Suchergebnisse

This paper formulates a general theory of how political unrest influences public policy. Political unrest is motivated by emotions. Individuals engage in protests if they are aggrieved and feel that they have been treated unfairly. This reaction is predictable because individuals have a consistent view of what is fair. This framework yields novel insights about the sources of political influence of different groups in society. Even if the government is benevolent and all groups have access to the same technology for political participation, equilibrium policy can be distorted. Individuals form their view of what is fair taking into account the current state of the world. If fewer aggregate resources are available, individuals accept a lower level of welfare. This resignation effect in turn induces a benevolent government to procrastinate unpleasant policy choices.

An opinion poll on a representative sample of Italians suggests that it does. We focus on reforms increasing retirement age or cutting pension benefits. We find that individuals who are more informed about the costs and functioning of the pension system are more willing to accept reforms. We do not find that exposure to media coverage of pension issues significantly improves information. We perform a controlled experiment asking a random subsample of individuals to read a descriptive note on the Italian pension system before answering the questionnaire, finding that citizens reading the note are more willing to support pension reforms. Adapted from the source document.

We compare single ballot vs dual ballot elections under plurality rule, assuming sincere voting and allowing for partly endogenous party formation. Under the dual ballot, the number of parties is larger but the influence of extremist voters on equilibrium policy is smaller, because their bargaining power is reduced compared to a single ballot election. The predictions on the number of parties and on policy volatility are consistent with data on municipal elections in Italy, where cities with more (less) than 15,000 inhabitants have dual (single) ballots respectively.

This paper investigates the normative criteria that guide the allocation of a policy task to an elected politician versus an independent bureaucrat. The bureaucrat is preferable for technical tasks for which ability is more important than effort, or if there is great uncertainty about whether the policymaker has the required abilities. The optimal allocation of redistributive tasks is ambiguous, and depends on how the bureaucrat can be instructed. But irrespective of the normative conclusion, the politician prefers not to delegate redistributive policies. (JEL D72, D73, D82)

We estimate the effect of political regime transitions on growth with semi-parametric methods, combining difference in differences with matching, that have not been used in macroeconomic settings. Our semi-parametric estimates suggest that previous parametric estimates may have seriously underestimated the growth effects of democracy. In particular, we find an average negative effect on growth of leaving democracy on the order of ?2 percentage points implying effects on income per capita as large as 45 percent over the 1960- 2000 panel. Heterogenous characteristics of reforming and non-reforming countries appear to play an important role in driving these results.