Suchergebnisse

"Es hat sich gezeigt, dass politische Zersplitterung ein wichtiger Faktor für die
Wahlbeteiligung ist. Wir stellen einen empirischen Ansatz vor, der den Einfluss
von zwei unterschiedlichen Dimensionen der Zersplitterung herausarbeitet,
nämlich die Anzahl der Parteien und die Größenunterschiede zwischen diesen
Parteien. Dies ermöglicht, Größe, Bedeutung und Richtung der individuellen
Einflüsse eines jeden Elements zu beurteilen, was in der Forschung bisher vernachlässigt
worden ist. Unsere empirische Analyse der flämischen Kommunalwahlen
im Jahr 2000 zeigt: je mehr Parteien zur Wahl antreten, desto geringer
ist die Wahlbeteiligung. Die Größenunterschiede zwischen den Parteien haben
einen positiven, wenn auch nicht signifikanten Einfluss auf die Wahlbeteiligung." (Autorenreferat)

"In vielen empirischen Arbeiten werden die günstigen Auswirkungen des
Sozialkapitals im Allgemeinen unterstrichen. Neueste Veröffentlichungen sind
indes dazu übergegangen, ausdrücklich die Bedeutung der Unterscheidung
zwischen verschiedenen Arten von Sozialkapital hervorzuheben. Ganz besonders
unterscheidet man zwischen homogenen (oder bonding) und heterogenen
(oder bridging) Netzwerken, wobei argumentiert wird, dass letztere mit größerer
Wahrscheinlichkeit positive externe Effekte erzeugen als die ersten. Die
empirische Operationalisierung dieser theoretischen Unterscheidung ist jedoch
bisher eher unterentwickelt. In diesem Papier wird ein erster Schritt zur Lösung
dieser Frage getan, indem die Diversität von (freiwilligen) Verbandsmitgliedschaften
im Hinblick auf einige sozio-ökonomische Charakteristika untersucht
wird. Die vorgeschlagene Methodologie wird auf Daten einer flämischen
Erhebung zu freiwilligen Vereinsmitgliedschaften angewendet. Diese Analyse
zeigt, dass Freizeitclubs und humanitäre Verbände wie z.B. das Rote Kreuz zu
den heterogeneren (bridging) Vereinigungen, während Frauengruppen und
Seniorenclubs zu den homogeneren (bonding) gehören." (Autorenreferat)

Abstract
Building on agency-theoretical perspectives of public bureaucracies, we argue that politician–bureaucrat preference alignment can have important implications for bureaucrats' pay. We study such private gains to bureaucrats from their political alignment with elected politicians using detailed data on all 1,632 top administrators active in all Norwegian municipalities over a period of 25 years (1991–2015). Whereas existing studies generally rely on proxies for politician–bureaucrat political alignment, a rare feature of our data allows measuring it directly since 27% of top bureaucrats ran for political office. We focus explicitly on individuals at the very top of the administrative hierarchy and are able to separate the intensive margin (i.e., wage increases) from any additional effects at the extensive margin (i.e., new appointments). Using close elections for inference in a regression discontinuity analysis, we find that politician–bureaucrat alignment significantly increases top bureaucrats' wage even in the Norwegian civil service system. This has important implications also from a theoretical perspective. Our results indeed go against predictions from models with policy-motivated bureaucrats, but are consistent with politically aligned principal–agent matches being more productive.

Young voters' political behaviour differs from the rest of the electorate in that they exhibit lower turnout and express different preferences. This article examines the impact of information provision about central government on young voters' perception of government performance and their voting behaviour. We randomly exposed a sample of university students to positive, neutral or negative information before the 2017 Portuguese local elections. Treated voters update their perceptions, more so when exposed to negative news. This negativity bias is stronger for first-time voters. We find no evidence of an average treatment effect on voting behaviour, but negative information significantly affects initially undecided voters. Our results indicate that sensitivity to information is heterogeneous and that some young voters may be more prone to manipulation through the provision of negative news. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

AbstractA large number of studies show that war and terrorism have a significant effect on individuals' political attitudes. Yet, this extensive literature does not inspect the mechanisms behind this effect. This paper concentrates on one possible mechanism, by differentiating between the human toll of terror and war and the economic costs they cause. For these purposes we focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and use variation in the level of violence across time and space together with localities' different exposure to the tourism sector to estimate their respective effects on political attitudes. Our results suggest that whereas fatalities from the conflict make Israelis more willing to grant territorial concessions to the Palestinians, the associated economic costs of conflict do not have a consistent significant effect on individuals' political attitudes.

In both public administration and economics, efficiency is brought forward as an important criterion for evaluating administrative actions. Clearly, its value as an assessment principle depends on our ability to adequately measure efficiency. This article argues that citizen's coproduction in public services requires a careful reassessment of how we approach the measurement of productive efficiency in public service delivery. Theoretically, we illustrate that using observable outcomes (e.g., library circulation, school results, health outcomes, fires extinguished, crimes solved) as output indicators is inappropriate and leads to biased estimates of public service providers' productive efficiency. This bias arises because citizens co-determine final outputs, leaving them at least partly beyond the service providers' control. Empirically, we find supportive evidence of both the existence and importance of such "demand-induced" bias. (author's abstract)

"Provision of most public goods (e.g., health care, libraries, education, police, fire protection, utilities) can be characterised by a two-stage production process. In the first stage, basic inputs (e.g., labour and capital) are used to generate service potential (e.g., opening hours, materials), which is then, in the second stage, transformed into observed outputs (e.g., school outcomes, library circulation, crimes solved). As final outputs are also affected by demand-side factors, conflating both production stages likely leads to biased inferences about public productive (in)efficiency and its determinants. Hence, this paper uses a specially tailored, fully non-parametric efficiency model allowing for both outlying observations and heterogeneity to analyse efficient public good provision in stage one only. We employ a dataset comprising all 290 Flemish public libraries. Our findings suggest that ideological stance of the local government, wealth and density of the local population and source of library funding (i.e., local funding versus intergovernmental transfers) strongly affect library productive efficiency. (Author's abstract)

We study the private gains to bureaucrats from their political alignment with elected politicians. Whereas existing studies generally rely on proxies for politician-bureaucrat political alignment, a rare feature of our data allows measuring it directly since 27% of bureaucrats ran for political office. We focus explicitly on individuals at the very top of the administrative hierarchy, and are able to separate the intensive margin (i.e. wage increases) from any additional effects at the extensive margin (i.e. new appointments). Using close elections for inference, we find that politician-bureaucrat alignment significantly increases top bureaucrats' wage even in the Norwegian civil service system. Our results go against predictions from models with policy-motivated bureaucrats, but are consistent with politically aligned principal-agent matches being more productive.

""Social and/or political involvement within the population is often argued to enhance public sector performance. The underlying idea is that engagement fosters political awareness and interest and increases the public's monitoring ability. Still, weak fiscal autonomy can undermine voters' interest in and demand for an efficient production of public services. In our contribution, we test whether and how voter involvement in the political sphere is related to government performance - in terms of its efficiency - using a broad panel of German municipalities. Our results suggest that voter involvement indeed has a positive impact on cost efficiency. Crucially, however, this efficiency-enhancing effect of voter involvement is significantly positively affected by local governments' fiscal autonomy." (author's abstract)

Previous work on the relation between school inputs and students' educational attainment typically fails to account for the fact that schools can adjust their grading structure, even though such actions are likely to affect students' incentives. Our theoretical model shows that, depending on schools' and students' reactions to resource changes, the overall effect of spending on education outcomes is ambiguous. Schools, however, adjust their grading structure following resource shifts, such that grade inflation is likely to accompany resource-driven policies. Exploiting a quasi-experimental policy intervention in the Netherlands (where the grading system relies on both standardized central and schoollevel exams), we find that additional resources benefit educational attainment only when they are substantial, but induce grade inflation otherwise. (author's abstract)