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Comments on a paper that applied some technical analysis from game theory to a dynamic version of the divide-the-dollar game in voting theory. Contribution of the work in principle to the understanding of the role of voting as a paradigmatic political institution; Analysis of whether the approach can yield a testable theory of the outcomes of majority rule; Investigation of how outcomes change over time as an existing government operates in a changing environment.

Comments on the articles of David Austen-Smith and Kenneth A. Shepsle regarding legislative institutions. Problems raised on the interactions between elections and legislatures; Approach used by Austen-Smith on the relationship between electoral and legislative theories; Discussion of the institutional social-choice paradigm; Views on the legislative model of Shepsle.

A lack of information about electoral candidates leads to a ballot order effect that increases the chances of candidates in the top electoral list positions winning voters' support. The ballot order effect is confounded by the effect of ranking and the effect of attention, which work in the same direction. We exploit a variation in ballot layout (the quasi-random location of the break between the first and second sides of the ballot) in the 2006, 2010, 2013, and 2017 Czech parliamentary open list proportional representation elections to disentangle these effects and identify the effect of attention. We show that being listed on the reverse side of the ballot paper decreases electoral support—measured by number of preferential votes received—by at least 40%. Focusing on preferential votes allows us to filter out the effect of political party preference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I investigate the impact of voter turnout on top marginal tax rates in OECD countries between 1974 and 2013. I find that higher turnout leads to higher taxes for top earners, a result broadly consistent with the median voter theorem. Using novel survey data, I confirm that individuals in all but the wealthiest income bracket prefer higher taxes on the rich more than they prefer greater government spending in the economy. In line with these preferences, I find that turnout has a significantly negative effect on top income shares but no effect on the size of government or on public welfare expenditure. An instrumental variables approach confirms my findings. Overall, the paper is the first of its kind to link turnout to measures of redistribution that affect top earners and to preferences for redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the targeted spending of public resources provide electoral benefits for incumbents? Despite the attention of scholars to that question, the empirical results are mixed thus far. The present paper supplies insights into the electoral benefits of discretionary funding on local elections. I study the consequences of pork-barrel politics in 7355 competitive mayoral elections in Slovakia between 2006 and 2018, finding that more grants from the central government enhance the likelihood of mayors winning reelection. The same advantage applies to mayors whose municipalities receive grants in local election years. The effects of the number of grants obtained as well as the timing of their distribution are, however, moderated by municipal population. More specifically, a larger number of grants and resources obtained near the end of the mayoral term provides electoral benefits only to small town mayors but give no advantage to the mayors of larger urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on an article about the incorporation of partisan activists into the spatial theory of electoral competition. Flaw on the assumption that an individual's utility for a political party depends only on the average of the ideal points of the party's activists.

In this paper we examine three forms of regret in relation to the UK's hugely significant referendum on EU membership that was held in June 2016. They are: (i) whether 'leave' voters at the referendum subsequently regretted their choice (in the light of the result), (ii) whether non-voters regretted their decisions to abstain (essentially supporting 'remain') and (iii) whether individuals were more likely to indicate that it is everyone's duty to vote following the referendum. We find evidence in favor of all three types of regret. In particular, leave voters and non-voters were significantly more likely to indicate that they would vote to remain given a chance to do so again; moreover, the probability of an individual stating that it was everyone's duty to vote in a general election increased significantly in 2017 (compared to 2015). The implications of the findings are discussed in the context of the referendum's outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vote buying is a form of political clientelism involving pre-electoral transfers of money or material benefits from candidates to voters. Despite the presence of secret ballots, vote buying remains a pervasive phenomenon during elections in developing countries. While prior literature has focused on how vote buying is enforced by parties and political candidates and which types of voters are most likely targeted, we know much less about the behavioral spillover effects of vote buying on citizens' demand for redistribution and contributions to the provision of public goods. In this paper, we provide evidence on how vote buying causally affects voters' candidate choice, support for redistribution, and public goods provision. Using data from a laboratory experiment in Kenya, we find that vote buying is a double-edged sword for candidates using clientelist strategies: it attracts votes from those who were offered money and accepted it, but it also leads to negative reactions from those who rejected the offer as well as those who were not offered money. In line with its effect on voting behavior, vote buying has negative effects on subjects' evaluations of the vote-buying candidate. Vote buying significantly reduces individuals' stated preferences for more government spending on police and law enforcement—yet, surprisingly, not on other welfare areas such as unemployment benefits or health. We also find that open ballots—but not vote-buying campaigns—reduce individuals' willingness to contribute to public goods provisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite recognition that government officials have politically motivated incentives to pursue new infrastructure construction at the expense of infrastructure upkeep, no prior research directly addresses how political incentives affect road maintenance separate from road construction. This paper investigates how local political incentives affect local road maintenance using unique data on completed road maintenance projects and difference-in-differences which leverages exogenous timing of mayoral elections. Since residents complain about damaged roads and can also be frustrated by travel delays caused by road maintenance, it is theoretically ambiguous how elected officials manipulate road maintenance, assuming they do so for political purposes. We show local election cycles shift road maintenance timing and location. We provide evidence that maintenance follows different patterns in mayoral election years and that maintenance is shifted around sub-city geographic units based on those units' political similarity of registered voters. A mayoral election costs $90,623 in additional road-related costs, translating to $28,093,182 per election for large cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to propose a comparison of four multi-winner voting rules, k-Plurality, k-Negative Plurality, k-Borda, and Bloc. These four election methods are extensions of usual scoring rules designed for electing a single winner and are compared on the basis of two criteria. The first comparison is based on the Condorcet committee efficiency which is defined as the conditional probability for a peculiar voting rule to select the Condorcet committee, provided that such a committee exists. The second comparison is based on the likelihood of two paradoxes of committee elections: the Prior Successor Paradox and the Leaving Member Paradox, which occur when a member of an elected committee exits. Aside from these two extensions, this paper is one of the very rare contributions giving exact results under the Impartial Anonymous Culture (IAC) condition for the case of four candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1996, Felsenthal and Machover proposed a bargaining procedure for a valuable payoff in cooperative and simple games. They proved that the value underlying their bargaining scheme was the Shapley value by showing that it verifies the axioms that Shapley proposed for characterizing his value. They remarked that a direct proof of the result involves rather formidable combinatorial difficulties, but that it has some independent interest. In this paper, we prove such a combinatorial result and obtain a formula for the Shapley value that has a great potential to be extended to more general classes of games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relation between campaign spending and votes, in France, relying on political financing reforms as a quasi-natural experiment to assess if and how spending affects votes, for both incumbent and challenger candidates in multiparty legislative elections. The French reforms were adopted in the mid-1990s, modifying the fundraising rules in three important ways: (1) spending limits were reduced, (2) legal entities no longer were allowed to fund candidates, and (3) the maximal amount of candidates' personal campaign spending reimbursed by the State was raised. We study observations on two consecutive legislative elections, one before and one after the reforms. The difference in campaign expenses across elections turns out to be strongly affected by the reforms: candidates from the extreme parties (far left and far right) increased their expenditures substantially, while the candidates fielded by moderate parties reduced them considerably. Focusing on politicians running in both elections, we estimate the impact of spending using first-difference panel data methods and TSLS. Our instrumental variables for the difference in spending are constructed from the regulatory reforms. We find that spending by incumbents did not have statistically significant effects on their vote shares. Spending by challengers is statistically significant but the impact nevertheless is economically small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This comment is concerned with the relation between the basic model of elections and income redistribution in Lindbeck and Weibull (1987) and the model in Coughlin (1986a). Its purpose is to (i) isolate the (small set of) assumptions that separate these closely related models, (ii) identify a special case of the Lindbeck-Weibull model where their results immediately provide direct extensions of four of the results in my paper, and (iii) point out that one of the lemmata in my paper identifies the precise location of the equilibrium income distribution for this important special case of the Lindbeck-Weibull model. The comment also relates these observations to Lindbeck and Weibull's example of familiar assumptions that satisfy their sufficient conditions for the existence of a political equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a Federal Reserve reaction function which relates policy intentions to forecasts of policy objectives. Pre- and postpresidential election estimates of this reaction function for the post-Accord period of 1953-1984 suggest two conclusions: (1) the Federal Reserve reacts differently to economic conditions in the pre- and postelection biennia and (2) these differences in Fed behavior are not likely the result of partisan political influence, but rather the result of self-restraint by the Fed during preelection periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In state legislative elections some candidates attract contributions from many donors whereas other candidates have much smaller donor pools. Why? What are the origins of these disparities? This paper conceptualizes contributions as a type of attachment between the donor and the state legislative candidate. To model the formation of these attachments, this paper proposes a variant of the Barabasi-Albert preferential attachment model. The theoretical model is tested with data on over one million contributions to state legislative candidates in 2008. The paper also derives implications for macro-level inequities across candidates which are tested by comparing the observed inequities to simulations of the preferential attachment model. The results provide strong support for the hypotheses and show that the preferential attachment model provides a parsimonious representation of contributions to state legislative candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we show how results in state administered university entrance standardized exams in Portugal are sensitive to the electoral cycle. Using individual data for all senior high school students taking national exams between the years 2004 and 2018, we reveal that whenever exams occur in years of upcoming legislative elections, the average senior high-school student grade increases by 1.17 and 0.63—on a 0 to 20 scale, in the core disciplines of Mathematics and Portuguese, respectively. Furthermore, the probability of passing the exams, that is, of getting more than 9.5 out of 20, increases by ten and eight percentage points in those same exams. Neither the quality of students nor the leniency of grading in these years explain this rise in pre-election exam grades. Robustness tests using early legislative elections, held, exceptionally, before national exams, and therefore not anticipated by those who arguably manipulate the exams, show that there was no inflation of exam scores in those years. Furthermore, we highlight that exam inflation can be a powerful electoral tool, with a unit increase in the municipality average score in Mathematics and Portuguese exams associated with a 1.46 percentage point rise in the vote share of the sitting government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preference approval voting (PAV) and fallback voting (FV) are two voting rules that combine approval and preferences, first introduced by Brams and Sanver (in: Brams, Gehrlein and Roberts (eds) The mathematics of preference, choice and order, Springer, Berlin, 2009). Under PAV, voters rank the candidates and indicate which ones they approve of; with FV, they rank only those candidates they approve of. In this paper, we further develop the work of Brams and Sanver (2009) by exploring some other normative properties of FV and PAV. We show among other things that FV and PAV satisfy and fail the same criteria; they possess two properties that AV does not: Pareto optimality and the fact of always electing the absolute Condorcet winner when he exists. To provide a practical comparison, we evaluate the probabilities of satisfying the Condorcet majority criteria for three-candidate elections and a considerably large electorate, examining FV and PAV alongside other voting rules. Our findings indicate that PAV outperforms the Borda rule in this regard. Furthermore, we observe that in terms of agreement, FV and PAV align more closely with scoring rules than with approval voting. Our analysis is performed under the impartial anonymous culture assumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral competition between two expert candidates may lead to inefficient platform choices. The present paper studies electoral competition between two experts and a third uninformed candidate. The latter behaves populistically. This seemingly useless candidate restores efficiency. The paper then endogenizes information acquisition. If the information acquisition costs are low, then equilibria with (i) three expert candidates or (ii) two experts and one uninformed candidate may arise. There are costs such that the latter equilibrium is the only pure strategy equilibrium in which information is transmitted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using two different data sources—municipal level data and individual data—we consider several hitherto unexplored aspects of the relationship between voting technology and election outcomes. We distinguish between introductory and permanent effects of electronic voting, and between national and municipal elections. We test for a possible asymmetry between the effect of moving from paper ballots to electronic voting, and vice versa, and we control for polling station density. We find a positive but temporary effect of electronic voting on voter turnout, a negative effect on the fraction of residual votes, and no effect on the share of left wing parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The selection of political officials is under-studied in economic analysis of authoritarian politics. In the absence of elections, the autocracy alone is burdened with the task of selecting the right candidate for every political position. This paper tries to empirically investigate an authoritarian political selection market where a dictator "sells" potentially valuable political membership to eligible supporters who have to pay a "price" in terms of screening cost. We highlight one dilemma that many contemporary autocracies face, namely the need to recruit educated elites who usually have better options in the private sector and are less dependent on the regime. This paper argues that autocracies can minimize this challenge by actively screening for unobservable loyalty conditional on observed technical skills. Using micro-level Chinese Communist Party college recruitment data, we show that the party adopts a discriminative strategy of lowering (but not removing) the screening cost for high-ability students and more intensively screening for loyalty among low-ability students. Using brainwashing course scores as a measurement of loyalty provides suggestive evidence that party members of a given ability level have more loyalty than nonmembers at the same ability level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A previously published paper evaluated election schemes under a wide variety of election circumstances. This paper improves upon the previous work by refining the measures used to rate the election schemes and increasing the statistical significance of those ratings. With these modifications, we can now draw some new conclusions: (a) In general circumstances, the Borda System outperforms the Copeland System which out-performs Approval which outperforms Majority Rule. (b) The Maximin Rule -- strongly supported by Rawls's -- turns out to be a reasonable election rule if the number of election alternatives is large relative to the number of voters. (c) With two exceptions, all our election systems performed quite well given a society with highly correlated utilities. (d) Given a polarized society, a serial dictatorship was better than every other election system except Borda. Perhaps even more importantly, we now have the possibility of conducting some cost/benefit analyses of different proposals for electoral changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a response to a comment on an article about income redistribution and elections. Explanation on the existence of equilibrium among voters; Assumptions on the probability of votes; Opinion on the claims of John O. Ledyard regarding election theorems.

The empirical literature on the effects of opinion polls on election outcomes has recently found substantial evidence of a bandwagon effect, defined as the phenomenon according to which the publication of opinion polls is advantageous to the candidate with the greatest support. This result is driven, in the lab experiments, by a higher turnout rate among the majority than among the minority. Such evidence is however in stark contrast with the main theoretical model of electoral participation in public choice, the pivotal voter model, which predicts that the supporters of an underdog candidate participate at a higher rate, given the higher probability of casting a pivotal vote. This paper tries to reconcile this discrepancy by showing that a bandwagon effect can be generated within the pivotal voter model by concavity in the voters' utility function, which makes electoral participation more costly for the expected loser supporters. Given the strict relationship between concavity and risk aversion, the paper also establishes the role of risk aversion as a determinant of bandwagon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about politicians' preferences for electoral systems, yet little is known about the preferences of voters. In 1993, New Zealand had a binding electoral referendum on the same day as the general election where voters chose between keeping a single plurality system (First Past the Post) or introducing a pure proportional one (Mixed Member Proportional). This paper merges data from all nationwide polling stations to Census data on local voters to examine what drives citizens' preferences for an electoral system. We find that strategic partisan interest was a key driver: voters overwhelmingly preferred the system that most benefited their favorite party. However, socioeconomic characteristics and social values also mattered; people who held more progressive values, were outside the dominant religion and lived in urban areas were much more likely to vote to change to a proportional system. Survey data show that these findings hold at the individual level, and further, that individuals who were angry with the economy were much more likely to vote against the status quo, regardless of their background, party preferences or social values. This behavior is likely to have ultimately balanced the result in favor of Mixed Member Proportional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the system of presidential appointments of regional governors, which existed in Russia from 2005 to 2012, gubernatorial loyalty to the central government and particularly governors' ability to deliver satisfactory results to the ruling party in national-level elections were crucial to their likelihood of being reappointed to the next term. In this paper, we argue that governors, anticipating the relationship between loyalty and reappointments, attempted to deliver additional votes to the ruling party, and show that those attempts were subject to regional political cycles. Exploiting variation in the starting and expiry dates of Russian regional governors' terms of office, we find that the winning margins for a pro-government party across Russian regions in national-level elections held between 2007 and 2012 were substantially higher when elections were closer to the beginning or to the expiration of a regional governor's term. The effect is driven almost exclusively by the governors serving their first terms. However, for elections held between 1999 and 2004, when governors were subject to direct votes by regional constituencies, no similar effect is found. The results can be explained by, e.g., first impression and recency biases in appointment decisions. We then implement several exercises to identify the sources of the additional votes for the ruling party and demonstrate that governors, while unlikely committing electoral fraud, likely exerted effort to stimulate turnout among ruling party supporters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although often at the heart of the public debate, the underlying determinants of political selection and voters' punishment of corrupt politicians remain poorly investigated. This paper contributes to our understanding of those issues by showing that places, such as Italy, where social norms are weak and trust in government is low, also feature adverse political selection and low levels of electoral punishment of corrupt politicians. Our measure of trust in government is based on the occurrence of cheating by Italian schoolteachers. We show that untrustworthiness is strongly related to both the malfeasance of local representatives and to low levels of electoral punishment of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a political explanation for the form of corporate governance captured by the degree of minority shareholder protection (MSP). Using a multi-stage game model of three-party competition under proportional electoral systems, I demonstrate that the electoral threshold-the minimum percentage of votes a party must receive to get at least one seat in parliamentary PR systems-is inversely related to the degree of MSP. This finding represents an important modification to formal models in the political economic literature that tends to omit the political process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new approach to spatial models of legislative elections in which voters have preferences over the bundles of roll call votes implied by candidate locations rather than over the locations themselves. With such preferences, voters with single-peaked, symmetric preferences and perfect information can sincerely prefer a distant candidate to a more proximate candidate. Moreover, negative agenda control in Congress makes such preference orderings inevitable, so party agenda control can allow majority party extremists to defeat more centrist minority party candidates. The model has implications for theories of parties in Congress, and spatial modeling more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper introduces the possibility of coalition government into the theoretical study of political accountability and analyzes the accountability of coalitions as a problem of team production. It is shown that coalition governments can be held accountable in the presence of an electoral alternative. Accountability becomes problematic if it is certain that at least one of the coalition parties stays in power after the elections. Such a coalition (sometimes called a ‘unity government’) can not be given appropriate collective incentives. To incentivate government performance, voters make one coalition party responsible for the outcome. This, however, makes the other coalition party interested in sabotage. The paper analyzes the resulting conflict and characterizes optimal voter strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Campaign finance regulation is an important issue for democracies. Proponents of stricter contribution limits believe it will improve competitiveness. Opponents argue that contribution caps are just a mask for incumbency protection. This paper comments on John Lott’s 2006 article in “Campaign Finance Reform and Electoral Competition” in Public Choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies a principal-agent model of the relationship between office-holder and an electorate, where everyone is initially uninformed about the office-holder’s ability. If office-holder effort and ability interact in the determination of performance in office, then an office-holder has an incentive to learn, i.e., raise effort so that performance becomes a more accurate signal of her ability. Elections reduce the learning effect, and the reduction in this effect may more than offset the positive “re-election concerns” effect of elections on effort, implying higher effort with appointment. When this occurs, appointment of officials may welfare-dominate elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the link between local budget outcomes and the intensity of party competition, measured as the margin of victory obtained by the incumbent in the previous local election (i.e. the difference between the vote share and 50%). Two competing hypotheses are tested in the paper. On the one hand, the Leviathan government hypothesis suggests that the lower the intensity of party competition is, the greater is the increase in the size of the local public sector, irrespective of the ideology of the party in power. On the other hand, the Partisan government hypothesis suggests that the incumbent will find it easier to advance its platform when intensity of competition is low (i.e., parties on the left/right will increase/decrease the size of the local public sector when the intensity of the challenge from the opposition is low). These hypotheses are tested with information on spending, own revenues and deficit for more than 500 Spanish local governments over 8 years (1992–1999), and information on the results of two local electoral contests (1991 and 1995). The evidence favors the Partisan hypothesis over the Leviathan one. We found that, for left-wing governments, spending, taxes and deficits increased as the electoral margin increases; whereas, for right-wing governments, a greater margin of victory led to reductions in all these variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the literature, it has been suggested that political budget cycles are context-conditional, i.e., do not occur in all countries or under all circumstances. What about the underlying economic conditions? It has already has been shown that recessionary expectations reinforce the political budget cycle. This paper argues theoretically that opportunistic policymakers expecting a recession during an election year allow the primary deficit to increase even more when the stock of debt is very high, but reduce the deficit by more during an expected boom (in an election year). For the empirical estimation we use panel data from Portuguese municipalities. Plots of average marginal effects for election years show that differences between high- and low-debt municipalities become more pronounced in stronger expected recessions as well as booms; the stronger effect on the deficit in high-debt municipalities is caused by changes on both the revenue and the expenditure side. A whole armada of robustness tests (non-linear effects, alternative specifications of excessive debt and forecasts, various methods to account for time effects and clustering, several sample restrictions) confirms our results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central result in the political economy of taxation is that the degree of redistribution is positively linked to income inequality. However, empirical evidence supporting such a relationship turns out to be mixed. This paper shows how the different empirical reactions can be rationalized within a simple model of tax avoidance and costly tax enforcement. By focusing on structure-induced equilibrium in which taxpayers vote over the size of the income tax and the level of tax enforcement, we show that more inequality may well reduce the extent of redistribution, depending on two opposing effects: the standard political effect and a negative tax base effect working through increases in the average level of tax avoidance and the share of enforcement expenditures in total tax revenue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the notion of cycle avoiding trajectories in majority voting tournaments and shows that they underlie and guide several apparently disparate voting processes. The set of alternatives that are maximal with respect to such trajectories constitutes a new solution set of considerable significance. It may be dubbed the Banks set, in recognition of the important paper by Banks (1985) that first made use of this set. The purpose of this paper is to informally demonstrate that the Banks set is a solution set of broad relevance for understanding group decision making in both cooperative and non-cooperative settings and under both sincere and sophisticated voting. In addition, we show how sincere and sophisticated voting processes can be viewed as mirror images of one another - embodying respectively, "memory" and "foresight." We also show how to develop the idea of a "sophisticated agenda," one in which the choice of what alternatives to propose is itself a matter of strategic calculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argues that John Ledyard's paper constitutes a theoretically persuasive case for other features--in particular, institutions and information concerning final policy outcomes--being fundamental, and not just complicating, elements of a satisfactory theory of electoral behavior. Indication when voting has zero opportunity costs; Discussion of rational-voters' equilibrium; Two positive lessons to be drawn from Ledyard's paper.

The impact of the fragmentation of executive and legislative bodies on the level and composition of government expenditure is a feature of politics that has attracted considerable attention from economists. However, previous authors have abstracted from two important concepts: ideology and intra-party politics. In this paper, we account for these two phenomena explicitly, and make two main contributions. First, we show that both intra- and inter-party ideological dispersion matter in explaining the level of sub-national public spending. Therefore, it is improper to consider parties as monolithic entities. We also show that ideological dispersion matters especially for current expenditures, and not so much for investment expenditures. To do so, we construct a panel database (2003-2010) comprising data from a survey that quantifies the policy preferences of party members who were candidates in Swiss elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the effect on vote shares and reelection probability for the incumbent's party from a signal indicating poor fiscal performance. In Norway, local governments with persistent deficits are placed in the Register for State Review and Approval of Financial Obligations ( Robek). In addition to increased central government monitoring, placement in Robek triggers a great deal of attention in the local media. It is thus expected to raise voter awareness of the fiscal stance of the local government. The results indicate that voters value the information embedded in this signal, and take it into account when casting their votes. Both the share of votes for the incumbent's party and the probability that the incumbent party stays in office is significantly reduced as a consequence of the local government being included in the register. The vote share for the incumbent is reduced by about three percentage points, while the reelection probability is reduced by about 0.12. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies empirically the voting outcomes of Egypt's first parliamentary elections after the Arab Spring. In light of the strong Islamist success at the polls, we explore the main determinants of Islamist versus secular voting. We identify two dimensions that affect voting outcomes at the constituency level: socioeconomic profile and the electoral institutional framework. Our results show that education is negatively associated with Islamist voting. Interestingly, we find significant evidence suggesting that higher poverty levels are associated with a lower vote share for Islamist parties. Exploiting the sequential voting setup, we show that later voting stages have not resulted in stronger support for the already winning Islamist parties (i.e., there is no bandwagon effect). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After War World II, a group of scholars began using rational choice models from economics and game theory to examine the manner in which public policies would be determined if men and women were as “rational” in their political activities as they were in other spheres of life. The implications of such an approach to politics were not obvious and took decades to be worked out. Indeed, they are still being worked out. The result was a new field of research that deepened our understanding of economic and political systems and their many interdependencies. This review essay provides an overview of the core findings of public choice during its first half century and of the boot-strapping process through which those findings emerged. Those core findings provide the idea base and results that ground most contemporary public choice research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a social choice analysis, using simulated data based on English general elections from 1992 through 2010, of the properties of three voting rules: First-Past-the-Post, the Alternative Vote, and the Coombs Rule. More specifically, the paper examines (1) the plurality, anti-plurality, and Condorcet status of candidates in each election and the interrelationships among these statuses, (2) the effects of strict and partial single-peakedness of voter preferences, and (3) the identity of winners, Condorcet efficiency, and the relationship between votes and seats under the three voting rules. The analysis considers only the case of three candidates and, in the manner of basic social choice theory, the set of candidates and voter preferences over them are taken to be fixed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, this paper examines differences between West and East European countries in their levels of satisfaction with the way democracy works. Compared to East European countries, satisfaction levels were considerably higher in Western countries (West Europe, North America, and Oceania). Moreover, there was considerably greater inequality in the distribution of satisfaction in East European, compared to Western, countries. When these facts were combined to construct “equity-sensitive” satisfaction averages, the gap between Western countries and East European countries was even greater than suggested by a comparison of average satisfaction levels. This raised the question of why satisfaction levels varied so markedly between these two sets of countries. A logit model suggested that a number of factors were important for determining whether people were satisfied with the way democracy worked in their countries. While there was a difference between Western countries and East European countries in their endowments of these satisfaction-inducing factors (income, gender, participation, education, among others), when the equations were estimated separately for the Western countries and East European countries, the coefficient responses associated with several of these factors also differed markedly between the two groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing literature has shown that special interest groups can have both growth enhancing and growth retarding effects on an economy. In either case, it is always assumed that the nature of the special interest groups remains constant over time. The hypothesis of this paper is that a dynamic relationship exists between politicians and lobbyists, i.e., that opportunities for rent extraction for special interest groups can evolve over time. In the short run politicians may support 'projects' proposed to them by lobbies, because they yield clear economic benefits. However, continued governmental support may imply a cost to society and yield rents to the lobbies. A theoretical framework in which established and new lobbies overlap is developed to model a government's incentives to behave in a manner consistent with the hypothesis. In this framework, voters can still rationally reelect politicians even if the latter support lobbies for an inefficiently long period of time, because if they did not, then the quality of the pool of new projects would deteriorate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we study the political economy of the inter-regional allocation of investment in infrastructure, in an effort to disentangle tactical and programmatic motives, where tactical politics refers to the discretionary allocation of investment to districts with more 'political clout' and programmatic politics refers to the allocation of investment according to certain 'objective' criteria (e.g., income level). We use a panel of data from the Spanish electoral districts for the period 1964-2004 to estimate an equation in which investment depends both on economic and political variables. The results show that tactical politics do matter since the districts receiving the most funds are those in which: (i) the incumbent's vote margin is low, (ii) few votes are needed to win an additional seat in the legislature, (iii) the central and regional governments are controlled by the same party, and (iv) regional parties play a pivotal role in the legislature. However, the results also show that programmatic politics matter, since inter-regional redistribution is shown to increase: (i) with the arrival of democracy and European Union funds, (ii) under leftist governments, and (iii) the weaker the correlation is between 'political clout' and regional income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a simultaneous equations model to analyze increases in intergovernmental fiscal transfers and associated vote changes in Portuguese legislative elections. The results suggest that election year increases in transfers by the central government to municipalities secure added votes, and that these transfers are targeted at jurisdictions where the government faces the risk of losing support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies changes in voting preferences over election campaigns. Building on the literature on spatial models and valence issues, we study whether (1) ideological distance to political parties, (2) assessments of party competence to handle different policy issues, and (3) voter-updated candidate evaluations are factors that explain shifts in voter choices in the weeks preceding the election. To test our hypotheses, we use data from three survey panels conducted for the 2008, 2011 and 2015 Spanish general elections. Our findings show that valence factors are more influential than ideological indifference to account for campaign conversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the presence of political budget cycles (PBCs) in the European Union using data from all 27 member states over the period 1997-2008, and explores their variability across countries and over time. Three basic results emerge: First, incumbent governments across the EU tend to engineer PBCs in order to enhance their re-election prospects. Second, PBCs are much larger and statistically more robust in the Eurozone countries than in the countries that have not yet adopted the euro. Third, the degree to which governments manipulate fiscal policy is negatively correlated with non-economic voting and positively correlated with electoral competitiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using electronic-markets data, this paper investigates partial determinants of change in Graham's price-earnings ratios (P/E) during US presidential election cycles. We document evidence over six elections, that as the probable winner of the election becomes clearer, markets surprisingly respond with decreases in P/E ratios. We consider that our results are consistent with rational markets reacting to presidential campaigns focused on influencing biased, sociotropic voters. These results should be of great interest to researchers concerned with market reaction to election cycles, public policy, and the overall role of election uncertainty in financial markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effect of legislative turnover on the size and composition of government expenditures in Indian states over the 1980-2000 period is examined. The paper finds that excessive turnover in Indian state elections results in inefficient government expenditure policy. First, the higher the turnover, the larger the government size. Second, excessive turnover affects the allocative efficiency of government expenditures by skewing the composition of government spending toward pure consumption and away from more productive investment expenditures. Third, the effect of turnover on fiscal policy is not linear; public consumption expenditure is convex in turnover, while public investment expenditure is concave in turnover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out a simple dynamic probabilistic voting model in which a government allocates a fixed budget across electoral districts that differ in their loyalties to the ruling party. The model predicts that the geographic pattern of spending depends on the way the government balances long-run 'machine politics' considerations and the more immediate concern to win over swing voters. Empirical results obtained from a panel of electoral districts in Québec provide robust evidence that districts which display loyalty to the incumbent government receive disproportionately more spending, especially close to an election, at odds with the standard 'swing voter' view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]