|
on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Pantelis Kammas (Athens University of Economics and Business); Maria Poulima (Department of Economics, University of Ioannina); Vassilis Sarantides (Department of Economics, University of Sheffield, UK) |
| Abstract: | This paper seeks to investigate the role of electoral personalism and long-run partisan loyalty on the allocation of local public goods. To this end, we exploit the discontinuity in the political landscape of Greece after a brief military junta (1967-1974) to link the parties established after 1974 with their political ancestors during the pre-dictatorial era. In particular, after 1974 Greece is a ‘new democracy’ with infant political parties that were trying to increase their political power by maintaining the networks of their (pre-junta) political ancestor parties. Consistent with expectations, empirical findings suggest that incumbents directed public investment resources to regions characterized by long-run loyalty in favor of their party. Moreover, our analysis illuminates the channel of this association by highlighting the important role of strong Members of Parliament (MPs) with ministerial positions. This result is in line with the literature suggesting that powerful MPs typically favor their home districts under an Open-List Proportional Representation (OLPR) electoral system. This is because OLPR induces intra-party competition as candidates compete over their co-partisans in order to get elected. In this political environment, powerful MPs attempt to maintain their networks of political patronage in the loyal prefectures of their affiliated party, whereas the party expropriates their electoral influence. |
| Keywords: | public investment, partisan loyalty, open-list proportional representation |
| JEL: | H1 H4 D7 |
| Date: | 2021–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:shf:wpaper:2021004&r= |
| By: | Casella, Alessandra; Macé, Antonin |
| Abstract: | Voters have strong incentives to increase their influence by trading votes, a practice indeed believed to be common. But is vote trading welfare-improving or welfare-decreasing? We review the theoretical literature and, when available, its related experimental tests. We begin with the analysis of logrolling -- the exchange of votes for votes, considering both explicit vote exchanges and implicit vote trades engineered by bundling issues in a single bill. We then focus on vote markets, where votes can be traded against a numeraire. We cover competitive markets, strategic market games, decentralized bargaining, and more centralized mechanisms, such as quadratic voting, where votes can be bought at a quadratic cost. We conclude with procedures allowing voters to shift votes across decisions -- to trade votes with oneself only -- such as storable votes or a modified form of quadratic voting. We find that vote trading and vote markets are typically inefficient; more encouraging results are obtained by allowing voters to allocate votes across decisions. |
| Keywords: | bundling; logrolling; quadratic voting; storable votes; vote markets; voting |
| JEL: | D6 D71 D72 |
| Date: | 2020–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15201&r= |
| By: | Bekkouche, Yasmine; Cagé, Julia; Dewitte, Edgard |
| Abstract: | What is the impact of campaign spending on votes? Does it vary across election types, political parties or electoral settings? Estimating these effects requires comprehensive data on spending across candidates, parties and elections, as well as identification strategies that handle the endogenous and strategic nature of campaign spending in multiparty systems. This paper provides novel contributions in both of these areas. We build a new comprehensive dataset of all French legislative and UK general elections over the 1993-2017 period. We propose new empirical specifications, including a new instrument that relies on the fact that candidates are differentially affected by regulation on the source of funding on which they depend the most. We find that an increase in spending per voter consistently improves candidates' vote share, both at British and French elections, and that the effect is heterogeneous depending on candidates' party. In particular, we show that spending by radical and extreme parties has much lower returns than spending by mainstream parties, and that this can be partly explained by the social stigma attached to extreme voting. Our findings help reconcile the conflicting results of the existing literature, and improve our understanding of why campaigns matter. |
| Keywords: | Campaign expenditures; Campaign finance reform; Campaign financing; Elections; Heterogeneous effects of campaign spending; Multiparty electoral data |
| JEL: | D72 H7 P48 |
| Date: | 2020–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15150&r= |
| By: | Amory Gethin (PSE - Paris School of Economics - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - ENS Paris - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS Paris - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, WIL - World Inequality Lab); Clara Martínez-Toledano (WIL - World Inequality Lab , Imperial College London); Thomas Piketty (PSE - Paris School of Economics - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - ENS Paris - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS Paris - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, WIL - World Inequality Lab) |
| Abstract: | This paper provides new evidence on the long-run evolution of political cleavages in 21 Western democracies by exploiting a new database on the vote by socioeconomic characteristic covering over 300 elections held between 1948 and 2020. In the 1950s-1960s, the vote for democratic, labor, social democratic, socialist, and affiliated parties was associated with lower-educated and low-income voters. It has gradually become associated with higher-educated voters, giving rise to "multi-elite party systems" in the 2000s-2010s: high-education elites now vote for the "left", while high-income elites continue to vote for the "right". This transition has been accelerated by the rise of green and anti-immigration movements, whose key distinctive feature is to concentrate the votes of the higher-educated and lower-educated electorate, respectively. Combining our database with historical data on political parties' programs, we provide evidence that the reversal of the educational cleavage is strongly linked to the emergence of a new "sociocultural" axis of political conflict. We also discuss the evolution of other political cleavages related to age, geography, religion, gender, and the integration of new ethnoreligious minorities. |
| Date: | 2021–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-03226118&r= |
| By: | Tur-Prats, Ana; Valencia Caicedo, Felipe |
| Abstract: | The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was one of the most devastating conflicts of the twentieth century, yet little is known about its long-term legacy. We show that the war had a long-lasting effect on social capital, voting behavior and collective memory. To this end we use geo-located data on historical mass graves, disaggregated modern-day survey data on trust, combined with modern electoral results. For econometric identification, we exploit deviations from the initial military plans of attack, using the historical (1931) highway network. We also employ a geographical Regression Discontinuity Design along the Aragon Front. Our results show a significant, negative and sizable relationship between political violence and generalized trust. We further scrutinize the trust results, finding negative effects of conflict on trust in institutions associated with the Civil War, but no effects when looking at trust on Post 1975 democratic institutions. We also find long-lasting results on voting during the Democratic Period (1977-2016), corresponding to the sided political repression implemented in the Aragon region. In terms of mechanisms-using a specialized survey on the Civil War, street names data and Francoist newsreels about the war-we find lower levels of political engagement and differential patterns of collective memory about this traumatic historical event. |
| Keywords: | Civil War; Collective Memory; conflict; History; Political Propaganda; Political Repression; Spain; Trust; voting |
| JEL: | D72 D74 N14 Z10 |
| Date: | 2020–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15091&r= |
| By: | Persichina, Marco (CERE - the Center for Environmental and Resource Economics) |
| Abstract: | This work shows that defective behaviors from the cooperative equilibrium in the management of common resources can be fueled and triggered by the presence of agents with myopic behaviors. The behavior implemented by naïve agents, even if performed with cooperative intent, can activate a dynamic of cascading defections from the cooperative strategy within the harvesters’ group. This paper demonstrates and discusses that the apparent and detectable decay of the cooperative choices in the dilemmas of common resources is not an exclusive and indisputable signal of an escalation in free-riding intentions but also an outcome of the present-biased preferences and myopic behaviors of the cooperative agents. Notably, within the context populated by conditional cooperators with a heterogeneous myopic discount factor, in the absence of information on agents’ intentions, the present-biased preferences can trigger a strategy that directs the community to excessively increase its harvesting level, even in presence of the other-regarding motives. Therefore, lowering cooperative behaviors can also be the effect of the absence of coordination instruments in response to the cognitive bias that influences human behaviors. |
| Keywords: | Present bias; Commons; Cooperation; Cascading Defections; Naïve Agent |
| JEL: | C71 C73 D01 D90 D91 Q20 Q29 |
| Date: | 2021–05–20 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:slucer:2021_008&r= |
| By: | Domínguez, J. Carlos |
| Abstract: | The MGG Programme is an innovative and ambitious initiative implemented by the German Development Institute (DIE) with the support of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). Although the scope and objectives have changed since it was launched in 2007, there is a clear vision that summarises its overarching goals: to construct a network that functions as an effective, high-quality, knowledge-based cooperation system for promoting global governance and sustainable development in the long run. In this respect, managing and crafting symbols, perceptions and collective identities within the MGG will remain crucial as a glue that enables collective efforts and maximises the network's overall impact. Under what conditions does cooperation among diverse groups become sustainable? How does the MGG look when analysed as part of the longer-term life trajectory of its participants? How do individual identities intersect with a collective sense of belonging to the programme and to the network? What is the role of the collective identity and the collective narrative that underpins MGG efforts? The main goal of this discussion paper is to apply oral history methodologies to answer some of these questions. The assumption is that the long-term impact of the MGG Programme depends on how well individual motivations, which are shaped by complex life trajectories, intersect with national interests and broader global cooperation narratives. By confronting theory with empirical evidence, this paper also draws some lessons and raises some interesting questions that may be useful for MGG staff to consider when planning future activities. |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:diedps:142021&r= |
| By: | Bandyopadhyay, Siddhartha; Cabrales, Antonio |
| Abstract: | We consider a model where agents differ in their 'types' which determines their voluntary contribution towards a public good. We analyze what the equilibrium composition of groups are under centralized and centralized choice. We show that there exists a top-down sorting equilibrium i.e. an equilibrium where there exists a set of prices which leads to groups that can be ordered by level of types, with the first k types in the group with the highest price and so on. This exists both under decentralized and centralized choosing. We also analyze the model with endogenous group size and examine under what conditions is top-down sorting socially ecient. We illustrate when integration (i.e. mixing types so that each group's average type if the same) is socially better than top-down sorting. Finally, we show that top down sorting is efficient even when groups compete among themselves. |
| Keywords: | Group-formation; integration; Public Good; Segregation; Top-down sorting |
| JEL: | D02 D64 D71 H41 |
| Date: | 2020–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15137&r= |
| By: | Blesse, Sebastian; Bordignon, Massimo; Boyer, Pierre; Carapella, Piergiorgio; Heinemann, Friedrich; Janeba, Eckhard; Raj, Anasuya |
| Abstract: | We explore the potential for six well-known reform proposals in the European Union such as Eurobonds and European Unemployment insurance through a survey of members of national parliaments in France, Germany and Italy in 2018. In addition, we address three institutional reforms and fiscal policies: a new tax-based own resource for the EU budget, majority voting of the European council on tax policy, and the extension of legislative initiative to the European Parliament. We find that (i) nationality and party alliance are key determinants of reform preferences, but the latter dominates quantitatively the former; (ii) on average Italian politicians and members belonging to the Socialists and Democrats group are much more in favour of further European integration than German policymakers and those from the European People's Party group; and (iii) populist parties in Germany and Italy have radically different views on the future of Europe. In the last part of the paper, we compare the answers for the same questions to the answers made by French and German parliament members in 2016. We find that (iv) there is considerable stability of views over time. |
| Date: | 2020–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15021&r= |
| By: | Giuliano, Paola; Wacziarg, Romain |
| Abstract: | We argue that low levels of social capital are conducive to the electoral success of populist movements. Using a variety of data sources for the 2016 US Presidential election at the county and individual levels, we show that social capital, measured either by the density of memberships in civic, religious and sports organizations or by generalized trust, is significantly negatively correlated with the vote share and favorability rating of Donald Trump around the time of the election. |
| Keywords: | populism; social capital; voting behavior |
| JEL: | D72 Z1 |
| Date: | 2020–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15140&r= |
| By: | Karlan, Dean S.; List, John |
| Abstract: | We conducted a fundraising experiment with an international development nonprofit organization in which a matching grant offered by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation raised more funds than one from an anonymous donor. The effect is strongest for solicitees who previously gave to other BMGF-supported, poverty charities. With supporting evidence from two other fundraising experiments as well as a survey experiment, we argue this is consistent with a quality signal mechanism. Alternative mechanisms are discussed, and not ruled out. The results help inform theories about charitable giving decision-making, and provide guidance to organizations and large donors on how to overcome information asymmetries hindering fundraising. |
| Keywords: | asymmetric information; Charitable fundraising; Matching grant; Public Goods |
| JEL: | D12 D71 D82 H41 O12 |
| Date: | 2020–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15221&r= |