Abstract

Using data from 225 cantonal government elections over the 1980–2019 period in Switzerland, we estimate the effect of fiscal performance on the vote share of finance ministers seeking re-election. Our estimations show that finance ministers benefit statistically and electorally from balancing fiscal accounts and presenting budget surpluses. Improving the fiscal balance by 1000 Swiss francs per inhabitant in the pre-election year raises the electoral result of a finance minister by 1.4–5.4 percentage points from the vote share of her previous election. We present evidence for politician-specific monitoring: the finance minister—in contrast to the spending ministers—seems to be the sole member of government who benefits, electorally, from debt reduction. Correcting for possible selection phenomena, our results suggest that the electoral effect of fiscal performance may not be caused by a selection bias but rather by the office of the finance ministry itself.

Highlights

  • Making use of the unique institutional context of the Swiss cantons in terms of fiscal autonomy, democratic institutions, and electoral rules, this paper asks whether voters hold cantonal finance ministers accountable for a canton’s fiscal performance on re-election day

  • Its top rows focus on how the fiscal balance in the pre-election year affects differences from the previous election in the vote shares of finance and spending ministers

  • Analyzing the data from 225 government elections at the Swiss cantonal level for the 1980–2019 period with about 700 suitable cases of incumbents running for re-election confirms that finance ministers (FMs) statistically and electorally benefit from balanced fiscal accounts and debt reduction

Read more

Summary

Introduction

Making use of the unique institutional context of the Swiss cantons in terms of fiscal autonomy, democratic institutions, and electoral rules, this paper asks whether voters hold cantonal finance ministers accountable for a canton’s fiscal performance on re-election day. 210), models of electoral accountability are most promising when applied in contexts characterized by directly and individually elected executives with significant discretionary power. The fact that the cantonal finance minister mainly is responsible for balancing fiscal accounts differs from existing studies, which have dealt mostly with the re-election of a president, mayor, or governmental parties. By focusing on the subfederal level of governance in Switzerland, the present study engages in a subtler and more precise analysis of performance-oriented voting. 2 summarizes the relevant literature on electoral accountability as well as fiscal performance; it describes the theoretical intuitions guiding our empirical analysis. We present and discuss the results in Sect. 5; Sect. 6 concludes

Electoral accountability and fiscal performance
Financial management on the cantonal level
Cantonal executive governments and multi‐seat majoritarian elections
Dependent variable: change in vote share from the previous election
Explanatory variable: fiscal balance in the pre‐election year
Econometric specification
Main results
Robustness checks
Selection bias
Functional form
Conclusion
Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call