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on Positive Political Economics |
| By: | Casas-Arce, Pablo (Universitat Pompeu Fabra); Saiz, Albert (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania) |
| Abstract: | We develop a model that nests previous explanations for women under-representation in positions of power. Focusing on democratic electoral dynamics, our framework delineates the three types of mechanisms that may be at play: consumer demand, candidate supply, and internal party dynamics beyond electoral markets. We use Spain's Equality Law, requiring a 40 percent female quota in electoral lists, to test the alternative theories. The law was enacted by the social-democratic party after the surprise parliamentary electoral results following the Madrid terrorist bombings, and was therefore completely unexpected by regional political machines. The law only applied to towns with populations above 5000, so we can use a treatment-control, before-and-after discontinuity design to learn about the impact of female politicians in local elections. Our evidence is most consistent with the existence of entrenched male-dominated political machines capturing influential power positions within the parties. |
| Keywords: | female political representation |
| JEL: | J16 J71 |
| Date: | 2011–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp5645&r=pol |
| By: | Ari Aisen; Francisco José Veiga |
| Abstract: | The purpose of this paper is to empirically determine the effects of political instability on economic growth. Using the system-GMM estimator for linear dynamic panel data models on a sample covering 169 countries, and 5-year periods from 1960 to 2004, we find that higher degrees of political instability are associated with lower growth rates of GDP per capita. Regarding the channels of transmission, we find that political instability adversely affects growth by slowing productivity growth and, to a smaller degree, physical and human capital accumulation. Finally, economic freedom and ethnic homogeneity are beneficial to growth, while democracy may have a slight negative effect. |
| Date: | 2010–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:chb:bcchwp:568&r=pol |
| By: | Cousins, Mel |
| Abstract: | Most studies of the Irish Parliamentary party and its leaders have, understandably, focused on issues directly concerning Ireland. There have been relatively few studies of the role of the Parliamentary party in broader British politics, particularly in relation to social issues. In order to assess this issue over a period of time, this study examines the division lists of the House of Commons in relation to votes on selected ‘social’ issues in the 1880s. An analysis of the Irish Parliamentary party’s voting record in the 1880s throws some light on the party’s broader views on social issues. The study examines the voting behaviour of the Irish Parliamentary party in the context of that of the other major political groupings in the 1880s Parliament. It looks in particular at i) The extent to which the Irish party members actually voted in comparison with MPs overall; ii) the internal cohesion of the Irish Parliamentary party votes, i.e. the extent to which those members voting expressed the same views; iii) their ‘likeness’ with the voting patterns of other major political groupings, i.e. the extent to which the Irish party votes were in line with other groups; and iv) the extent to which (if any) this changed over time. |
| Keywords: | Roll-call voting analysis; Irish parliamentary party; social issues; nineteenth century Irish history |
| JEL: | I00 D72 |
| Date: | 2011–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:30102&r=pol |
| By: | Zudenkova, Galina |
| Abstract: | This paper contrasts the incentives for cronyism in business, the public sector and politics within an agency problem model with moral hazard. The analysis is focused on the institutional differences between private, public and political organizations. In business, when facing a residual claimant contract, a chief manager ends up with a relatively moderate first-best level of cronyism within a firm. The institutional framework of the public sector does not allow explicit contracting, which leads to a more severe cronyism problem within public organizations. Finally, it is shown that the nature of political appointments (such that the subordinate's reappointment is conditioned on the chief's re-election) together with implicit contracting makes political cronyism the most extreme case. |
| Keywords: | Cronyism; Meritocracy; Manager; Bureaucrat; Politician. |
| JEL: | D73 D86 D72 |
| Date: | 2011–03–15 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:30231&r=pol |
| By: | Emmanuel Flachaire (GREQAM - Groupement de Recherche en Économie Quantitative d'Aix-Marseille - Université de la Méditerranée - Aix-Marseille II - Université Paul Cézanne - Aix-Marseille III - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) - CNRS : UMR6579); Cecilia Garcìa-Peñalosa (GREQAM - Groupement de Recherche en Économie Quantitative d'Aix-Marseille - Université de la Méditerranée - Aix-Marseille II - Université Paul Cézanne - Aix-Marseille III - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) - CNRS : UMR6579); Maty Konte (GREQAM - Groupement de Recherche en Économie Quantitative d'Aix-Marseille - Université de la Méditerranée - Aix-Marseille II - Université Paul Cézanne - Aix-Marseille III - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) - CNRS : UMR6579) |
| Abstract: | After a decade of research on the relationship between institutions and growth, scholars in this field seem to be divided. Economic institutions perform well in growth regressions and a body of literature argues that this supports the key importance of institutions for development. Other authors maintain that the type of constraints that the recent theoretical literature describes are the more stable political institutions, and these have been found to play no role in empirical growth analyses. In this paper we re-examine the role that institutions play in the growth process using cross-section and panel data for both developed and developing economies over the period 1970-2000. Our results indicate that the data is best described by an econometric model with two growth regimes. Political institutions are the key determinant of which growth regime an economy belongs to, while economic institutions have a direct impact on growth rates within each regime. These findings support the hierarchy of institutions hypothesis, whereby political institutions set the stage in which economic institutions and policies operate. |
| Keywords: | growth; institutions; cross-country regressions; mixture regressions |
| Date: | 2011–04–14 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-00586038&r=pol |
| By: | Alassane Drabo (CERDI - Centre d'études et de recherches sur le developpement international - CNRS : UMR6587 - Université d'Auvergne - Clermont-Ferrand I) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the link between health inequalities, air pollution and political institutions. In health economics literature, many studies have assessed the association between environmental degradation and health outcomes. This paper extends this literature by investigating how air pollution could explain health inequalities both between and within developing countries, and the role of political institutions in this relationship. Theoretically, we argue that differential in exposition to air pollution among income classes, prevention ability against health effect of environment degradation, capacity to respond to disease caused by pollutants and susceptibility of some groups to air pollution effect are sufficient to expect a positive link between air pollution and income related health inequality. Furthermore, in democratic countries, this heterogeneity in the health effect of pollution may be mitigated since good institutions favour universal health policy issues, information and advices about hygiene and health practices, and health infrastructures building. Our econometric results show that sulphur dioxide emission (SO2) and particulate matter (PM10) are in part responsible for the large disparities in infant and child mortalities between and within developing countries. In addition, we found that democratic institutions play the role of social protection by mitigating this effect for the poorest income classes and reducing the health inequality it provokes. |
| Keywords: | health inequality;air pollution;political institutions;social protection |
| Date: | 2011–04–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-00584997&r=pol |
| By: | Luis Diaz-Serrano (Universitat Rovira i Virgili and CREIP); Andrés Rodríguez-Pose (London School of Economics and IMDEA Social Sciences Institute) |
| Abstract: | This paper analyses whether the different powers and resources at the disposal of local and regional governments across Europe deliver greater satisfaction with political institutions and lead to greater personal happiness. The analysis uses microdata from the four available waves of the European social survey (2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008), including more than 160,000 observations of individuals living in 29 European countries. Our results reveal that political and fiscal decentralization have a positive and significant effect on individuals' overall happiness. Fiscal decentralization also exerts a significant effect on the level of satisfaction with political and economic institutions and with the education and health systems, whereas the effect of political decentralization on these variables is more limited. The results show that citizens seem to be happier with the actual capacity of their local governments to deliver than with the general principle that they can have a say on their daily politics and policies. |
| Keywords: | Happiness; well-being; satisfaction; fiscal and political decentralization; Europe |
| JEL: | H11 H77 |
| Date: | 2011–04–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imd:wpaper:wp2011-07&r=pol |
| By: | Polborn, Sarah (Department of Economics, Aarhus School of Business) |
| Abstract: | The costs of the current suboptimal carbon abatement policy are likely in the range of 3 to 6 trillion 2005 US dollars. Using methods from the political economy of environmental policy, the paper develops a new carbon abatement policy instrument, carbon securities. A carbon security entitles its owner to a fixed proportion of ex ante unknown total emissions. This creates an additional group of stakeholders on the side of the issue that has traditionally been underrepresented. The advantages over existing systems include an equilibrium carbon price closer to the social optimum, a more predictable environmental policy, and higher investment in abatement technology |
| Keywords: | Carbon abatement; environmental policy; global warming; interest groups; lobbying; policy instrument design; political process |
| JEL: | D72 Q54 Q58 |
| Date: | 2011–09–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:aareco:2010_019&r=pol |
| By: | Monica Martinez-Bravo; Gerard Padró i Miquel; Nancy Qian; Yang Yao |
| Abstract: | We use unique survey data to study whether the introduction of local elections in China made local leaders more accountable towards local constituents. We develop a simple model to predict the effects on different policies of increasing local leader accountability, taking into account that there is an autocratic upper government. We exploit variation in the timing of the top-down introduction of elections across villages to estimate the causal effects of elections and find that elections affected policy outcomes in a way that is consistent with the predicted effects of increased local leader accountability. |
| JEL: | H4 P16 |
| Date: | 2011–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:16948&r=pol |
| By: | Michel Le Breton; Maria Montero; Vera Zaporozhets |
| Abstract: | We analyze and evaluate the different decision rules describing the Council of Ministers of the EU starting from 1958 up to date. All the existing studies use the Banzhaf index (for binary voting) or the Shapley-Shubik index (for distributive politics). We argue that the nucleolus can be considered an appropriate power measure in distributive situations and an alternative to the Shapley-Shubik index. We then calculate the nucleolus and compare the results of our calculations with the conventional measures. In the second part, we analyze the power of the European citizens as measured by the nucleolus under the egalitarian criterion proposed by Felsenthal and Machover (1998), and characterize the first best situation. Based on these results we propose a methodology for the design of the optimal (fair) decision rules. We perform the optimization exercise for the earlier stages of the EU within a restricted domain of voting rules, and conclude that Germany should receive more than the other three large countries under the optimal voting rule. |
| Date: | 2011–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdx:dpaper:2011-03&r=pol |
| By: | Cervellati, Matteo (University of Bologna); Sunde, Uwe (University of St. Gallen) |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the empirical role of violent conflicts for the causal effect of democracy on economic growth. Exploiting within-country variation to identify the effect of democratization during the “Third Wave”, we find evidence that the effect of democratization is weaker than reported previously once one accounts for the incidence of conflict, while the incidence of conflict itself significantly reduces growth. The results show in turn that permanent democratic transitions significantly reduce the incidence and onset of conflict, which suggests that part of the positive growth effect of democratization arises because democratization reduces conflict incidence. When accounting for the role of violence during democratization, we find evidence that peaceful transitions to democracy have a significant positive effect on growth that is even larger than reported in the previous literature, while violent transitions to democracy have no, or even negative, effects on economic growth. |
| Keywords: | democratization, armed conflict, civil war, economic growth, democratization scenario, peaceful transition |
| JEL: | O43 N10 N40 |
| Date: | 2011–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp5643&r=pol |
| By: | Buechel, Berno |
| Abstract: | We discuss to which extent the median voter theorem extends to the domain of single-peaked preferences on median spaces. After observing that on this domain a Condorcet winner need not exist, we show that if a Condorcet winner does exist, then it coincides with the median alternative ('the median voter'). Based on this result, we propose two non-cooperative games that implement the unique strategy-proof social choice rule on this domain. -- |
| Date: | 2011 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:kitwps:17&r=pol |