Suchergebnisse

Policy in coalition governments (a) depends on negotiations between parties that (b) continue between elections. No extant means of predicting policy - bargaining power indices, vote shares, seat shares, polling, veto players or measures of electoral competitiveness - recognizes both of these facts. We conceptualize, estimate and validate the first dynamic measure of parties' bargaining leverage intended to predict policy and politics. We argue that those parties with the greatest leverage in policy negotiations are those with the highest probability of participating in an alternative government, were one to form. Combining a large set of political polls and an empirical coalition formation model developed with out-of-sample testing, we estimate coalition inclusion probabilities for parties in a sample of 21 parliamentary democracies at a monthly frequency over four decades. Applications to government spending and to the stringency of environmental policy show leverage from coalition inclusion probabilities to be strongly predictive while the primary alternatives - vote shares, seat shares and polls - are not.

In a recent article, Rogowski and Kayser introduced a claim to the political economy literature that majoritarian electoral systems: (a) systematically privilege consumers relative to producers and, consequently, (b) reduce real prices. The authors, modifying an established model of regulation, showed that, within a competitive political system, politicians favour those who provide only votes (consumers) over those who provide both money and votes (producers). When producers provide only money, the intuition becomes apparent even without a model: politicians respond more to voters under (majoritarian) systems in which a small change in vote share can produce a large change in seat share. Cross-sectional evidence for the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries in 1990 was strongly supportive, suggesting that real prices were, all else equal, about 10 per cent lower in the averageOECDcountry with single-member district (SMD) electoral systems than in those that used some form of proportional representation (PR).As with all new empirical claims, healthy scepticism is warranted. Indeed, recent research in related areas has to be contrasted with – but it has not contradicted – these price results, associating proportional electoral arrangements with more positive social welfare outcomes including (a) less income inequality, (b) higher public spending, or, in combination with central banking institutions, (c) greater price stability. We acknowledge the possible incongruity of these results with those of Rogowski and Kayser; after all, verification of the price effects would suggest a more complicated relationship between electoral institutions and social welfare than is indicated in the extant literature.

In a recent article, Rogowski and Kayser introduced a claim to the political economy literature that majoritarian electoral systems: (a) systematically privilege consumers relative to producers and consequently, (b) reduce real pries. The authors, modifying an established model of regulation showed that, within a competitive political system, politicians favor those who provide only votes over those who provide both money and votes. When producers provide only money, the intuition become apparent even without a model: politicians respond more to voters under systems in which a small change in vote share can produce a large change in seat share. Cross-sectional evidence for the OECD countries in 1990 was strongly supportive, suggesting that real prices were, all else equal, about 10 percent lower in the average OECD country with single-member district electoral systems than in those that used some form of proportional representation. The relationship observed between electoral systems and prices in Rogowski and Kayser could prove anomalous, spurious, or unfounded for too many reasons. As a necessary prologue to the data analysis, the author next considered issues of measurement and of model specification. The author also showed the panel data and the empirical testing in detail. Different model was tested.

Abstract
How do voters form accurate expectations about the strength of political candidates in constituency elections if there are no reliable constituency polls available? We argue that voters can use national election polls and past election results to increase the accuracy of their expectations. A survey experiment during the German federal election of 2021 confirms that the provision of national election polls and past results increases the accuracy of voters' expectations. The analysis further shows that voters leverage the information to update their beliefs. The results have relevant implications for debates about belief formation in low-information environments.