完善党内选举制度是党内民主的根本

党内选举制度是衡量党内民主发展程度的重要标志,是党内民主的一项根本制度;党内选举制度难免有一些不够完善的方面,特别是“党组织负责人”的选举存在一些问题;要进一步推进党内民主的发展,就必须从制度完善和实际运作两个方面入手,解决影响各级党代会权威和广大党员及党员代表选举权利的问题。     

The day after: newly-elected politicians and the use of accounting information

Most democracies expect accounting information to be used by public managers and elected politicians to support decision-making and accountability to both the public and higher levels of government. This paper shows that Italian local government politicians also use accounting information to influence public opinion and to win political benefit after elections when there has been a change in the ruling party.     

Campaign Spending with Office-Seeking Politicians, Rational Voters, and Multiple Lobbies

I introduce a microfounded model of campaign finance with office-seeking politicians, a continuum of voters, and a large number of heterogeneous lobbies. Lobbies make contributions to politicians according to a common agency framework. Politicians use contributions to finance their electoral expenditures. Voters are not fooled by electoral expenditures: they are influenced in a way that is consistent with the equilibrium behavior of lobbies and politicians. The model is used to: (i) determine the relation between campaign spending and the deviation from the median voter's preferred policy; (ii) show the informational value of lobbies' contributions; (iii) evaluate the welfare implications of restricting campaign spending; and (iv) interpret the empirical finding that campaign expenditures have a very low effect on election outcome. Although in equilibrium advertising provides voters with useful information, under reasonable parameter values, a ban on campaign contributions makes the median voter better off. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D72, D82, M37.     

The 2020 Presidential election: A race against mortality

A year from the inauguration, four of the top five Democratic 2020 U.S. Presidential election candidates in the polls are in their seventies. Using actuarial data and the history of Presidential assassinations, the top two contenders, Former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, have a 24–29% chance of not surviving to the end of a hypothetical first term. The 77 and 78‐year‐old men's chances of dying before the end of a second term as President of the United States are between 46 and 56%.     

Employment shocks and anti-EU sentiment

Euroscepticism and the rise of populist parties have often been linked to economic insecurity. This paper identifies regional employment changes as causal factors for forming attitudes towards the European Union and voting for eurosceptic parties in European Parliament elections. To do so, I combine industry-specific employment data for roughly 260 European NUTS II regions with individual-level Eurobarometer survey data for the past 20 years and regional voting results. I apply panel data and instrumental variable methods; for the latter I construct a Bartik-style instrument, which predicts employment changes on the basis of regional industry specialization and Europe-wide sector specific employment growth rates. The effect of employment changes on attitudes towards the EU is particularly strong for unemployed and low-skilled workers in regions with a high share of migrants from other European member states, which supports the narrative that ‘losers of globalization’ tend to be more skeptical towards economic and political integration.     

Female participation in parliament. Are we ever going to converge to Scandinavia?

Despite the fact that female political participation has been steadily growing over time, women’s representation in politics is substantially lower than their proportion in society. In this paper, we investigate the determinants of women’s representation using a GMM system estimation to address the possible endogeneity. We employ a unique dataset that covers data for 130 countries from 1972 to 2005 in 7 different geographical regions to estimate a dynamic model for women’s representation and calculate each region’s steady state. In general, we find that the steady state values are above each region’s current percentage of women in parliament; however, without changing other variables, no region significantly increases the percentage of women in parliament. Moreover, we find that 66–87% of the gap between each region’s steady state with Scandinavia is explained by female secondary education enrollment, labor force participation, and political and economic rights.     

A passion for voting

We model expressive voting as a dynamic game with informed and ignorant voters. A voter has selective memory for actions and he is aware of it. We find a unique symmetric equilibrium with ignorant voting. Public signal in favor of one particular alternative creates the bandwagon and underdog effects. When the signal is sufficiently strong, the majority outcome is biased. This is a possible reason for persistence of public policies.     

A new approach to measure tactical voting: evidence from the British elections

Although tactical voting attracts a great deal of attention, it is very hard to measure as it requires knowledge of both individuals’ voting choices as well as their unobserved preferences. In this article, we present a simple empirical strategy to nonparametrically identify tactical voting patterns directly from balloting results. This approach allows us to study the magnitude and direction of strategic voting as well as to verify which information voters and parties take into account to determine marginal constituencies. We show that tactical voting played a significant role in the 2010 election, mainly for Liberal–Democratic voters supporting Labour. Moreover, our results suggest that voters seem to form their expectations based on a national swing in vote shares rather than newspaper guides published in the main media outlets or previous election outcomes. We also present some evidence that suggests that campaign spending is not driving tactical voting.     

Electoral Competition as a Determinant of Fiscal Decentralisation*

This paper estimates the effect of government electoral strength on fiscal decentralisation. Using a panel of democracies, we find that greater government electoral strength at the central level, measured by the share of seats held by the governing party in the legislature, reduces expenditure centralisation. Revenue centralisation is less affected by electoral strength.