Suchergebnisse

The election victory in the Netherlands for the Party for Freedom fits into a wider picture of European radical-right populism.

AbstractBehavioral economists and social psychologists have shown that extrinsic motivations can crowd out intrinsic motivations to act. This study examines this crowding out effect in the context of legislative behavior. By exploiting the federal nature of Swiss elections, we examine if response rates to requests of voters residing inside or outside a candidate's district vary based on the electoral competition candidate legislators face. We report two main findings. First, we find a high response rate among Swiss candidates (66 percent) which remains high for voters who reside outside a candidate's district (59 percent) suggesting that intrinsic motivations are a key driver of constituency effort. Second, the response to voters who reside inside a candidate's district is more pronounced for candidates confronted with a high degree of electoral competition. This suggests that extrinsic motivations are important for constituency work, but at the same time their presence might crowd out intrinsic motivations. This evidence suggests that the relationship between electoral competition and responsiveness might be less straightforward than assumed.

The foundational assumptions of policy diffusion relate to the behavior of individual policymakers. However, empirical tests of policy diffusion often focus on the behavior of governments as a whole (and not individuals). We provide a template for how to study the behavioral decisions of policymakers related to policy diffusion. Our particular field experiments test whether there is a bias toward seeking out information on the policy experiences of local governments in one's own country as opposed to governments outside of the country. The experimental evidence shows that local officials do not exhibit this bias. Further, they do not exhibit a bias against information about policies that have received an EU endorsement. Our results are a positive sign that nationalistic forces are not diminishing inter-country, policy diffusion within Europe, and our design provides a template for future experiments on policy diffusion.