You Have Got Mail! How Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations Shape Constituency Service in the European Parliament. IHS Political Science Series No. 140, May 2016

For representative democracy to work, legislators need to be responsive to the concerns of citizens. One way in which this can be achieved is through constituency service. Two factors drive constituency service: extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. Research to date suggests that extrinsic motivations are crucial for constituency service. Yet, this evidence stems primarily from the US context characterized by a personal ballot structure and campaign content which may bias findings in favor of extrinsic motivations. We present evidence from the first ever field experiment conducted in the European Parliament (EP) in which we vary both the extrinsic and intrinsic motivations of legislators. What is more, we are able to examine the way in which intrinsic and extrinsic motivations interact, an aspect largely ignored in the literature. Our findings suggest that while intrinsic motivations matter most for constituency service in the EP, they are dampened by the presence of extrinsic motivations

COVID and reverse remittances: when families send money to support migrant relatives abroad

Remittances, money migrants send to family members back home, tend to fall in times of crisis in migrant-receiving economies, but that has not been the case during the COVID pandemic. Catherine E. De Vries, David Doyle, Hector Solaz, and Katerina Tertytchnaya organised three focus groups in Kyrgyzstan, the third most remittance-dependent economy in the world, just behind Tonga and Lebanon. They found that the impact of the pandemic varied across migrant employment sectors, hospitality being the worst affected. Some family members report sending money from Kyrgyzstan to their migrant members in Russia

An experimental analysis of team production in networks

Experimental and empirical evidence highlights the role of networks on social outcomes. In this paper we test the properties of exogenously fixed networks in team production. Subjects make the same decisions in a team-work environment under four different organizational networks: The line, the circle, the star, and the complete network. In all the networks, links make information available to neighbors. This design allows us to analyze decisions across networks and a variety of subjects’ types in a standard linear team production game. Contribution levels differ significantly across networks and the star is the most efficient incomplete one. Moreover, our results suggest that subjects act as conditional cooperators with respect to the information received from the network.public goods, networks, experiments

Punish and Voice: Punishment Enhances Cooperation when Combined with Norm-Signalling

Material punishment has been suggested to play a key role in sustaining human cooperation. Experimental findings, however, show that inflicting mere material costs does not always increase cooperation and may even have detrimental effects. Indeed, ethnographic evidence suggests that the most typical punishing strategies in human ecologies (e.g., gossip, derision, blame and criticism) naturally combine normative information with material punishment. Using laboratory experiments with humans, we show that the interaction of norm communication and material punishment leads to higher and more stable cooperation at a lower cost for the group than when used separately. In this work, we argue and provide experimental evidence that successful human cooperation is the outcome of the interaction between instrumental decision-making and the norm psychology humans are provided with. Norm psychology is a cognitive machinery to detect and reason upon norms that is characterized by a salience mechanism devoted to track how much a norm is prominent within a group. We test our hypothesis both in the laboratory and with an agent-based model. The agent-based model incorporates fundamental aspects of norm psychology absent from previous work. The combination of these methods allows us to provide an explanation for the proximate mechanisms behind the observed cooperative behaviour. The consistency between the two sources of data supports our hypothesis that cooperation is a product of norm psychology solicited by norm-signalling and coercive devices

Practicing what you preach: How cosmopolitanism promotes willingness to redistribute across the European Union

The political fault lines surrounding the European sovereign debt crisis have underlined the political relevance and the fragile foundation of public support for international redistribution in the European Union. Against the backdrop of an emerging political integration-demarcation divide, this article examines how cosmopolitanism structures people’s willingness to redistribute internationally within the European Union. To this aim, we conducted laboratory experiments on redistributive behaviour towards other European citizens in the United Kingdom and Germany and analysed cross-national survey data on support for international redistribution covering the EU-28. Our findings suggest that cosmopolitanism increases generosity towards other Europeans and support for international redistribution even when controlling for self-interest, support for national redistribution, concern for others, and political ideology

Counter-Punishment, Communication, and Cooperation among Partners

We study how communication affects cooperation in an experimental public goods environment with punishment and counter-punishment opportunities. Participants interacted over 30 rounds in fixed groups with fixed identifiers that allowed them to trace other group members' behavior over time. The two dimensions of communication we study are asking for a specific contribution level and having to express oneself when choosing to counter-punish. We conduct four experimental treatments, all involving a contribution stage, a punishment stage, and a counter-punishment stage in each round. In the first treatment communication is not possible at any of the stages. The second treatment allows participants to ask for a contribution level at the punishment stage and in the third treatment participants are required to send a message if they decide to counter-punish. The fourth combines the two communication channels of the second and third treatments. We find that the three treatments involving communication at any of the two relevant stages lead to significantly higher contributions than the baseline treatment. We find no difference between the three treatments with communication. We also relate our results to previous results from treatments without counter-punishment opportunities and do not find that the presence of counter-punishment leads to lower cooperation level. The overall pattern of results shows that given fixed identifiers the key factor is the presence of communication. Whenever communication is possible contributions and earnings are higher than when it is not, regardless of counter-punishment opportunities

Corruption and electoral accountability: avenues for future research

The vast majority of people across the globe lives in countries characterized by high levels of corruption, commonly defined as the public misuse of private gains. Although the exact costs of corruption are difficult to estimate, research suggests that corruption is bad for economic and social development. Not only has corruption been shown to have a detrimental effect on a country's economy, the ability to generate tax revenue and social equality, the political effects of corruption are also considerable. Owing to its association with weak state capacity, corruption may damage the ability of governments to craft and implement policies in areas in which continued intervention and investment is needed and their capacity to respond quickly and effectively to sudden shocks. Owing to these undesirable outcomes, elections are supposed to curb corruption because voters will throw the rascals out. Recent research, however, suggests that more often than not corruption goes unpunished at the ballot box. This essay sets out possible research avenues to find out why this is the case

The electoral consequences of corruption

Democratic elections have been assumed to play a crucial role in curbing corruption among public officials. Voters, due to their general distaste for corruption, are expected to sanction politicians who misuse public office for private gains. Yet, empirical evidence to date is mixed, and it often suggests that the electoral punishment of corruption is rather mild. Recently, political scientists have made great strides in understanding why corruption might be tolerated by voters. In this review, we identify three key stages—information acquisition, blame attribution, and behavioral response—that underlie a retrospective vote based on corruption. A breakdown of one or more of these stages may lead to a lack of electoral punishment of corruption. We also outline some areas for future progress, particularly highlighting the importance of voter coordination for understanding the extent to which corruption is punished at the ballot box

Sweeping it under the rug: How government parties deal with deteriorating economic conditions

Party competition in advanced industrial democracies is generally characterized as a two-dimensional space consisting of an economic and non-economic dimension. This study examines (a) the extent to which parties strategically place more emphasis on one of these dimensions vis-à-vis the other, something we coin relative emphasis, and (b) the extent to which voters perceive such shifts in relative emphasis. Our specific focus here is on government parties. We expect government parties to shift emphasis away from the economic to the non-economic dimension when economic conditions deteriorate. In doing so, they aim to reduce the importance voters attach to the economy and the degree to which voters attribute responsibility for the economy to the government. By combining expert data for 232 parties with survey data for roughly 30,000 individuals in 28 European countries in 2014, our analysis shows that while government parties generally pay more attention to the economic dimension, they shift attention to the non-economic dimension when economic conditions deteriorate. In contexts where government parties have shifted attention away from the economic to the non-economic dimension, voters overall attach less importance to the economy and attribute less responsibility to the government for the state of the economy

An experimental analysis of team production in networks

Team production, Networks, Information, C92, H41,