Reelection Incentives Research Articles

Re-election incentives and the adoption of early childhood development programmes: The case of the "Happy Child" Programme in Brazil

What incentives matter for governments to adopt pro-poor early childhood development (ECD) policies? This paper addresses this question by employing a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to study the effect of mayoral re-election incentives on the adoption of the “Happy Child” ECD Programme in Brazil. The analysis finds that municipalities with first-term mayors (those that were eligible for re-election for another consecutive mandate) had a higher probability of programme adoption by 2018 of over 10 percentage points. These results confirm theoretical expectations about the role of re-election incentives and provide a significant contribution on the institutional determinants of the expansion of ECD programmes in developing countries.

Incentivizing anticorruption reform: Evidence from a natural experiment in Mexican subnational legislatures

AbstractWhile popular with voters, politicians rarely advance anticorruption policies because they can personally inconvenience them. When do the benefits of anticorruption reform outweigh the costs? I explore the role of electoral incentives by leveraging original data on over 600 anticorruption initiatives introduced to state legislatures in Mexico and an overlap between two reforms—one that required states to create local anticorruption systems and one that lifted an 80‐year‐old ban on reelection. Results show that legislators with reelection incentives were more likely to advance anticorruption initiatives and more likely to comply with the creation of local anticorruption systems. Findings underscore that while anticorruption reform is often met with resistance because corruption benefits those in power, electoral incentives can generate conditions under which reform takes place.

Incumbents’ re-election incentives and financial report disclosure in Indonesian local government

<p>This study investigates the relationship between incumbents' re-election incentives and financial reporting disclosure in the Indonesian local government. This study uses a sample of 351 local governments at the city or district level throughout 2015-2017 when they ran a local election. Content analysis is used to assign scores to the extent of disclosure. The incumbent mayor or regent who runs a second election is signaled by 1 and 0 otherwise as the proxy for the incumbent's re-election incentives. Cross-sectional multiple regressions will be conducted to examine the hypothesis that there is a significant relationship between an incumbent's re-election incentives and disclosure of financial statements in the local government. Our findings show that incumbent re-election incentives do not have a relationship with the disclosure of financial reports. The incumbent incentive to be re-elected does not necessarily drive an incumbent to disclose its financial statements. Regarding the control variables, significant negative relationships exist between dependencies and the size of the local government towards disclosure level. However, the complexity of the population was positively related to the disclosure level of financial reports. On the contrary, political competition, debt ratio, and type of local government were not related to the disclosure level of the local government's financial reports.</p>

The value of a party: Local politics and the allocation of intergovernmental transfers

This paper investigates how party connections affect the ability of local politicians to obtain central government funds for their municipality. Using a novel data set for mayoral elections in Germany spanning 2322 municipalities in eight states in the years 2000 to 2008 and regression discontinuity design, I find that party alignment between a local mayor and the state government increases transfers to a municipality by 20% per year. Such favoritism has been interpreted as a sign of partisanship and blamed on central governments which use public funds for partisan purposes. I show that local political conditions, such as reelection incentives and information transmission can partly account for the alignment effect. Taken together, the results provide alternative channels for the interpretation of alignment effects.

What Public Comments During Rulemaking Do (and Why)

Public comments on proposed federal regulations are thought to influence bureaucratic policy choices, but why? While reelection incentives give politicians straightforward reasons for catering to public preferences, regulators lack similarly direct incentives to accede to demands from stake-holders. We argue commenters may adopt several different tactics to try and persuade regulators. Broadly, they may either describe policy consequences or threaten the regulator with sanctions, especially by the Courts or Congress. But which tactics do members of the public – especially firms and interest groups – use during commenting, and why? We explore this question by extensive manual coding of comments submitted by strategic actors during high-stakes financial rulemaking. We find that the vast majority of comments have purely informational content, with very limited threats to involve political principals. These findings should be surprising to a literature that often presumes a model where interest group commenting is a form of bargaining in the shadow of the Courts or Congress. To assess whether this behavior is driven by the benefits of information versus the costs of threatening, we explore how the strategy of outside interests changes across the resource distribution, and analyze the litigation records of firms against these agencies. We conclude with a case study of a high-stakes policy where different kinds of interests used different strategies.

Working as a team: Do legislators coordinate their geographic representation efforts in party-centred environments?

Why do legislators engage in geographic representation in party-centred electoral systems, where they face weak re-election incentives to cultivate a personal vote? Existing research offers cross-pressuring incentive structures and intrinsic localism motivations as individual-level factors to explain this puzzle. In this article, we propose an alternative argument based on the principle of collective action within party-internal structures of labour division. We argue that legislators elected in the same multi-member district and under the same party label (party delegations) share collective vote-seeking incentives to collaborate with each other in order to strike a balance between the collective benefits and individual costs of constituency-oriented activities. Results from a comparative study of written parliamentary questions in Germany and Spain support our argument. Specifically, the study suggests that individual localism attributes interact with the team composition of party delegations to shape constituency-orientated behaviour.

Political Parties and Decentralization in Pakistan

AbstractWhy do politicians vote to decentralize power and resources? Drawing on structuralist and voluntarist approaches, we investigate why national party elites in Pakistan voted to devolve power to the provinces under the 18th Amendment to the 1973 Constitution but are hesitant to devolve meaningful fiscal and administrative power to the local level. We argue that the explanation for this disjuncture lies in Pakistan’s history of military experiments with local government, its candidate-centered party system, and the re-election incentives of politicians at the national, provincial and local levels. Using interviews with local government representatives, politicians, and bureaucrats, and archival research through National Assembly, Senate debates and newspapers, we show that devolution to the provinces was a means of holding a fragile federation together. However, Pakistan’s political parties, unable to elicit credible commitment from their legislators, feared that devolving power further could result in party defections, the rise of regional leaders, and inevitably, party fragmentation.

Communicative responsiveness in the Mexican Senate: a field experiment

ABSTRACT What motivates legislators to respond to citizen-initiated contacts about policy positions in party-centred systems with limited re-election incentives? We argue legislators are more responsive to individual citizens when they are being contacted about high-profile, salient policy issues, and when they have the relevant experience and staff resources to attend to individual requests. Using a field experiment where we email Mexican senators about their policy positions before casting eight different floor votes across nine months, we find substantial support for our argument. The article challenges the notion of re-election-based responsiveness by arguing that issue-visibility, access to individual resources, and personal political experience explain variation in communicative responsiveness in party-centred legislatures. Such findings hold critical implications for theories of democratic representation, suggesting the incentive to establish significant communicative relations with constituents does not only stem from incentives to cultivate a personal vote.

Empowering Future People by Empowering the Young

A number of recent writers have argued that the obligations of modern states to people who will exist in the future may far outstrip their obligations to their present citizens, given the vast number of people who will exist in the future and whose livelihoods depend on our actions (Beckstead 2013, Greaves and MacAskill 2019, John 2020, Tarsney 2019). And yet modern states do precious little on behalf of future generations, choosing to allow and incentivize destructive practices such as the widespread burning of fossil fuels, while failing to take preventative measures that could deter global pandemics and other catastrophes. The state is plagued with problems of political short-termism: the excessive priority given to near-term benefits at the cost of future ones (Gonzalez-Ricoy and Gosseries 2016B). By the accounts of many political scientists and economists, political leaders rarely look beyond the next 2-5 years and into the problems of the next decade. There are many reasons for this, from time preference (Frederick et al 2002, Jacobs and Matthews 2012) to cognitive bias (Caney 2016, Johnson and Levin 2009, Weber 2006) to perverse re-election incentives (Arnold 1990, Binder 2006, Mayhew 1974, Tufte 1978), but all involve foregoing costly action in the short term (e.g. increasing taxes, cutting benefits, imposing regulatory burdens) that would have larger moderate- to long-run benefits. Such behavior fails not only the generations of people who are to come, but also the large number of existing citizens who still have much of their lives left to lead. One type of mechanism for ameliorating political short-termism that receives much attention these days involves apportioning greater relative political influence to the young. As the story goes: younger citizens generally have greater additional life expectancy than older citizens, and it therefore looks reasonable to expect that they have preferences that are extended further into the future. If we apportion greater relative political influence to the young, it therefore seems that our political system as a whole will show greater concern for the future. In light of this story, a number of particular mechanisms have been proposed for apportioning greater relative political influence to the young, including lowering the voting age (Piper 2020), weighting votes inversely with age (MacAskill 2019, Parijs 1998), disenfranchising the elderly (Parijs 1998), and instituting youth quotas in legislatures (Bidadanure 2016, MacKenzie 2016). In what follows, I argue that merely apportioning greater political power to the young is unlikely to make states significantly less short-termist, but underexplored age-based mechanisms may be more successful. In particular, states might mitigate short-termism by employing age-based surrogacy and liability incentives mechanisms within a deliberative body of young people charged with representing the young.

Electoral Accountability and Particularistic Legislation: Evidence from an Electoral Reform in Mexico

Being able to hold politicians accountable is the hallmark of democracy, and central to this is the notion that politicians can run for reelection. Most research on reelection incentives compare politicians who are term-limited with those who are not. These studies concentrate mostly on relatively senior politicians in candidate-centered electoral systems. This article leverages a quasi-natural experiment posed by the staggered implementation of the 2014 Mexican Electoral Reform, which lifted an eighty-year-old ban on reelection. The author conducts a difference-in-differences analysis of the hypothesis that reelection encourages legislators to focus more on policies with the highest “electoral yield”—namely, particularistic legislation. Applying a correlated topic model to a new collection of transcripts from 6,890 legislative sessions in 20 Mexican states between 2012 and 2018, this article presents compelling evidence that it does, that the effect is synchronized with the electoral cycle, and that it is larger when the legislators’ political horizons are longer.

Dual candidacy as a source of legislator behaviour. The re-election and the mandate incentive under mixed-member electoral rules

Legislators are often viewed as ‘single-minded seekers of re-election’, and hence their actions are attributed to their ultimate goal of staying in office. However, an alternative approach ‘liberates’ legislators from the ever continuing struggle for re-election and argues that MPs carry out certain tasks simply because it is part of their jobs. This study is an attempt to empirically separate re-election and mandate incentives in the MPs’ behaviour. Hungary’s mixed-member electoral system with dual candidacy creates a situation in which the two types of incentives can be separately observed. If mandate incentives prevail there should be a difference between SMD and list MPs, while re-election motivations offer the dominant explanation to MP behaviour if the difference is between MPs nominated in SMDs and those who are not. Analysing legislators’ attitudes and behaviour between 2010 and 2014 it is found that although re-election incentives indeed prevail in the MPs’ behaviour, the effect of the mandate strongly characterizes attitudes creating a tension between what MPs do and what they think they should be doing.

Electoral incentives and Public Employees’ Retirement Systems in Brazilian municipalities

This paper tests whether Brazilian mayors manipulate the funding policies of Public Employees’ Retirement Systems (PERS) owing to electoral motivations, using an unexplored dataset containing the statements of contributions prepared by municipal governments that we match to four nationwide elections. In Brazil, PERS are active in more than 2000 municipalities and must collect contributions from public-sector employees and local governments to meet their defined benefit promises. The institutional context provides variation in both reelection incentives and the funding of PERS that allows for credible estimation: term limits and close races generate exogenous variation in incentives, and the large increases in contribution rates mandated by a national pension reform, implemented by municipalities with different lags, provide the necessary variation in the funding practices. Overall, the regression discontinuity estimates support the hypothesis that mayors seeking reelection in competitive environments reduce the flows of funding to municipal PERS. Moreover, the results confirm the notion that while politicians have benefited from the changing legislation and a lack of supervision in the past, less room for strategic maneuvering has been open recently.

Political Statement Cycle

Elected politicians may engage in opportunistic behavior for private benefits, which is a central problem in democratic societies. While re-election incentives can mitigate this problem, they may also induce words without actions: politicians pander to voters right before elections by proposing attractive policies but without actually implementing them. Using the minutes from assembly meetings, we find that politicians' statements follow election cycles: in election years, politicians temporarily change their statements (e.g., increasing amounts of money specified) during the budget-making process, and their contents become less consistent with the realized budget. The effects are larger for politicians whose previous electoral victories were narrower and these changes are associated with a higher probability of being re-elected. We find little evidence that politicians put more efforts to realize their policies when re-election incentives increase. These results imply a failure of the delegation system between voters and politicians, a key element of representative democracy.

Attract voters or appease activists? Opposition parties’ dilemma and party policy change

Why do mainstream opposition parties sometimes fail to adopt policy positions that are attractive to the wider electorate? In this paper, I construct a game-theoretic model between the party leader, the party’s MPs, and the party organization to illustrate how opposition parties’ platform adjustments depend on the party leader’s risk assessment of being deposed and MPs’ re-election incentives. The model predicts that a party leader is most likely to adhere to the activists’ position when MPs’ re-election probabilities depend greatly on activists’ campaign effort, and when MPs’ benefits of re-election are high. Platform adjustments are only possible when the reverse is true. These results have important implications on electoral competitiveness and strategies of parties in majoritarian versus proportional electoral systems. Namely, I expect that opposition parties in majoritarian systems are less able to adjust their platforms than those in proportional systems.

Re-election incentives and deforestation cycles in the Brazilian Amazon

Despite expansive research on Amazonian deforestation and its drivers, the role of local politics is not well understood. Using a panel data set that combines municipal-level deforestation and election data from 2002 to 2012, I estimate the effect of an incumbent mayor running for re-election on deforestation rates in election periods. I find that deforestation rates increase 8–10% in election years when an incumbent mayor runs for re-election, an amount equivalent to four percent of the total forest lost since the 2004 elections. Electoral deforestation cycles do not appear to be driven by changes in agricultural policy implementation and activity, but are linked to corruption and campaign finance, suggesting that weak institutional constraints facilitate electoral manipulation of forest resources. This phenomenon is not likely limited to Amazonian forests; re-election incentives could very well lead to misallocation of other natural resources in alternate geographies.

Energy subsidies and policy commitment in political equilibrium

Because non-renewable energy subsidies affect incentives for investing in energy-saving technologies, they entail a classic investment hold-up problem: once investment has taken place, policymakers will tend to overuse them for distributional reasons, which will in turn depress investment by forward-looking agents. Reforming energy subsidies thus requires overcoming a policy commitment problem. In this paper we show that, even when commitment is feasible, it may fail to materialize in a political equilibrium due to politicians' re-election incentives. In particular, it will be those politicians who are comparatively less favorable to energy subsidies who may fail to commit to phase them out.

Using Appellate Decisions to Evaluate the Impact of Judicial Elections

We investigate judicial election's impact on criminal case handling. Data from appeals of felony convictions in New York state are used to measure the accuracy of lower court outcomes. We also account for judicial election pressures and career paths. A theoretical model is developed where to guide the empirical analysis judges face a trade-off between exerting time and effort in criminal and civil cases. We show that during a re-election campaign, when the importance of good decision making in both types of cases is heightened, if the civil case outcomes are sufficiently more important, then error rates in criminal cases can increase. This effect is reversed for those who have a greater intrinsic interest in criminal justice. Results from the empirical analysis conform to the hypotheses derived from the theoretical model. Convictions that occur during the judge's re-election campaign are less likely to be upheld if appealed. The effect is concentrated in those who did not previously work in a prosecutor's office. In fact, judges who are former prosecutors experience higher affirmation rates with an additional escalation in success when up for re-election. We also differentiate judges who handle more civil cases and show that re-election distortions are greater. Finally, we also consider those who receive greater campaign support from special interest groups. Those who receive financial support have reduced accuracy. These additional results are consistent with the theory that it is the trade-off between criminal and civil cases that is driving decision making. Our results suggest that the criminal justice system is impacted by the interaction between a judge's characteristics and re-election incentives.

Legislative Behaviour Absent Re-Election Incentives: Findings from a Natural Experiment in the Arkansas Senate

SummaryWe analyse the effect of removing re-election incentives on the individual legislative participation of state lawmakers by using an original study based on the random assignment of term length that occurs in the Arkansas Senate, which in turn induces the random assignment of the total number of terms each senator may serve. Across five measures of legislative output—bills introduced, bills passed, bills cosponsored, resolutions and abstention rates, we cannot reject the null hypothesis of no effect. Since our sample is small, we adopt two strategies in our statistical analysis: we perform randomization-based inference to ensure that our tests adequately control size, and we use tests of equivalence to avoid incorrectly concluding that the effects are null because of low power. We also use bounds as a robustness check to address attrition in our original experimental sample.

Lame ducks and divided government: How voters control the unaccountable

Electoral institutions interact through the incentives they provide to policy makers and voters. In this paper divided government is interpreted as the reaction of voters to a systematic control problem. Voters realize that term-limited executives (“lame ducks”) cannot credibly commit to a moderate electoral platform due to missing reelection incentives. By dividing government control voters force a lame duck to compromise on policies with an opposing legislature. Based on data from the US states, I present evidence showing that the probability of divided government is about 8 to 10 percent higher when governors are lame ducks.

Gendered Perceptions and Reelection Incentives in the U.S. House of Representatives

ABSTRACTPrevious research has shown that the public systematically misperceives the ideology of female politicians. We posit that these misperceptions affect the ideal roll call ideology of female incumbents. Specifically, we contend that women receive greater benefits from more ideologically extreme roll call voting than comparable men. We test this theory by using data on the House of Representatives from 1972 to 2008. We find that even after accounting for district characteristics, female members are never penalized—at least in terms of facing a quality challenger—by ideological extremity. But extremity may increase male incumbents’ likelihood of facing such challengers.