Campaign finance regulations and policy convergence: the role of interest groups and valence

Regulation of campaign finance of political parties and candidates is intended to decrease the political influence of special interest groups and enhance the public interest in electoral outcomes. I investigate empirically the consequences of campaign financing regulations and find that public funding leads parties' platforms to diverge whereas ceilings on individual contributions lead to platform convergence to the median voter outcome. I relate these consequences to differences in valence or intrinsic popularity of parties. I also show that platform divergence is associated with a ban on corporate donations and with requirements of public disclosure of parties' income statements.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Disentangling the fiscal effects of local constitutions

We apply a regression discontinuity design to verify how constitutional rules, such aselectoral systems, shape budget revenues at the subnational governmental level. We takeadvantage of a natural experiment involving an institutional reform at the local level inPoland. The reform introduced two electoral rules, which changed according to an exogenouspopulation threshold: smaller municipalities used majoritarian elections and largermunicipalities used proportional elections. While intergovernmental grants increased inboth small and large municipalities, they increased less in municipalities with majoritarianelections compared to jurisdictions with proportional representation. This has furtherimplications regarding the level of property taxes and vertical fiscal imbalance. The jurisdictionswith proportional electoral systems had lower revenues from property taxes andhigher vertical fiscal imbalance than jurisdictions with majoritarian systems. We show thatthis effect works through the alignment channel, which is driven by the political alignmentof mayors with parties in the central government. This is more prevalent in proportionalelection scenarios. We also demonstrate that these effects are more pronounced in theperiod after 2002, when direct elections of mayors were introduced.Hervorming Sociale Regelgevin

Overlapping political budget cycle

We advance the literature on political budget cycles by testing for cycles in expenditures for elections to the legislative and the executive branches. Using municipal data, we identify cycles independently for the two branches, evaluate the effects of overlaps, and account for general year effects. We find sizable effects on expenditures before legislative elections and even larger effects before joint elections to the legislature and the office of mayor. In the case of coincident elections, we show that it is important whether the incumbent chief executive seeks reelection. To account for the potential endogeneity of that decision, we apply an IV approach using age and pension eligibility rules