Suchergebnisse

Defence date: 9 December 2019 ; Examining Board: Prof. Andrea Mattozzi, European University Institute (Supervisor); Prof. Andrea Ichino, European University Institute (Co-supervisor); Prof. James M. Snyder, Jr., Harvard University; Prof. Tommaso Nannicini, Università Bocconi ; In the first chapter, I study whether the introduction of primary elections induces more or less political polarization. Before 1976, only representatives from Indiana had to pass through the primaries, whereas the reform introduced primaries for Indiana's US senators too. Using a difference-in-differences, I show that primaries deliver less-polarized politicians and account for one-fifth of the pre-reform average ideological gap between parties. I interpret the results in the light of a conceptual framework in which primaries lower the cost of participating in candidate selection procedures, giving incentives to participate to moderate voters as well. The second chapter is coauthored with D. Iorio and A. Mattozzi. We use a newly collected dataset from 63 democracies, and we construct the tenure accumulated by the ruling party while in office. We merge these data with fiscal policy indicators. We find an expenditure elasticity of 0.061 and a deficit elasticity of 0.055 over the period 1972-2014. Our findings point into the direction of a honeymoon effect: the older is the coalition of parties, the more divisive tend to be the available policy choices, which require costly transfers in the form of public expenditure to keep coalition members together later on. In the third chapter, I exploit newly collected data on ties between local politicians in Italy from 1985 onwards, to study the relation between cross-party connections and future career prospects. Exploiting a difference-in-discontinuities design, I find that ruling coalition members connected with the runner-up are twice as likely to be promoted to the council in which the runner-up leads the opposition. The effect of connections with the leader of the rivals disappears when I consider appointments to boards of state-owned enterprises. These findings suggest that connected politicians act as political brokers and smooth the relationship between government and opposition. ; 1. Political Polarisation and Primary Elections 2. Good Old Spendthrift. The Fiscal Effects of Political Tenure 3. 'Keep Friends Close, But Enemies Closer': Connections and Political Careers

The thesis addresses three questions related to the main goals of elections, preference aggregation and politicians' accountability. In the first chapter, we explore the effect of adopting a closed or open list proportional representation system on the representation of minorities in Parliaments. The two systems differ in the possibility for the electorate to express preferential votes for candidates within party-lists. We show that minorities are proportionally represented only under open list, if voters can vote for a limited number of candidates. In all other cases, minorities are poorly represented, or not represented at all. The second chapter provides an explanation for sub-optimal policy making decisions by incumbents. We show that the possibility to stand for re-election can induce them to address less relevant issues, when more relevant ones are too difficult to solve. As failing to solve an issue constitutes a bad signal about their quality, politicians prefer to address easier ones, even if they are less important for the electorate. The goal of the third chapter is to axiomatically characterize a measure of ethnic voting, defined as the extent to which voting decisions are affected by ethnic motivations. The main property we impose on the measure is neutrality with respect to size of ethnic groups and total support of parties. We identify the class of size neutral measures of ethnic voting and investigate monotonicity axioms that are compatible with this property. ; (POLS - Sciences politiques et sociales) -- UCL, 2014

The thesis addresses three questions related to the main goals of elections, preference aggregation and politicians' accountability. In the first chapter, we explore the effect of adopting a closed or open list proportional representation system on the representation of minorities in Parliaments. The two systems differ in the possibility for the electorate to express preferential votes for candidates within party-lists. We show that minorities are proportionally represented only under open list, if voters can vote for a limited number of candidates. In all other cases, minorities are poorly represented, or not represented at all. The second chapter provides an explanation for sub-optimal policy making decisions by incumbents. We show that the possibility to stand for re-election can induce them to address less relevant issues, when more relevant ones are too difficult to solve. As failing to solve an issue constitutes a bad signal about their quality, politicians prefer to address easier ones, even if they are less important for the electorate. The goal of the third chapter is to axiomatically characterize a measure of ethnic voting, defined as the extent to which voting decisions are affected by ethnic motivations. The main property we impose on the measure is neutrality with respect to size of ethnic groups and total support of parties. We identify the class of size neutral measures of ethnic voting and investigate monotonicity axioms that are compatible with this property. ; (POLS - Sciences politiques et sociales) -- UCL, 2014

This dissertation examines three topics in political economy. Chapter 1 studies electoral cycles in public sector employment around US gubernatorial elections. Chapter 2 investigates the well-known fact that the US economy grew faster during Democratic presidencies and to what extent this phenomenon generalizes with respect to state-level elected offices. Chapter 3 studies how the use of best-worst voting rules influences the strategic position-taking behavior of political candidates in a spatial election model.

This dissertation studies the determinants of political institutions and their impact on economic development in various historical contexts. The first chapter asks: Why did the Catholic Church's power decline earlier in Northwestern Europe than in the East and South? I argue that differential demand for collective security in the face of the possible invasion by the "infidels" was an important factor in the Church-state relations. Catholic states had to cooperate to achieve military success and, therefore, delegated legal and fiscal authorities to the Church. To measure the Church's political power, I have assembled a novel dataset on appointments of bishops between 1198 and 1517. I find that in the dioceses located closer to the "infidels," bishops were differentially more likely to be selected by the pope or cathedral chapters than by secular rulers.The second chapter examines the economic origins of discrimination against Jewish entrepreneurs in the Russian Empire. Several changes in government policy between 1889 and 1894 freed large amounts of domestic private capital that now had to be reinvested in the equity market. I explore the relationship between anti-Jewish restrictions in the equity market, that began in 1890, and capital intensity of manufacturing industries. Using the RUSCORP database of all manufacturing corporations created in 1891–1902 and novel data on all Russian factories in 1890, I find a positive association between capital intensity and the probability of restrictions.In the third and final chapter, I study the role of labor mobility restrictions, that existed under serfdom, in shaping economic development. In the Russian Empire, twenty-three million people, who were serfs in 1858 and were not allowed to move to cities, were freed by 1870. I develop a structural model of rural-urban migration incorporating restrictions on mobility, features of the countryside and cities, and the travel costs. I estimate this model using novel detailed data on peasants, cities, and railroads in 1811–1910. The estimated parameters suggest that construction of railroads was the single most important factor explaining rural-urban migration. This is likely because allocation of rural labor was not efficient historically, independently from the impact of serfdom.

This thesis is comprised of three chapters. In the first chapter, I examine a voting model where two political parties have fixed positions on a unidimensional policy space but where the implemented policy is the convex combination of the two positions and study the effects of opinion polls on election results and social welfare. Voters are completely agnostic about the distribution of preferences and gain sequential and partial information through series of opinion polls. Voters' behavior is driven in part by regret minimization. The mass of undecided voters decreases monotonically with the number of polls, but may not necessarily disappear. Voters who remain undecided have centrist ideologies. Finally, social welfare is not necessarily increasing in the number of polls: having more polls is not always better. Features of the model are con firmed by empirical evidence. In the second chapter, which is a joint work with Agustin Casas and Guillermo Diaz, we evaluate the effect of an institutional provision designed to increase accountability of local officials, and we show that its implementation can lead to a distribution of power within the legislature which is not consistent with voters' true preferences. The cause of this inconsistency is the ballot design which asymmetrically affects the officials listed on it. We analyze the case of the Lima's 2013 city legislature recall referendum and show that the design of the referendum ballot had adverse and signifficant effects on the composition of the Lima's city legislature. We also show that the election results with more \neutral" ballot designs would have been signifficantly different, and the composition of the legislature would have been more representative of voters' true preferences. More specifically, we use our results to simulate the outcome of the election with a random order of candidates. Even though the voters' fatigue is still present, it affects all parties equally, obtaining a more faithful representation of the voters' preferences. Finally, the third chapter is a joint work with Marco Serena. For small electorates, the probability of casting the pivotal vote drives one's willingness to vote, however the existence of costs of voting incentivizes ones abstention. In two-alternative pivotal-voter models, this trade-off has been extensively studied under private information on the cost of voting. We complement the literature by providing an analysis under complete information, extending the analysis of Palfrey and Rosenthal [1983. A strategic calculus of voting. Public Choice. 41, 7-53]. If the cost of voting is sufficiently high at least for supporters of one of the two alternatives, the equilibrium is unique, and fully characterized. If instead the cost of voting is sufficiently low for everyone, we characterize three classes of equilibria and we find that all equilibria must belong to one of these three classes, regardless of the number of individuals. Furthermore we focus on equilibria which are continuous in the cost of voting. We show that this equilibrium refinement pins down a unique equilibrium. We conclude by discussing an application of our findings to redistribution of wealth. ; Polling in a Proportional Representation System / Christos Mavridis. -- The last shall be the first: failed accountability due to voters fatigue and ballot design / Christos Mavridis, Agustin Casas and Guillermo Diaz. -- Costly voting under complete information / Christos Mavridis, Marco Serena ; Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Economía ; Presidente: Pablo Amorós González; Secretario: Fracisco Marhuenda Hurtado; Vocal: Orestis Troumpounis

Defence date: 25 October 2017 ; Examining Board: Professor Andrea Mattozzi, EUI, Supervisor; Professor David K. Levine, EUI; Professor Ronny Razin, London School of Economics; Professor Alessandro Riboni, Ecole Polytechnique. ; My thesis is centred on the question of how information asymmetries affect elections. In particular, I am interested in how electoral concerns shape policy choices and in the consequences of institutional arrangements aimed to providing voters with information on politicians. In the first chapter I model a primary election, i.e. an election to choose a candidate. I show that if party members do not know the quality of candidates, high quality candidates distinguish themselves by proposing more extreme policies. As a result, introducing primary elections increases the quality of candidates but it might lead to policy polarization. The second chapter, which is my job market paper, develops a model in which a politician takes a repeated action over an issue and is evaluated by a voter through an election. I show that politicians who flip-flop, i.e. change their decision on the issue, are penalized by voters, because flip-flopping signals incompetence. As a result, politicians have an incentive to protect their reputation by inefficiently sticking to their initial policy choice. This decreases the quality of both policy and electoral choices. The paper also discusses how changes in transparency and term limits can discipline the behaviour of politicians. My third and final chapter describes a media market in which a set of news outlets compete to break a news concerning a politician in office; after receiving a signal of whether the politician is corrupt, media outlets can either fact-check and learn the truth, or publish the news immediately. We show that increasing the number of outlets competing in the market results in less fact-checking and more fake corruption scandals being published. By making the re-election of honest incumbents more difficult, the increase in competition might therefore be detrimental to social welfare. ; -- 1. Signalling Valence in Primary Elections -- 2. Flip-flopping and Electoral Concerns -- 3. Candidates, Leaks and Media (written with Antoni Italo De Moragas)