Corruption and Political Competition

There is a growing evidence that political corruption is often closely associated with the rent seeking activities of special interest groups. This paper examines the nature of the interaction between the lobbying activities of special interest groups and the incidence of political corruption and determines whether electoral competition can eliminate political corruption. We obtain some striking results. Greater electoral competition serves to lessen policy distortions. However, this in turn stimulates more intense lobbying which increases the scope of corrupt behavior. It is shown that electoral competition merely serves to alter the type of corruption that eventuates, but cannot eliminate it.Corruption, Lobbying, Political Competition

Electoral participation in the Netherlands: Individual and contextual influences

AbstractResearch into electoral participation has produced two traditions, one focusing mainly on individual level explanations while the second concentrates primarily on aggregate level explanations. By bringing these two research approaches together, we are not only able to explain individual electoral participation more thoroughly, but we also gain additional insight into the influence of aggregate level characteristics on individual behavior. We combine eight National Election Studies held in the Netherlands between 1971 and 1994 enabling us to study variation on the individual and the contextual (aggregate) level, including interactions between these two levels. Findings show that the addition of contextual characteristics form a significant improvement to an individual level model predicting electoral participation. Findings also confirm our expectation that the influence of individual characteristics such as education or political interest is dependent upon contextual characteristics describing for instance the salience of the election

The psychology of voting action : on the psychological origins of electoral research, 1939-1964

This article examines the development of psychologically oriented voting behavior research between 1939-1964. It intends to show the psychological basis of the Columbia and Michigan approaches and its implications for the analysis of electoral behavior. It is argued that, in spite of the large differences commonly perceived between these two approaches, there is much similarity between them, both with regard to their psychological roots as to their principal conclusions

The design of political institutions: Electoral competition and the choice of ballot access restrictions in the United States

Recent contributions to the political economics literature (Trebbi et al. 2007; Aghion et al. 2004) have challenged the view that political institutions are exogenous to the behavior of agents in the political arena. We explicitly address the potential endogeneity of institu- tions by examining the link between the degree of political competition and the design of ballot access restrictions in the United States. Exploiting exogenous variation in electoral competition at the state level induced by the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, our main finding is that restrictions to the entry of non-major party candidates have been systemat- ically adjusted to changing degrees of electoral competition. As a consequence, differences in ballot access requirements between states are endogenous in the sense that they reflect differences in electoral competition.Political institutions, electoral competition, ballot access

Electoral behavior of US counties: a panel data approach

This note proposes an econometric framework for studying electoral returns using aggregate voting and socioeconomic panel data. Along with usual covariates, the model includes electoral unit effects, electoral subunit effects and time effects, and features nested groupings and heteroskedasticity. We apply the framework to model the electoral behavior of US counties in congressional elections.

Plurality Rule, Proportional Representation, and the German Bundestag: How Incentives to Pork-Barrel Differ Across Electoral Systems

This paper examines the importance of electoral rules for legislators’ behavior. The German electoral system includes a mechanism which assigns whether legislators are elected under the “first-past-the-post” (FPTP), or the proportional representation (PR) electoral rule. Using this institution, we identify the effect of electoral rules on legislators’ behavior and disentangle whether so-called pork barrel politics are due to political climate in a country or due to the electoral rule employed. We find significant differences in committee membership, depending whether the legislator is elected though FPTP or PR. legislators elected through FPTP system are members of committees that allows them to service their geographically based constituency. Legislators elected through PR are members of committees that service the party constituencies, which are not necessarily geographically based.

Invalid Ballots and Electoral Competition

We study how the closeness of electoral race affect the number of invalid ballots under the traditional paper-ballot voting technology. Using a large dataset from the Italian parliamentary elections in 1994-2001, we find a strong positive correlation between the closeness of electoral race and the fraction of invalid ballots. This correlation is not driven by voters' behavior, the biased actions of election officers, or the strategic pressure by parties. The theory that garners most support is that of unbiased election officers that increase their effort in response to higher (expected) closeness of electoral race, so as to reduce the likelihood of incorrectly adjudicating the victory. We also find large North-South differences in the patterns of invalid ballots: (i) electoral districts and municipalities in Southern Italian regions have a substantially higher level of invalid ballots, and (ii) the correlation between the closeness of electoral race and the fraction of invalid ballots is absent in the South. Social capital and organized crime explain these differences: once these two features are accounted for, the districts and municipalities in the South behave similarly to those in the North.invalid ballots; electoral competition; social capital; voting technology; Italian parliamentary elections

Normalized Range Voting Broadly Resists Control

We study the behavior of Range Voting and Normalized Range Voting with respect to electoral control. Electoral control encompasses attempts from an election chair to alter the structure of an election in order to change the outcome. We show that a voting system resists a case of control by proving that performing that case of control is computationally infeasible. Range Voting is a natural extension of approval voting, and Normalized Range Voting is a simple variant which alters each vote to maximize the potential impact of each voter. We show that Normalized Range Voting has among the largest number of control resistances among natural voting systems

Pork Barrel Politics in Postwar Italy, 1953–1994

This paper analyzes the political determinants of the distribution of infrastructure expenditures by the Italian government to the country’s 92 provinces between 1953 and 1994. Extending implications of theories of legislative behavior to the context of open-list proportional representation, we examine whether individually powerful legislators and ruling parties direct spending to core or marginal electoral districts, and whether opposition parties share resources via a norm of universalism. We show that when districts elect politically more powerful deputies from the governing parties, they receive more investments. We interpret this as indicating that legislators with political resources reward their core voters by investing in public works in their districts. The governing parties, by contrast, are not able to discipline their own members of parliament sufficiently to target the parties’ areas of core electoral strength. Finally, we find no evidence that a norm of universalism operates to steer resources to areas when the main opposition party gains more votes.pork barrel; distributive politics; electoral systems; Italy; public spending; infrastructure