due to the existence of a law of large numbers in political representation. The academic literature has so far focused on the behavior of individual politicians but disregarded systematic aggregation effects. We provide a theoretical discussion and offer empirical evidence for the validity of a law of large numbers in political representation: As district magnitude increases, the quality of political representation by the majority of representatives increases, too.     

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.     

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.     

The economic effects of constitutions: do budget institutions make forms of government more alike?

According to an influential theoretical argument, presidential systems tend to present smaller governments relative to parliamentary countries because the separation between those who decide the size of the fiscal purse and those who allocate it creates incentives for lower public expenditures. In practice, however, presidential and parliamentary countries come in many forms. In particular, variation in procedural rules that assign budget prerogatives across the popular branches of government may affect the underlying incentives that differentiate these types of regimes in terms of fiscal outcomes. More specifically, we argue that more hierarchical rules that concentrate budgetary power in the executive relative to the legislature do not only reduce the extent of the common pool problem but also limit the degree of separation of powers, which may have a countervailing effect. Consequently, the effect of the form of government on public expenditures is conditional on specific procedural rules. We test this hypothesis on a broad cross-section of countries and find that presidentialism has a negative impact on government size only when executive discretion in the budget process is low (that is, in a context of separation of powers). However, the negative effect of presidentialism on expenditures vanishes when the executive’s discretion over the budget process is higher. This result, in addition to highlighting that not all budget institutions have the same effect on incentives and outcomes, points out how important it is to go beyond broad characterizations of political institutions for explaining policy outcomes, and more generally, for moving forward the research agenda in constitutional political economy.     

The quality-access tradeoff in decentralizing public services: Evidence from education in the OECD and Spain

Decentralized delivery of public services should enhance constituents’ ability to hold politicians accountable and improve public service outcomes, according to theory. Yet, decentralization has not consistently yielded those improvements. This paper uses a novel cross-country panel from the OECD to show that decentralization generally improves students’ access to education, but in so doing, it creates congestion effects which diminish the overall quality of education that students receive. We argue that this is partially explained by the incentives of sub-central governments upon receiving their new authority. Sub-central governments are more incentivized than national ones to pursue policy improvements that are more visible and quicker to achieve, even when they are costly – like improving access – over improvements that are less visible and take longer to achieve – like increasing quality. Decentralization should therefore result in positive effects on education access and negative on quality, consistent with our findings. We directly test the impact of political incentives on responses to decentralization by exploiting the timing of education decentralization in Spain (1980–99), and variation in the political assertiveness of regional governments, using generalized difference-in-differences and synthetic controls. As predicted, the magnitude of decentralization's effects is greater for assertive regions, which are most incentivized to prioritize high visibility, costly policies.     

混合宪制与三权分立:现代民主的君主制与贵族制特征

立法、行政与司法三权分立理论目前仍是现代代议制民主的基础。它由孟德斯鸠创立,取代了早先的混合宪制理论。后者可以追溯至柏拉图、亚里士多德和波利比乌斯,其核心主张是,世界上存在三种宪制:君主制、寡头制和民主制,而当来自三种宪制的各种制度混合在一起时,制度之间就会相互作用,影响国家的立法、执法与司法等全部职能。文章认为,今天,孟德斯鸠的三权分立说存在太多例外,已经漏洞百出,成为理解现代民主结构的障碍而非助力。因此,有必要恢复混合宪制,从而纠正"西方国家就是纯粹的民主制"和"民主就是由人民统治"这两个流行的观念。     

Evidence on the political principal-agent problem from voting on public finance for concert halls

Principal-agent problems can arise when preferences of voters are not aligned with preferences of political representatives. Often the consequence of the political principal-agent problem is political catering to special interests. In this paper I provide examples of principal-agent problems regarding public spending. The examples concern construction or extension of concert halls in two German cities. Resistance to public funding for the concert halls was particularly strong in electoral districts with large constituencies on the left. The evidence indicates that political representatives were more bourgeois than their constituencies. In the cases studied asymmetric information did not prevail and voters were able to discipline their representatives through referenda that countered the results of voting by political representatives.     

Political economy,information and incentives

This paper shows how the instruments of incentive theory can be used to develop some views about the proper design of governments to avoid the capture of politicians and bureaucrats by interest groups. First, treating politicians as informed supervisors to whom economic policy is delegated we show the usefulness of the separation of powers to increase the transaction costs of collusion, the relevance of asymmetric control for avoiding reciprocal favors. The incompleteness of the constitutional contract leaves discretion to politicians who become residual decision makers. We study the trade-offs between greater efficiency obtained by allowing powerful instruments to politicians and less discretion by restricting on the contrary those instruments. Determinants of those trade-offs are the variability of the environment, the extent of asymmetric information about tastes and technologies and the size of majorities. Finally, we show the new theory of incentives for group behavior can be used to determine the transaction costs of collusion under asymmetric information and to which extent these costs relax the constraints imposed on government by collusive behavior.     

Opportunist politicians and the evolution of electoral competition

This paper studies a uni-dimensional model of electoral competition between two parties with two types of politicians. ‘Opportunist’ ones care only about the spoils of the office, and ‘militant’ ones have ideological preferences on the policy space. Opportunist politicians review their affiliations and may switch parties, seeking better election prospects. In this framework, we compare a winner-take-all system, where all the spoils of office go to the winner, to a proportional system, where the spoils of office are split among the two parties in proportion to their vote shares. We study the existence of short term political equilibria and the dynamics and stability of policies and of party membership decisions. In the long run, it is possible that proportional systems see opportunist politicians spread over all parties, but this situation is unstable in winner-take-all systems.     

Centralized versus decentralized provision of local public goods: a political economy approach

This paper takes a fresh look at the trade-off between centralized and decentralized provision of local public goods. It argues that the sharing of the costs of local public spending in a centralized system will create a conflict of interest between citizens in different jurisdictions. When spending decisions are made by a legislature of locally elected representatives, this conflict of interest will play out in the legislature. Depending on precisely how the legislature behaves, the result may be excessive public spending or allocations of public goods characterized by uncertainty and misallocation across districts. The extent of the conflict of interest between districts is affected by spillovers and differences in tastes for public spending. Thus, the relative performance of centralized and decentralized systems depends upon spillovers and differences in tastes for public spending, but for different reasons than suggested in the existing literature.     

Rotating group representatives and group members’ requests in repeated public goods game

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the effect of group representatives on contribution behaviour in response to group members’ requests in repeated public goods games. Data came from 135 students in 15 groups enrolled in the experiment, grouped in the following treatments: no group representatives (NR, NRG) and group representatives (R1, R2). We also tested initial requests wherein the group members’ initial requests (i.e. NRG, R2) mediated the positive relationship between individual-level contribution preferences and group contributions. We used a fixed-effects GLS regression and IV regression to analyse the effect of group representatives and group members’ requests. The results indicated the following: (a) rotating group representative/group members’ requests was related to group contributions at the session (within-members) and group (between-group) levels; (b) the reactions to members’ requests positively predicted group contributions; (c) subjects in the no group representatives treatment formed their requests by relying more on previous group contributions than subjects in the group representatives treatment, who relied more on the previous group members’ requests; and (d) the initial requests explained long-term contribution levels, which resulted in variations in group contributions observed between the NRG and R2 treatments. Our findings highlight the role of rotating group representatives in stimulating cooperation among members, while group members’ requests impel individuals to make contribution decisions at the group level.     

A note on economic freedom and political ideology

Within the field of public economics, there is the perception that Republicans are associated with ‘small government’ and Democrats with ‘big government’. We test this notion by examining whether economic freedom is affected when a single party is in control of the state legislature. We find no link between party control and our main economic freedom indicator, but we do find a positive link between Republican control and the taxation component of economic freedom, suggesting a Republican legislature leads to lower taxation.     

Do interest groups reward politicians for their votes in the legislature? Evidence from the great recession

ABSTRACT

Interest groups lobby politicians in various ways to influence their policy decisions, especially, their voting decisions in the legislature. Most, if not all, of the studies on this issue examine ”pre-vote” lobbying activities of interest groups that occur before politicians vote in the legislature. In this paper, however, I examine ”post-vote” lobbying activities of interest groups that occur after politicians vote in the legislature. By using data on the amount of monetary contributions given by interest groups to the members of the U.S. House of Representatives who have served in the 109th (2005–06) through 111th (2009–10) Congress, I find evidence that voting in favour of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (EESA) of 2008, one of the most significant pieces of legislation and possibly the biggest government bailout in U.S. economic history, has increased the amount of monetary contributions that politicians receive from the interest groups in the financial sector after the passage of the EESA. I also discuss two reasons for such post-vote lobbying and find empirical evidence for one of them.     

Public Preferences for Government Spending Priorities: Survey Evidence from Germany

Employing data from a representative survey conducted in Germany, this paper examines public preferences for the size and composition of government expenditure. We focus on public attitudes towards taxes, public debt incurrence and public spending in six different policy areas. Our findings suggest, first, that individual preferences for the use of additional tax money can be categorised as either capital‐oriented expenditure or public debt reduction. Second, we find that fiscal preferences differ along various dimensions. Specifically, personal economic well‐being, economic literacy, confidence in politicians, political ideology and time preference are significantly related to individual attitudes towards public spending, taxes and debt. The magnitude of the effects is particularly large for time preference, economic knowledge and party preference. Third, public preferences for public spending priorities are only marginally affected when considering a public budget constraint.     

The informational effects of competition and collusion in legislative politics

We use a mechanism design approach to study the organization of interest groups in an informational model of lobbying. Interest groups influence the legislature only by communicating private information on their preferences and not by means of monetary transfers. Interest groups have private information on their ideal points in a one-dimensional policy space and may either compete or adopt more collusive behaviors. Optimal policies result from a trade-off between imposing rules which are non-responsive to the groups' preferences and flexibility that pleases groups better. Within a strong coalition, interest groups credibly share information which facilitates communication of their joint interests, helps screening by the legislature and induces flexible policies responsive to the groups' joint interests (an informativeness effect). Competing interest groups better transmit information on their individual preferences (a screening effect). The socially and privately optimal organization of lobbying favors competition between groups only when their preferences are not too congruent with those of the legislature. With more congruence, a strong coalition is preferred. Finally, within a weak coalition, interest groups must design incentive compatible collusive mechanisms to share information. Such weak coalitions are always inefficient.     

Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, and the Provision of Collective Goods in Less-Developed Countries

Parliamentary systems are more likely, ceteris paribus, than presidential systems to give politicians the incentive to provide policies aimed at broad national constituencies rather than at particularistic sectoral or regional constituencies, because a parlimentary constitutional design encourages legislators to subordinate their pursuits to their parties' broader interests. However, less-developed countries often lack the conditions for the nationally oriented parties that parliamentarism requires in order to thrive, due to such factors as sharp disparities in development across regions and income groups. Thus the provision of collective goods in such countries may be facilitated by the establishment of presidential executives, which can be delegated independent constitutional authority to structure the national policy process. Policy-making in these cases thus can be stylized as a presidency elected nationally and granted strong powers over legislation that partially counteract the particularistic tendencies of a fragmented legislature whose members remain close to their regional constituencies.     

Allies or commitment devices? A model of appointments to the Federal Reserve

We present a model of executive‐legislative bargaining over appointments to independent central banks in the face of an uncertain economy with strategic economic actors. The model highlights the contrast between two idealized views of Federal Reserve appointments. In one view, politicians prefer to appoint conservatively biased central bankers to overcome credible commitment problems that arise in monetary policy. In the other, politicians prefer to appoint allies, and appointments are well described by the spatial model used to describe appointments to other agencies. Both ideals are limiting cases of our model, which depend on the level of economic uncertainty. When economic uncertainty is extremely low, politicians prefer very conservative appointments. When economic uncertainty increases, politicians’ prefer central bank appointees closer to their own ideal points. In the typical case, the results are somewhere in between: equilibrium appointments move in the direction of politician's preferences but with a moderate conservative bias.     

Distributive politics of public goods networks through multistage voting

Public goods networks create conflict between districts needing the network and districts that pay the costs. Thus, it is difficult for pork barrel politicians to achieve logrolling with other districts. I show that logrolling is possible for such politicians if they set their agenda properly. To show this, I model the centralized decision‐making process as a multistage vote among representatives from different districts. I assume the districts are better off if and only if the public good “connects” them to the network. Public goods can be provided universally by setting the agenda properly, even when costs exceed the benefits.