Suchergebnisse

Offering employment in the public sector in exchange for electoral support (patronage politics) and vote-buying are clientelistic practices frequently used by political machines. In the literature, these practices are typically studied in isolation. In this paper, we study how the interaction between these two practices (as opposed to having just one tool) affects economic development. We present a theoretical model of political competition, where, before the election, the incumbent chooses the level of state investment that can improve productivity in the private sector. This decision affects the income levels of employees in the private sector, and, thereby, the costs and effectiveness of vote-buying and patronage. We show that when the politician can use both clientelistic instruments simultaneously, his opportunity cost for clientelism in terms of foregone future taxes declines. As a result, the equilibrium amount of public investment is typically lower when both tools are available than otherwise.

Diversionary war theory holds that insecure leaders are more likely to pursue aggressive foreign policies than their more secure counterparts. This hypothesis rests on the premise that interstate dispute involvement helps leaders deter potential challenges against their rule. We offer strong support for this premise by looking at coup attempts. Cross-national time-series evidence from interstate dispute participation over the period 1960–2000 indicates that a country in a militarized confrontation with another state is about 60% less likely to experience a coup attempt in the subsequent year. Consistent with our hypothesis, we establish that it is mainly militarized involvement in disputes, rather than non-militarized involvement, that is associated with lower coup likelihood. The results are robust to controlling for a wide set of potential correlates of coups and remain qualitatively intact when we focus entirely on within-country variations in coup attempts and interstate disputes.

We provide a game‐theoretical model of manipulative election campaigns with two political candidates and a Bayesian voter. The latter is uncertain about how good the candidates are. Candidates take unobservable, costly actions to manipulate voter's opinion about their positions. We show that if the candidates differ in campaigning efficiency, and the voter receives the biased campaign messages with some noise, then the cost‐efficient candidate can win the election with higher probability than her opponent even when she is ex‐post an inferior choice for the voter. Our paper offers a novel informational justification for imposing limits on campaign spending and encouraging diversity in the supply of political information.