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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Iñigo Iturbe-Ormaetxe (: Departamento de Fundamentos del An·lisis EconÛmico (FAE), Universidad de Alicante.); Santiago Sanchez-Pages (King's College London.); Angel Solano-Garcia (Department of Economic Theory and Economic History, University of Granada.) |
| Abstract: | We study theoretically and empirically the redistributive effects of extending voting rights to non-citizens. Our model predicts a tax increase when newly enfranchised voters represent a sufficiently large fraction of voters. We study the 1975 Swedish electoral reform that extended voting rights to non-citizens in municipal elections. In the first term after the reform, there was a tax increase that was not repeated in subsequent terms. This increase was stronger the greater the foreign population in the municipality. This effect was concentrated in municipalities where the size of the non-citizen population was large enough to upturn the previous electoral outcome. |
| Keywords: | : Immigration, Conflict, Income redistribution, Inequality, enfranchisement. |
| JEL: | D72 D74 F22 |
| Date: | 2021–10–20 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gra:wpaper:21/10&r= |
| By: | F. Lagona (UiB - University of Bergen, Università degli Studi Roma Tre); Fabio Padovano (CREM - Centre de recherche en économie et management - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - UR1 - Université de Rennes 1 - UNIV-RENNES - Université de Rennes - UNICAEN - Université de Caen Normandie - NU - Normandie Université) |
| Abstract: | The Political Legislation Cycle theory predicts a peak of legislative production in the pre-electoral period, when legislators focus on voters' welfare to be reelected. This paper verifies the theory on South Korean legislative production (1948–2016); it is the first test of the theory in a country undergoing a process of democratization, thus providing evidence relevant also for the conditional political cycles literature. Two insofar untested hypotheses are verified: 1) peaks of legislative production should increase with the degree of democracy; 2) as the party system and the mechanisms of legislative checks and balances develop, the PLC should become more evident in bills of legislative rather than executive's initiative. A hurdle model estimated on both laws of parliamentary proposal and of government assignment lends empirical support to both hypotheses, with the noticeable feature that PLC in Korea appear more in the form of an upward trend than of pre-electoral peaks. © 2021 Elsevier B.V. |
| Keywords: | Autocracy,Conditional political cycles,Democratic transition,Executive vs. parliamentary legislative initiative,Hurdle model,Over-dispersion,Political legislation cycles,Zero inflation |
| Date: | 2021–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03225568&r= |
| By: | Johanna Mollerstrom; Avner Strulov-Shlain; Dmitry Taubinsky |
| Abstract: | We report the results of an online experiment studying preferences for giving and preferences for group-wide redistribution in small (4-person) and large (200-person) groups. We find that the desire to engage in voluntary giving decreases significantly with group size. However, voting for group-wide redistribution is precisely estimated to not depend on group size. Moreover, people’s perception of the size of their reference group is malleable, and affects their desire to give. These results suggest that government programs, such as progressive tax-and-transfer systems, can help satisfy other-regarding preferences for redistribution in a way that creating opportunities for voluntary giving cannot. |
| JEL: | D63 D9 |
| Date: | 2021–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29375&r= |
| By: | Julia Cage (ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Edgard Dewitte (ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) |
| Abstract: | We study electoral campaigns over the long run, through the lens of their spending. In particular, we ask whether changing media technologies and electoral environments impacted patterns of spending and their correlation with electoral results. To do so, we build a novel exhaustive dataset on general elections in the United Kingdom from 1857 to 2017, which includes information on campaign spending (itemized by expense categories), electoral outcomes and socio-demographic characteristics for 69, 042 election-constituency candidates. We start by providing new insights on the history of British political campaigns, in particular the growing importance of advertising material, including via digital means, to the detriment of paid staff and electoral meetings. We then show that there is a strong positive correlation between expenditures and votes, and that overall the magnitude of this relationship has strongly increased since the 1880s, with a peak in the last quarter of the 20th century. We link these transformations to changes in the conduct of campaigns, and to the introduction of new information technologies. We show in particular that the expansion of local radio and broadband Internet increased the sensitivity of the electoral results to differences in campaign spending. These results encourage greater contextualization in the drafting of campaign finance regulations. |
| Keywords: | Elections,Campaign finance,Electoral expenditures,Information technologies |
| Date: | 2021–09–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-03384143&r= |
| By: | Kamesh Munagala; Yiheng Shen; Kangning Wang; Zhiyi Wang |
| Abstract: | Motivated by civic problems such as participatory budgeting and multiwinner elections, we consider the problem of public good allocation: Given a set of indivisible projects (or candidates) of different sizes, and voters with different monotone utility functions over subsets of these candidates, the goal is to choose a budget-constrained subset of these candidates (or a committee) that provides fair utility to the voters. The notion of fairness we adopt is that of core stability from cooperative game theory: No subset of voters should be able to choose another blocking committee of proportionally smaller size that provides strictly larger utility to all voters that deviate. The core provides a strong notion of fairness, subsuming other notions that have been widely studied in computational social choice. It is well-known that an exact core need not exist even when utility functions of the voters are additive across candidates. We therefore relax the problem to allow approximation: Voters can only deviate to the blocking committee if after they choose any extra candidate (called an additament), their utility still increases by an $\alpha$ factor. If no blocking committee exists under this definition, we call this an $\alpha$-core. Our main result is that an $\alpha$-core, for $\alpha 1.015$ for submodular utilities, and a lower bound of any function in the number of voters and candidates for general monotone utilities. |
| Date: | 2021–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2110.12499&r= |
| By: | Yasmine Bekkouche (PSE - Paris School of Economics - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - ENS Paris - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement); Julia Cage (ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Edgard Dewitte (ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) |
| Abstract: | What is the impact of campaign spending on votes? Does it vary across election types, political parties or electoral settings? Estimating these effects requires comprehensive data on spending across candidates, parties and elections, as well as identification strategies that handle the endogenous and strategic nature of campaign spending in multiparty systems. This paper provides novel contributions in both of these areas. We build a new comprehensive dataset of all French legislative and UK general elections over the 1993-2017 period. We propose new empirical specifications, including a new instrument that relies on the fact that candidates are differentially affected by regulation on the source of funding on which they depend the most. We find that an increase in spending per voter consistently improves candidates' vote share, both at British and French elections, and that the effect is heterogeneous depending on candidates' party. In particular, we show that spending by radical and extreme parties has much lower returns than spending by mainstream parties, and that this can be partly explained by the social stigma attached to extreme voting. Our findings help reconcile the conflicting results of the existing literature, and improve our understanding of why campaigns matter. |
| Date: | 2020–12–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-03389172&r= |