The Effect of Information on Voter Turnout: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
In: American journal of political science: AJPS, Band 49, Heft 1, S. 103-118
ISSN: 0092-5853
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In: American journal of political science: AJPS, Band 49, Heft 1, S. 103-118
ISSN: 0092-5853
In: American journal of political science, Band 49, Heft 1, S. 103-118
ISSN: 1540-5907
Do better‐informed people vote more? Recent formal theories of voter turnout emphasize a positive effect of being informed on the propensity to vote, but the possibility of endogenous information acquisition makes estimation of causal effects difficult. I estimate the causal effects of being informed on voter turnout using unique data from a natural experiment Copenhagen referendum on decentralization. Four of fifteen districts carried out a pilot project, exogenously making pilot city district voters more informed about the effects of decentralization. Empirical estimates based on survey data confirm a sizeable and statistically significant causal effect of being informed on the propensity to vote.
In: The economic journal: the journal of the Royal Economic Society, Band 113, Heft 488, S. F389-F390
ISSN: 1468-0297
This paper explores the effect of political accountability on the size of the public sector in a principal-agent model of democratic government. Political accountability is the degree to which the electorate can control politicians through elections, and emphasis is put on the roles of transparency and political contestability. Increasing transparency and political contestability increases the control of politicians, which makes public goods provision more attractive to voters, increasing the size of government. The prediction of the model is strongly supported by robust empirical evidence from a cross section of 62 democratic countries in 1995.
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In: Behavioural public policy: BPP, Band 7, Heft 3, S. 721-743
ISSN: 2398-0648
AbstractIn the past decades, behavioral economics has credibly identified numerous decision-making biases leading people to make choices they would not have made if better informed about the long-term consequences of their actions. This has given rise to a new reason for government interventions: internalities. In contrast to traditional reasons for government intervention, such as redistribution and externalities, overcoming internalities often involves the use of paternalistic policies. We investigate theoretically and empirically the formation of attitudes toward paternalistic policies. Theoretically, we focus on the role of self-interest and distinguish between self-interest as construed for the rational decision-maker, self-interest when self-control problems are present, and self-interest when procedural or expressive elements, such as autonomy, matter. Empirically, we employ two novel data sets: a Danish survey on political opinion combined with administrative data on actual behavior and a large-scale cross-country survey to analyze attitudes toward paternalistic policies in the health and financial domains. We show that targets of paternalism are more opposed to paternalism than non-targets both in Denmark and across nine Western democracies and rely on our theoretical priors to explore mechanisms that can explain these attitudes.
In: American political science review, Band 105, Heft 2, S. 238-258
ISSN: 1537-5943
Optimal jurisdiction size is a cornerstone of government design. A strong tradition in political thought argues that democracy thrives in smaller jurisdictions, but existing studies of the effects of jurisdiction size, mostly cross-sectional in nature, yield ambiguous results due to sorting effects and problems of endogeneity. We focus on internal political efficacy, a psychological condition that many see as necessary for high-quality participatory democracy. We identify a quasiexperiment, a large-scale municipal reform in Denmark, which allows us to estimate a causal effect of jurisdiction size on internal political efficacy. The reform, affecting some municipalities, but not all, was implemented by the central government, and resulted in exogenous, and substantial, changes in municipal population size. Based on survey data collected before and after the reform, we find, using various difference-in-difference and matching estimators, that jurisdiction size has a causal and sizeable detrimental effect on citizens' internal political efficacy.
In: The public opinion quarterly: POQ, Band 81, Heft 2, S. 564-576
ISSN: 1537-5331
In: EPSA 2013 Annual General Conference Paper 354
SSRN
Working paper
In: American political science review, Band 105, Heft 2, S. 238-259
ISSN: 0003-0554
In: James E. , A & Lassen , D D 2010 ' Enforcement and Public Corruption : Evidence from US States ' Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen .
We use high-quality panel data on corruption convictions, new panels of assistant U.S. attorneys and relative public sector wages, and careful attention to the consequences of modeling endogeneity to estimate the impact of prosecutorial resources on criminal convictions of those who undertake corrupt acts. Consistent with "system capacity" arguments, we find that greater prosecutor resources result in more convictions for corruption, other things equal. We find more limited, recent evidence for the deterrent effect of increased prosecutions. We control for and confirm in a panel context the effects of many previously identified correlates and causes of corruption. By explicitly determining the allocation of prosecutorial resources endogenously from past corruption convictions and political considerations, we show that this specification leads to larger estimates of the effect of resources on convictions. The results are robust to various ways of measuring the number of convictions as well as to various estimators.
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In: University of Copenhagen Department of Economics EPRU Working Paper No. 2010-08
SSRN
Working paper
In: Alt , J E & Lassen , D D 2008 ' Inequality and Corruption : Evidence from US States ' Economic Policy Research Unit. Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen .
High-quality data on state-level inequality and incomes, panel data on corruption convictions, and careful attention to the consequences of including or excluding fixed effects in the panel specification allow us to estimate the impact of income considerations on the decision to undertake corrupt acts. Following efficiency wage arguments, for a given institutional environment the corruptible employee's or official's decision to engage in corruption is affected by relative wages and expected tenure in the public sector, the probability of detection, the cost of fines and jail terms, and the degree of inequality, which indicate diminished prospects facing those convicted of corruption. In US states over 25 years we show that inequality and higher government relative wages significantly and robustly produce less corruption. This reverses other findings of a positive association between inequality and corruption, which we show arises from long-run joint causation by unobserved factors.
BASE
SSRN
Working paper
In: American journal of political science, Band 50, Heft 3, S. 530-550
ISSN: 1540-5907
We investigate the effects of fiscal transparency and political polarization on the prevalence of electoral cycles in fiscal balance. While some recent political economy literature on electoral cycles identifies such cycles mainly in weak and recent democracies, in contrast we show, conditioning on a new index of institutional fiscal transparency, that electoral cycles in fiscal balance are a feature of many advanced industrialized economies. Using a sample of 19 OECD countries in the 1990s, we identify a persistent pattern of electoral cycles in low(er) transparency countries, while no such cycles can be observed in high(er) transparency countries. Furthermore, we find, in accordance with recent theory, that electoral cycles are larger in politically more polarized countries.
In: American journal of political science: AJPS, Band 50, Heft 3, S. 530-550
ISSN: 0092-5853