Abstract
We analyze the impact of elected competitors from the same constituency on legislative shirking in the German Bundestag from 1953 to 2017. The German electoral system ensures at least one federal legislator per constituency with a varying number of elected competitors between zero to four from the same constituency. We exploit the exogenous variation in elected competitors by investigating changes in competition induced by legislators who leave parliament during the legislative period and their respective replacement candidates in an instrumental variables setting with legislator fixed effects. The existence of elected competitors from the same constituency reduces absentee rates in roll-call votes by about 6.1 percentage points, which corresponds to almost half of the mean absentee rate in our sample. The effect is robust to the inclusion of other measures of political competition.
Highlights
Political competition affects the behavior of politicians and their legislative activities (e.g., Bernecker, 2014; Gavoille & Verschelde, 2017)
We analyze the effect of political competition on legislative shirking in roll-call votes using data from the German Bundestag from 1953 to 2017
Exogenous variation in the number of competitors per constituency is established by accounting for legislators who leave parliament during the legislative period and their respective replacement candidates as instruments
Summary
Political competition affects the behavior of politicians and their legislative activities (e.g., Bernecker, 2014; Gavoille & Verschelde, 2017). We investigate how the existence of elected competitors from the same constituency, but from different parties in the German federal parliament, affects legislative shirking. The informative institutional setting at the German federal level allows us to analyze the effect of having one or more elected competitors from the same constituency on legislative shirking in parliament. While legislator fixed effects go some way toward address endogeneity issues, unobservable variables such as political ability or valence could be time-variant To address such issues, we rely on credibly exogenous variation in the number of legislators per constituency in an instrumental variables setting: During a given legislative period, legislators may end their mandates and leave parliament for reasons such as death, sickness or running for higher political offices.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
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 callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
