Suchergebnisse

This paper models a purely informational mechanism behind the incumbency advantage. In a two-period electoral campaign with two policy issues, a specialized incumbent and an unspecialized, but possibly more competent challenger compete for election by voters who are heterogeneously informed about the state of the world. Due to the asymmetries in government responsibility between candidates, the incumbent's statements may convey information on the relevance of the issues to voters. In equilibrium, the incumbent sometimes strategically releases his statement early and thus signals the importance of his signature issue to the voters. This gives rise to the incumbency advantage. We find that, since the incumbent's positioning on the issue reveals private information which the challenger can use in later statements, the incumbent's incentives to distort the campaign are decreasing in the quality of the incumbent, as previously documented by the empirical literature. However, we show that this implies a non-monotonicity in the distortions that arise in equilibrium.

This paper models a purely informational mechanism behind the incumbency advantage. In a two-period electoral campaign with two policy issues, a specialized incumbent and an unspecialized, but possibly more competent challenger compete for election by voters who are heterogeneously informed about the state of the world. Due to the asymmetries in government responsibility between candidates, the incumbent's statement may convey information on the relevance of the issues to voters. In equilibrium, the incumbent sometimes strategically releases his statement early and thus signals the importance of his signature issue to the voters. We find that, since the incumbent's positioning on the issue reveals private information which the challenger can use in later statements, the incumbent's incentives to distort the campaign are decreasing in his quality, as previously documented by the empirical literature. The distortions arising in equilibrium are decreasing in the incumbent's effective ability; however, the distortions may be increasing in the incumbent's reputation of expertise on his signature issue.

This paper models a purely informational mechanism behind the incumbency advantage. In a two-period electoral campaign with two policy issues, a specialized incumbent and an unspecialized, but possibly more competent challenger compete for election by voters who are heterogeneously informed about the state of the world. Due to the asymmetries in government responsibility between candidates, the incumbent's statements may convey information on the relevance of the issues to voters. In equilibrium, the incumbent sometimes strategically releases his statement early and thus signals the importance of his signature issue to the voters. This gives rise to the incumbency advantage. We find that, since the incumbent's positioning on the issue reveals private information which the challenger can use in later statements, the incumbent's incentives to distort the campaign are decreasing in the quality of the incumbent, as previously documented by the empirical literature. However, we show that this implies a non-monotonicity in the distortions that arise in equilibrium.

Gender quotas should foster women's presence in politics, which in turn may affect local poli- cymaking. This paper investigates this mechanism, considering indicators of municipality spending in Italy as relevant policy outcomes. For identification, we rely on the time and geographic variation in the introduction of a gender quota reform by Law 215/2012. The reform affected gender composition of candidates in Italian municipal council elections, resulting in an increase of the share of female councilors of about 13.9 percentage points. Using the reform as an instrument, we estimate that a one percentage point increase in female participation in councils rises expenditure for local security by about 1% and reduces administration costs by a comparable amount, whereas evidence on the impact on other local expenditure items is mixed and not significant. Estimated effects are associated with compositional changes in terms of employment status of female councilors and are robust to endogeneity issues, to relevant sample selections and to the implications of confounding policies.

Constitutional structures shape politicians' behaviour and hence policy outcomes through the different incentives schemes that they generate. In this paper we analyse these mechanisms in parliamentary and presidential systems. The comparison is carried out by analysing how the two systems may select the efficient policy in the presence of asymmetric information. Presidential and parliamentary systems differ in that the policy proposed by the executive in the parliamentary system is confidence‐dependent and observable. The main findings suggest that the parliament responds better to the incentive scheme in the presidential system due to the lower uncertainty faced by legislators over their term limit. However, the parliamentary system generates a more efficient behaviour of the executive due to selection and disciplining effects.