Outside income and moral hazard : the elusive quest for good politicians

In most modern democracies elected officials can work in the private sector while appointed in parliament. We show that when the political and market sectors are not mutually exclusive, a trade-off arises between the quality of elected officials and the effort they exert in political life. If high-ability citizens can keep earning money outside of parliament, they will be more likely to run for election; for the same reason, they will also be more likely to shirk once elected. These predictions are confronted with a unique dataset about members of the Italian Parliament from 1996 to 2006. The empirical evidence shows that bad but dedicated politicians come along with good but not fully committed politicians. There is in fact a non-negligible fraction of citizens with remarkably high pre-election income who are appointed in parliament. These citizens are those who gain relatively more from being elected in terms of outside income. Conversely, they are less committed to the parliamentary activity in many respects, like voting attendance and bills sponsorship

Lynch And Stephen In Tight Race For NH Governor 11/01/2010

Governor John Lynch has seen his once formidable lead over Republican challenger John Stephen shrink in the final weeks of the campaign. Most voters have now made up their mind who to support. Election: 201

Unplag Demographic Attribute Selection Model For Prediction Of Election Participation Using Decision Tree

Implementing a democratic general election is expected to produce people's representatives who can channel the people's aspirations. Demographic data is information that discusses a group of people with several related attributes and involves many factors. In this study, we will relate the relationship between the implementation of elections and the condition of demographic data with a benchmark for the form of public participation in the election. By utilizing 2019 election data and Bangkalan Regency demographic data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS), it is expected to determine the relationship between the two conditions of the dataset on the form of public participation at the polling station (TPS) level. By starting with the Preprocessing step, it implement a classification method with the Decision Tree (DT) algorithm to predict community presence at the polling station level. There are three versions of the dataset that will be used in modeling, namely initial data that has not been selected for attributes (version 1), data that has been chosen using correlation�based attribute selection (version 2), and data that has been selected using chi�square attributes ( version 3). The results show version 1 with a prediction of 81%, followed by version 2 with a prediction of 81%, and the last is version 3 with a prediction of 70%. The detachment model's formation with the selection attribute has a different impact, and the relationship between the election dataset and demographics has a significant effect, as indicated by the prediction results of version 2

Does Revolution Work? Evidence from Nepal’s People’s War

In 2015, after a decade-long conflict and nine years of negotiation, Nepal promulgated a constitution that replaced its 240-year-old monarchy by a federal republic. The subsequent 2017 local elections ushered more than 30,000 first-time politicians into office. Using a census of 3.68 million Nepalis (2.56 million of whom are of voting age) covering eleven districts, party nomination lists and party candidate selection committee surveys, electoral data and information on conflict incidence, we document that castes that were historically excluded from political representation achieved representation without a significant representation-ability trade-off: improved social representation among politicians is accompanied by positive selection on education and income. Triangulating across multiple data sources, we show that the entry of the revolutionary Maoist group as a post-conflict mainstream party played an important role. Finally, political representation of non-elite castes improved their policy inclusion as measured by individual access to earthquake reconstruction transfers. These gains, however, vary with the extent of social connections to the elected mayor and point to a continuing need to balance power by supporting institutions that provide all citizens political voice

Close Race in CD1, Kuster Likely Winner in CD2

Congressman Frank Guinta and former Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter are in a close race in New Hampshire’s First Congressional District. Second District Congresswoman Ann Kuster holds a wide lead over Republican challenger Jim Lawrence. Democrats are positioned to gain control of the New Hampshire State House and State Senate. Election: 201

Outside income and moral hazard : the elusive quest for good politicians

In most modern democracies elected officials can work in the private sector while appointed in parliament. We show that when the political and market sectors are not mutually exclusive, a trade-off arises between the quality of elected officials and the effort they exert in political life. If high-ability citizens can keep earning money outside of parliament, they will be more likely to run for election; for the same reason, they will also be more likely to shirk once elected. These predictions are confronted with a unique dataset about members of the Italian Parliament from 1996 to 2006. The empirical evidence shows that bad but dedicated politicians come along with good but not fully committed politicians. There is in fact a non-negligible fraction of citizens with remarkably high pre-election income who are appointed in parliament. These citizens are those who gain relatively more from being elected in terms of outside income. Conversely, they are less committed to the parliamentary activity in many respects, like voting attendance and bills sponsorship.Politicians, Moral hazard, Adverse selection, Absenteeism, Outside income

Party influence in congress and the economy

To understand the extent to which partisan majorities in Congress influence economic policy, we compare financial market responses in recent midterm elections to Presidential elections. We use prediction markets that track election outcomes as a means of precisely timing and calibrating the arrival of news, allowing substantially more precise estimates than a traditional event study methodology. We find that equity values, oil prices, and Treasury yields are slightly higher with Republican majorities in Congress, and that a switch in the majority party in a chamber of Congress has an impact that is only 10%-30% of that of the Presidency. We also find evidence inconsistent with the popular view that divided government is better for equities, finding instead that equity valuations increase monotonically, albeit slightly, with the degree of Republican control

Credibility and Policy Convergence: Evidence from U.S. House Roll Call Voting Records

Traditional models of politician behavior predict complete or partial policy convergence, whereby electoral competition compels partisan politicians to choose positions more moderate than their most-preferred policies. Alternatively, if politicians cannot overcome the inability to make binding pre-commitments to policies, the expected result is complete policy divergence. By exploiting a regression discontinuity (RD) design inherent in the Congressional electoral system, this paper empirically tests the strong predictions of the complete divergence hypothesis against the alternative of partial convergence within the context of Representatives' roll call voting behavior in the U.S. House (1946-1994). The RD design implies that which party wins a district seat is quasi-randomly assigned among elections that turn out to be 'close'. We use this variation to examine if Representatives' roll call voting patterns do not respond to large exogenous changes in the probability of winning the election, the strong prediction of complete policy divergence. The evidence is more consistent with full divergence and less consistent with partial convergence, suggestive that the difficulty of establishing credible commitments to policies is an important real-world phenomenon.

NH Congressional Races Close In Final Days 10/31/2010

Democrat Ann McLane Kuster and Republican Charlie Bass are locked in a very tight race for New Hampshire’s Second Congressional District seat. The First C.D. race has also tightened with Republican Frank Guinta holding a modest, but not insurmountable, lead over incumbent Carol Shea-Porter. Election: 201

Sticking with Your Vote: Cognitive Dissonance and Voting

In traditional models, votes are an expression of preferences and beliefs. Psychological theories of cognitive dissonance suggest, however, that behavior may shape preferences. In this view, the very act of voting may influence political attitudes. A vote for a candidate may lead to more favorable interpretations of his actions in the future. We test the empirical relevance of cognitive dissonance in US Presidential elections. The key problem in such a test is the endogeneity of voter choice which leads to a mechanical relationship between voting and preferences. We use the voting age restrictions to help surmount this difficulty. We examine the Presidential opinion ratings of nineteen and twenty year olds two years after the President's election. Consistent with cognitive dissonance, we find that twenty year olds (who were eligible to vote in the election) show greater polarization of opinions than comparable nineteen year olds (who were ineligible to vote). We rule out that aging drives these results in two ways. First, we find no polarization differences in years in which twenty and nineteen year olds would not have differed in their eligibility to vote in the prior Presidential election. Second, we show a similar effect when we compare polarization (for all age groups) in opinions of Senators elected during high turnout Presidential campaign years with Senators elected during low turnout non-Presidential campaign years. Thus we find empirical support for the relevance of cognitive dissonance to voting behavior. This finding has at least three implications for the dynamics of voting behavior. First, it offers a new rationale for the incumbency advantage. Second, it suggests that there is an efficiency argument for term limits. And finally, our results demonstrate that efficiency may not be increasing in turnout level.