This policy brief discusses how voters respond to public policies with a particular focus on crime control policies. We present the main methodological issues that the researcher faces to disentangle the response of voters to the consequences of policies from the other factors. We present the results of a study of the consequences of the 2006 Italian collective pardon. Using randomness in local variation in recidivism rates we show that Italian voters held the incumbent government responsible for local variations in recidivism caused by the collective pardon. We conclude by discussing the consequences for the evaluation of the electoral response to public policies

Galbiati, Roberto

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Roberto Galbiati,
Departement d'économie
de Sciences Po,
DESP CNRS, LIEPP
roberto.galbiati@sciencespo.fr
Comment citer cette publication :
Roberto Galbiati, Evaluating Electoral Responses to Policies: What do we learn from Italian
incarceration policies, LIEPP Policy Brief, n°45, 2020-01-10.
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Nowadays politics is strongly polarized. Politicians and voters’ form opposing
ideological clusters around issues such as migration, European integration, taxation and
crime. Given the existence of electoral incentives, such a polarization seems to suggest that
voters are myopically rewarding ideology over the evaluation of the effectiveness of
policies. Voters seem to choose politicians closer to their ideological priors than those
proposing policies that may actually improve their economic or social wellbeing. Whether
this impression is true or not has implications for the functioning of democracies and for
the capacity of democracies to improve social and economic outcomes. Democracies work
when voters hold governments accountable for their policy choices not only on ideological
basis but also depending on the effectiveness of policy outcomes. Only if politicians are
held accountable on the basis of the impact of their policy the electoral incentive to adopt
policies that effectively enhance voters’ wellbeing holds. When we think about crime control
policies this issue turns out to be even more
apparent. Crime is perceived as a crucial social issue
in most western countries. For instance, as reported
by Mastrorocco and Minale (2018), European citizens
report that crime is on the top of their concerns.
While voters seem to care about crime on the policy
side, there is evidence that that politicians behave as if
criminal justice policies have a significant impact on
voting behavior. Elected officials tend to spend more
to control crime or become more severe in their
decisions concerning criminal behavior when elections
approach (see for instance Levitt, 1997; Abrams et at.
2019; Berdejo and Yuchtman, 2013). This possible
correlation between voters’ concerns and politicians’
behavior could be driven by ideological clustering,
strategical responses or effort to find more effective
crime policies. For instance, more lenient crime-
control policies might simply be positively judged by
liberal and negatively by conservatives independently
from the actual effects of policies on crime incidence
and politicians would adapt to preferences
independently of the actual outcome of the policy.
Thus, we may end up observing penalties and
incarceration rates increasing or decreasing
independently of their effect on crime rates.
In this policy brief, we will discuss what we
know about how voters’ respond to the
consequences of public policies with a particular
focus on criminal justice. In what follows we
introduce the main methodological challenges. Then
we present a brief summary of the state of the art
of the literature in political economy about the
subject. Finally, we discuss the results of a case study
that addresses the main methodological issues.
In order to be able to assess whether and how
voters respond to government's policies, the ideal
experiment would require the government to
randomly manipulate policies (e.g. their domain of
application or their intensity) and then this random
manipulation mapping into different outcomes. For
example, in order to evaluate if voters’ respond to
the effects of tax increases or cuts by the central
government, it would be necessary to observe a
random variation of its effects across lower level of
government, for instance regions or municipalities.
Or, given a tougher crime control policy, it would be
necessary to observe locally random variation in
penalties and understand whether differential penalties
map into different crime rates. With this kind of
variation, conditional on the ideological preferences of
voters on these type of policies, the variation in local
response would identify the causal effect of the policy
outcome on voters’ electoral behavior, if any. That is, it
is necessary to observe variations in the effects of the
policy that are independent both from the voters’ and
the government's characteristics. In this case, we would
have an ideal counterfactual to assess if and to what
extent the effects of policy decisions affect voters’
outcomes and in turn their electoral response holding
all else constant.
Understanding accountability is at the core of
research in political economy, an incentive
mechanism linking political choices, outcomes and
voters’ responses is assumed in standard models (see
Ashworth, 2012 for an extensive review of the
literature). Given the importance of the issue, a
recent active literature has focused on understanding
whether voters correctly link politicians’ actions to
outcomes or are subject to systematic attribution
error. Existing papers trying to identify whether
voters hold politicians accountable either rely on
endogenous governments policy choices or on
exogenous variations in voters’ well-being that are
due to events orthogonal to governments policies. In
the first case, a few papers focuse on the effects of
natural disasters. Under the assumption that the
timing of natural events is independent from the
electoral cycle and the identity of incumbent
governments, these papers evaluate how voters
respond to disaster preparedness and relief spending
(Healy and Malhotra 2009). Papers focusing on
exogenous variation of voters’ wellbeing assume that
these events might be interpreted by voters as the
result of a governments policy (e.g., Bagues and
Esteve-Volart, 2013; Healy et at. 2010). All these
papers provide some mixed evidence about the
drivers of voters’ response to policy choices and
outcomes. The mixed evidence partially depends on
differences in the contexts of analysis and partially
on the difficulties to have a clean identification
allowing to understand whether voters respond to
government actions or variations in wellbeing that
are orthogonal to governments’ choices.
In a recent paper Drago, Galbiati and Sobbrio
(Forthcoming) we assess how voters’ respond to the
consequences of the choices of an incumbent
government by focusing on the consequences of the
2006 Italian pardon Bill. Despite the importance of
crime for voters, existing studies on the link between
crime control policies and voters' decisions are
mostly correlational and provide mixed evidence
(Hall 2001; Krieger 2011). In the paper based on the
Italian case study we exploit a natural experiment
that allows us to have a proper counterfactual to
evaluate the voters’ response to the consequences of
the policy keeping their ideology and the impact of
the policy on ideological stands constant.
In July 2006, the Italian government
implemented a collective pardon due to a dramatic
overcrowding in prisons at that time. The pardon is
discussed and voted by the Italian Parliament (with
the law 241.2006) but it is promoted and then
implemented by the incumbent center-left
government. The policy was not part of the
campaign platform of the majority coalition but was
rather a decision taken because of the immediate
need to reduce prison overcrowding. As a result of
the collective pardon, a subset of the prisoners with
less than 36 months of residual sentence were
released and about the 30% of inmates in Italian
prisons are released on August 1st 2006 (Figure 1).
The pardon applied to convicts for a large set of
felonies. Those excluded were terrorism, mafia
crimes and sexual abuses against children. What
makes the intervention interesting for our purposes
is that it worked as a conditional suspension of
incarceration. According to Article 2 of the law, all
those that benefited from the incarceration term
reduction who recommitted a crime within five
years, lost their right to pardon. Thus, in the five-
years following their release from prison, former
inmates granted collective pardon faced an
additional expected sentence equal to the residual
sentence pardoned by the bill. This provision
implies that as far as the residual pardoned sentence
is as good as random, the conditional sentence
suspension provided a random incentive to commit
crime from the perspective of former inmates. The
following example helps to clarify how individual
incentives to reoffend are randomized by the law.
Consider two criminals convicted of the same
crime. Both inmates had a residual sentence equal
to or less than three years on July 31, 2006. As a
consequence of the new law they are both released
from prison on August, 2006. Suppose that the first
individual had a residual sentence of two years and
that the second individual entered in prison one
year after the first individual. Hence, the second
inmate had a pardoned residual sentence of three
years. Over the following five years, for any crime
category, they face a difference in expected sentence
of one year. For example, if they commit a car theft
that carries a sentence of three years, the first
individual would be sentenced to five years in
prison (there years for the theft plus two year from
the pardoned residual sentence), while the second
individual would be sentenced to six years (three
years plus three years of residual sentence). It is
worth noting that the difference in the timing of
incarceration comes both from whether or not a
criminal entered prison directly upon the day of
apprehension and on when the crime was
committed.
Thus, the Pardon law ends up randomizing at
the individual level the incentives to recidivate. This
heterogeneity remains even when aggregating the
individual heterogeneity at the municipality where
pardoned inmates lived (Figure 2). As a
consequence, the setting emerging after the
implementation of the Italian collective pardon is
very similar to the ideal experiment described
above: we have a national policy, with idiosyncratic
local application and voters that observe the
national level decisions and the local consequences
without direct observation of the local variation in
the incentives to reoffend.
Thus, by looking at voters’ responses to the
variation in the incentive to recidivate across
municipalities we can assess to what extent their
respond to the effects of the crime control policy
by holding all the rest equal.
Drago, Galbiati and Sobbrio (2019) we first
show that, in line with what we expectedand what
found in other papers using individual variation,
municipalities where pardoned individuals had a
higher incentive to recidivate experienced higher
reoffending rates. Then, we provide evidence that
individuals do take into account the observed effects
of the policy in their voting decisions. By matching
data on the 2006 and 2008 General Elections to data
on crime rates, incentives to reoffend and other
observables at the municipality level it is possible to
assess how voters responded to variations in the
incentive to recidivate and reoffending. It turns out
Figure 1: Incarceration rates
Note : The figure illustrates the variation in the incarceration
rate (i.e., per 100,000 people) in Italy before and after the
collective pardon bill.
Figure 2: Average Incentive to Recidivate
(standardized) across Italian Municipalities
that in municipalities with higher incentive to
recidivate voters “punished” the political coalition of
the incumbent government (at the moment of the
pardon approval) in the first post-pardon
parliamentary elections. The effect is quantitatively
relevant. A one standard deviation increase in the
incentive to recidivate (corresponding to an increase
of recidivism of 15.9%) led to a 3.06% increase in
the margin of victory of the center-right challenging
coalition coalition in the post-pardon national
elections (2008) relative to the last election before the
pardon (2006). These results, show that worse
observable effects of the policy at the local level,
imply worse electoral outcome for politicians
responsible for such policy.
The paper also describes the mechanisms that
drive the main results. The role of the media in
conveying information about the consequences of
the pardon is relevant. Newspapers report more
crime news on pardoned individual recidivating
where the incentive to recidivate is higher. Moreover,
voters update their beliefs about the competence of
the incumbent coalition to deal with crime in
response to variations in the incentives to recidivate.
Importantly, a higher incentive to recidivate is not
associated with individuals being more likely to
perceive crime as the most important issue in Italy or
in their area of residence. This suggests that votes
correctly associated the pardon with the recidivism
of pardoned inmates and not with crime in general.
Under the methodological viewpoint, the
Italian case study has a series of advantages with
respect to other empirical studies on accountability.
First, it analyzes actual (voting) behavior rather than
just self-reported preferences which typically elicit
opinions not necessarily correlated with actual
behavior. Moreover, we study a national level policy
over a salient issue. Hence, our findings are
informative of the overall change in the support for
the government as a result of a policy. Differently
from the previous studies, we are able to observe
exogenous variations in the outcome of a policy
which voters can clearly map into a governments
policy choice on a salient issue. That is, our empirical
design allows to isolate the analysis from any possible
attribution error intrinsically present in other papers.
Hence, our empirical design provides a direct and
clean test on how voters respond to government's
policies and, ultimately, on politicians accountability.
Our study shows that despite casual evidence might
suggest the contrary, voters keep politicians
accountable for the effects of policies as described in
retrospective voting models.
These findings are relevant for the political
debate in Europe and abroad: voters seem to be
responsive to the realized effects of public policies as
long as it is possible to identify who is responsible for
such. How does this square with the evidence on
political debate and the mixed evidence on voters’
sophistication? Are Italian voters more sophisticated
than others? These different findings can be
reconciled by observing that Italy had two elections
in a short time and voters were strongly primed about
the relevance of crime. This probably made them
focusing on the issue and on its short run
consequences. Taken together all these results deliver
a picture where while ideology matters, the short run
consequences of politics are strongly taken into
account by voters. The real challenge for forward-
looking policy makers is to make voters aware of
both the short and long run consequences of
policies. How this can be done it is a matter of
further research.
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Directeur de publication :
Bruno Palier
Edition et maquette :
Andreana Khristova, Samira Jebli
Sciences Po - LIEPP
27 rue Saint Guillaume
75007 Paris - France
liepp@sciencespo.fr
© LIEPP 2020


Evaluating Electoral Responses to Policies. What do we learn from Italian incarceration policies

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Evaluating Electoral Responses to Policies. What do we learn from Italian incarceration policies

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