Suchergebnisse

Divided government is often thought of as causing legislative deadlock. I investigate the link between divided government and economic reforms using a novel data set on welfare reforms in US states between 1978 and 2010. Panel data regressions show that under divided government a US state is around 25% more likely to adopt a welfare reform than under unified government. An analysis of close elections providing quasi-random variation in the form of government and other robustness checks confirm this counter-intuitive finding. The empirical evidence is consistent with an explanation based on policy competition between governor, senate, and house.

Divided government is often thought of as causing legislative deadlock. I investigate the link between divided government and economic reforms using a novel data set on welfare reforms in US states between 1978 and 2010. Panel data regressions show that under divided government a US state is around 25% more likely to adopt a welfare reform than under unified government. An analysis of close elections providing quasi-random variation in the form of government and other robustness checks confirm this counter-intuitive finding. The empirical evidence is consistent with an explanation based on policy competition between governor, senate, and house.

Does stiffer electoral competition reduce political shirking? For a micro-analysis of this question, I construct a new data set spanning the years 2005 to 2012 covering biographical and political information about German Members of Parliament (MPs), including their attendance rates in voting sessions. For the parliament elected in 2009, I show that indeed opposition party MPs who expect to face a close race in their district show significantly and relevantly lower absence rates in parliament beforehand. MPs of governing parties seem not to react significantly to electoral competition. These results are confirmed by an analysis of the parliament elected in 2005, by several robustness checks, and also by employing an instrumental variable strategy exploiting convenient peculiarities of the German electoral system. The study also shows how MPs elected via party lists react to different levels of electoral competition. [Copyright Elsevier B.V.]

Does stiffer electoral competition reduce political rent-seeking behavior? For a microanalysis of this question, I construct a new data set spanning the years 2005 to 2012 covering biographical and political information of German members of parliament (MPs) and including attendance rates in voting sessions for the first time. For the parliament elected in 2009, I show that indeed MPs who expect to face a close race in their district show significantly and relevantly lower absence rates in parliament beforehand. MPs of governing parties seem to react less to electoral competition. These results are confirmed by an analysis of the parliament elected in 2005, by several robustness checks, and also by employing an instrumental variable strategy exploiting convenient peculiarities of the German electoral system. This study is also the first to analyze how MPs elected via party lists react to different levels of electoral competition.

We investigate whether the decision to experiment with novel policies is influenced by electoral incentives. Our empirical setting is the U.S. welfare reform in 1996, which marked the most dramatic shift in social policy since the New Deal. We find that electoral incentives matter: governors with strong electoral support are less likely to experiment with policies than governors with little electoral support. Yet, governors who cannot be reelected experiment more than governors striving for reelection. The importance of electoral incentives is robust to controlling for governor ideology, voter preferences for redistribution, the influence of the legislature, or for learning among states. A comparison of the role of governor ideology and electoral incentives reveals that both contribute about equally to policy experimentation.

We study the political economy of policy innovations during the U.S. welfare reform in 1996. Specifically, we investigate how reputation concerns among governors influence the decision to experiment with welfare policies. In line with a political agency model, our empirical results suggest that governors with high reputation among the electorate are less likely to experiment with welfare policies than governors with low reputation. Yet, governors with high reputation who are less concerned about reelection actually experiment more than governors striving for reelection. Overall, our findings imply that reelection concerns may inhibit innovation in the public sector.