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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Felipe Carozzi; Davide Cipullo; Luca Repetto |
| Abstract: | We study how partisan alignment across levels of government affects coalition formation and government stability using a regression discontinuity design and a large dataset of Spanish municipal elections. We document a positive effect of alignment on both government formation and stability. Alignment increases the probability that the most-voted party appoints the mayor and decreases the probability that the government is unseated during the term. Aligned parties also obtain sizeable electoral gains in the next elections over unaligned ones. We show that these findings are not the consequence of favoritism in the allocation of transfers towards aligned governments. |
| Keywords: | government stability, government formation, political alignment, inter-governmental relations |
| JEL: | D72 H20 H77 |
| Date: | 2022 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10047&r=cdm |
| By: | Bhattacherjee, Sanjay; Chakravarty, Satya R.; Sarkar, Palash |
| Abstract: | This article introduces a general model for voting games with multiple weight vectors. Each weight vector characterises a parameter representing a distinct aspect of the voting mechanism. Our main innovation is to model the winning condition by an arbitrary dichotomous function which determines whether a coalition is winning based on the weights that the coalition has for the different parameters. Previously studied multi-parameter games are obtained as particular cases of the general model. We identify a new and interesting class of games, that we call hyperplane voting games, which are compactly expressible in the new model, but not necessarily so in the previous models. For the general model of voting games that we introduce, we describe dynamic programming algorithms for determining various quantities required for computing different voting power indices. Specialising to the known classes of multi-parameter games, our algorithms provide unified and simpler alternatives to previously proposed algorithms. |
| Keywords: | weighted majority voting game, multi-parameter games, Boolean formula, voting power, dynamic programming |
| JEL: | C71 |
| Date: | 2022–11–14 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:115407&r=cdm |
| By: | Kim Leonie Kellermann |
| Abstract: | Do politically administered mass layoffs undermine trust and political interest? During the German reunification, formerly state-owned socialist firms in East Germany were privatized by the Treuhand, which came at the cost of massive job losses and public protest. I demonstrate that these activities had a detrimental effect on attitudes and political behavior of the affected individuals. Using survey data from the German Socio-economic Panel and election results, I find that East Germans who lost their jobs exhibit significantly lower trust levels, lower political interest and a lower identification with mainstream democratic parties, even up to 30 years after reunification. I corroborate the causality of the results using fixed-effects estimations and a placebo analysis, which fails to explain political disenchantment by reasons other than the Treuhand experience. I interpret the findings as the persistent, negative effect of perceived political mismanagement during a crucial phase of economic transition on long-run political identification. |
| Keywords: | East Germany, trust, political alienation, privatization, radical voting |
| JEL: | D72 E24 L33 |
| Date: | 2022 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:diw:diwsop:diw_sp1175&r=cdm |
| By: | Frédéric Docquier; Lucas Guichard; Stefano Iandolo; Hillel Rapoport; Ricardo Turati; Gonzague Vannoorenberghe |
| Abstract: | We analyze the long-run evolution of populism and explore the role of globalization in shaping such evolution. We use an imbalanced panel of 628 national elections in 55 countries over 60 years. A first novelty is our reliance on both standard (e.g., the ”volume margin”, or vote share of populist parties) and new (e.g., the ”mean margin”, a continuous vote-weighted average of populism scores of all parties) measures of the extent of populism. We show that levels of populism in the world have strongly fluctuated since the 1960s, peaking after each major economic crisis and reaching an all-time high – especially for right-wing populism in Europe – after the great recession of 2007-10. The second novelty is that when we investigate the ”global” determinants of populism, we look at trade and immigration jointly and consider their size as well as their skill-structure. Using OLS, PPML and IV regressions, our results consistently suggest that populism responds to globalization shocks in a way which is closely linked to the skill structure of these shocks. Imports of low-skill labor intensive goods increase both total and right-wing populism at the volume and mean margins, and more so in times of de-industrialization and of internet expansion. Low-skill immigration, on the other hand, tends to induce a transfer of votes from left-wing to right-wing populist parties, apparently without affecting the total. Finally, imports of high-skill labor intensive goods, as well as high-skill immigration, tend to reduce the volume of populism. |
| Keywords: | elections, populism, immigration, trade |
| JEL: | D72 F22 F52 J61 |
| Date: | 2022 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10068&r=cdm |