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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Marco Battaglini; Valerio Leone Sciabolazza; Eleonora Patacchini |
| Abstract: | We study vote trading among U.S. Congress members. By tracking roll-call votes within bills across five legislatures and politicians' personal connections made during the school years, we document a propensity of connected legislators to vote together that depends on how salient the bill is to the politicians' legislative agenda. Although this activity does not seem to enhance U.S. Congress members' legislative effectiveness, vote trading is a strong predictor of future promotions to position of leadership. |
| JEL: | D72 D74 D91 |
| Date: | 2023–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:31169&r=cdm |
| By: | Awad, Emiel; Minaudier, Clement |
| Abstract: | Interest groups are often highly selective regarding which policymakers to meet and when to meet them. How valuable are private meetings with policymakers as a function of their preferences and bargaining power, and when do interest group prefer access early or late in the legislative process? To answer these questions, we study a model of informational lobbying with a collective decision-making body and endogenous reforms. We show that the value of gaining private access to legislators depends not only on their ideological alignment with the interest group, but also on their ideological alignment with the median of the legislature and with the agenda setter. Moreover, the value of access to a particular legislator depends on the ideological alignment between the median and the agenda setter, even when that legislator is neither of them. Finally, we show that the agenda setter herself may not be a particularly valuable target and that she can be influenced by a simple cheap talk recommendation even though the interest group has transparent motives. |
| Date: | 2023–04–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:8z4ax&r=cdm |
| By: | Juan Herreño; Matias Morales; Mathieu Pedemonte |
| Abstract: | We study the reaction of voters to shifts in local economic conditions. Using the departure from the gold standard of US trading partners in 1931 and the US in 1933, we exploit heterogeneity in export destinations, creating local differences in expenditure-switching in US counties by isolating the aggregate effects of the monetary shocks using time fixed effects. We find significant changes in local voting behavior in response to both shocks, one originating abroad, and another domestically. The response to both shocks have similar magnitude. We argue that voters punished and rewarded incumbents regardless of the shocks’ origin, implying strong feedback from economic conditions to electoral outcomes. |
| Keywords: | US Elections; Gold Standard; Economic Voting |
| JEL: | D72 N42 E61 |
| Date: | 2023–03–29 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedcwq:95894&r=cdm |
| By: | Thorsten Drautzburg; Igor Livshits; Mark L. J. Wright |
| Abstract: | The political process in the United States appears to be highly polarized: Data show that the political positions of legislators have diverged substantially, while the largest campaign contributions come from the most extreme donor groups and are directed to the most extreme candidates. Is the rise in campaign contributions the cause of the growing political polarization? In this paper, we show that, in standard models of campaign contributions and electoral competition, a free-rider problem among potential contributors leads naturally to polarization of campaign contributors but without any polarization in candidates’ policy positions. However, we go on to show that a modest departure from standard assumptions — allowing candidates to directly value campaign contributions (because of “ego rents” or because lax auditing allows them to misappropriate some of these funds) — delivers the ability of campaign contributions to cause policy divergence. Consistent with the model, we document that a candidate’s share of contributions in U.S. House of Representatives races is higher when her opponent's agenda is more extreme. |
| Keywords: | Polarization; Campaign Contributions; Agendas |
| JEL: | D72 H41 |
| Date: | 2022–09–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedpwp:94717&r=cdm |
| By: | Frédéric Docquier; Lucas Guichard; Stefano Iandolo; Hillel Rapoport; Riccardo Turati |
| 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 rst 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 aecting the total. Finally, imports of high-skill labor intensive goods, as well as high-skill immigration, tend to reduce the volume of populism. |
| Keywords: | Populism;Globalization |
| Date: | 2023–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cii:cepidt:2023-10&r=cdm |