How Lasting is Voter Gratitude? An Analysis of the Short- and Long-Term Electoral Returns to Beneficial Policy

Dominant theories of electoral behavior emphasize that voters myopically evaluate policy performance and that this shortsightedness may obstruct the welfare-improving effect of democratic accountability. However, we know little about how long governments receive electoral credit for beneficial policies. We exploit the massive policy response to a major natural disaster, the 2002 Elbe flooding in Germany, to provide an upper bound for the short- and long-term electoral returns to targeted policy benefits. We estimate that the flood response increased vote shares for the incumbent party by 7 percentage points in affected areas in the 2002 election. Twenty-five percent of this short-term reward carried over to the 2005 election before the gains vanished in the 2009 election. We conclude that, given favorable circumstances, policy makers can generate voter gratitude that persists longer than scholarship has acknowledged so far, and elaborate on the implications for theories of electoral behavior, democratic accountability, and public policy

Voters Get What They Want (When They Pay Attention): Human Rights, Policy Benefits, and Foreign Aid

How do the human rights practices abroad affect decisions about the allocation of foreign aid? This article provides a new approach to this long-standing question. We bring donor government, donor citizens, and recipients’ attributes together in a single analytical framework. We argue that donor citizens are more self-serving than previously assumed; they do not wholeheartedly support their government punishing human rights abusers when those states provide important policy benefits. When donor governments believe that their citizens will hold them accountable for their policy choices, they make foreign aid decisions that mirror citizens’ self-serving policy preferences. Thus, they avoid punishing repressive regimes that are the sources of valuable benefits. Our experimental and observational results provide support for our claims. Overall, our findings suggest that aid donors selectively punish human rights violators with aid cuts, but their variegated treatment of human rights violators largely stems from the self-serving policy preferences of their voters

External validation of prognostic models to predict stillbirth using the International Prediction of Pregnancy Complications (IPPIC) Network database: an individual participant data meta-analysis

Objective Stillbirth is a potentially preventable complication of pregnancy. Identifying women at high risk of stillbirth can guide decisions on the need for closer surveillance and timing of delivery in order to prevent fetal death. Prognostic models have been developed to predict the risk of stillbirth, but none has yet been validated externally. In this study, we externally validated published prediction models for stillbirth using individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis to assess their predictive performance. Methods MEDLINE, EMBASE, DH-DATA and AMED databases were searched from inception to December 2020 to identify studies reporting stillbirth prediction models. Studies that developed or updated prediction models for stillbirth for use at any time during pregnancy were included. IPD from cohorts within the International Prediction of Pregnancy Complications (IPPIC) Network were used to validate externally the identified prediction models whose individual variables were available in the IPD. The risk of bias of the models and cohorts was assessed using the Prediction study Risk Of Bias ASsessment Tool (PROBAST). The discriminative performance of the models was evaluated using the C-statistic, and calibration was assessed using calibration plots, calibration slope and calibration-in-the-large. Performance measures were estimated separately in each cohort, as well as summarized across cohorts using random-effects meta-analysis. Clinical utility was assessed using net benefit. Results Seventeen studies reporting the development of 40 prognostic models for stillbirth were identified. None of the models had been previously validated externally, and the full model equation was reported for only one-fifth (20%, 8/40) of the models. External validation was possible for three of these models, using IPD from 19 cohorts (491 201 pregnant women) within the IPPIC Network database. Based on evaluation of the model development studies, all three models had an overall high risk of bias, according to PROBAST. In the IPD meta-analysis, the models had summary C-statistics ranging from 0.53 to 0.65 and summary calibration slopes ranging from 0.40 to 0.88, with risk predictions that were generally too extreme compared with the observed risks. The models had little to no clinical utility, as assessed by net benefit. However, there remained uncertainty in the performance of some models due to small available sample sizes. Conclusions The three validated stillbirth prediction models showed generally poor and uncertain predictive performance in new data, with limited evidence to support their clinical application. The findings suggest methodological shortcomings in their development, including overfitting. Further research is needed to further validate these and other models, identify stronger prognostic factors and develop more robust prediction models. (c) 2021 The Authors. Ultrasound in Obstetrics & Gynecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Society of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology.Peer reviewe

Food Price Shocks and the Political Economy of Global Agricultural and Development Policy

The recent spikes of global food prices induced a rapid increase in mass media coverage, public policy attention, and donor funding for food security and for agriculture and rural poverty. This has occurred while the shift from low to high food prices has induced a shift in (demographic or social) location of the hunger and poverty effects, but the total number of undernourished and poor people has declined over the same period. We suggest that the observed pattern can be explained by the presence of a global urban bias on agriculture and food policy in developing countries, and we discuss whether this global urban bias may actually benefit poor farmers. We argue that the food price spikes have succeeded where others have failed in the past: to move the problems of poor and hungry farmers to the top of the policy agenda and to induce development and donor strategies to help them

Essays on Public Finance : Retirement Behavior and Disaster Relief

The dissertation consists of three self-contained essays on Public Finance. “News Droughts, News Floods and U.S. Disaster Relief” studies the mass media's influence on the U.S. government response to about 5,000 natural disasters in developing countries in 1968-2002. These disasters took around 63,000 lives and affected 125 million people per year. Given the huge losses involved, it is essential that disaster relief is provided to those most in need. We show that U.S. disaster relief depends on the occurrence of other newsworthy events at the time of the disaster, such as the Olympic Games or the O.J. Simpson Trial, which are obviously unrelated to need. We argue that the only plausible explanation for this is that relief decisions are driven by news coverage of disasters, and that this news coverage is crowded out by other newsworthy events. “Fiscal Policy and Retirement in the Twentieth Century” proposes a model that explains the trend in labor supply among older workers through changes in fiscal policy, including social security. The essay re-introduces social security as a major determinant of retirement behavior, while simultaneously offering an explanation to the two main puzzles in the literature: (i) the small contemporary retirement elasticities and (ii) the drop in the retirement age prior to the introduction of social security. “Sustainable Fiscal Policy and the Retirement Decision” concerns the sustainability of fiscal policy in aging economies and the retirement decision. The essay develops an applied general equilibrium model, where the retirement age is endogenous and current fiscal policy is a response to future demographic developments. Three policies are analyzed: (1) raising taxes (2) reducing the replacement rate and (3) raising the Full Retirement Age. All policies are found to have a substantial impact on retirement. Sustaining fiscal policy will result in falling interest rates, inducing a general delay in retirement. This general equilibrium effect on retirement can be substantially larger than the direct effect of changing social security incentives