{"title":"Jumping on the bandwagon and off the Titanic: An experimental study of turnout in two-tier voting","authors":"Yoichi Hizen , Kazuya Kikuchi , Yukio Koriyama , Takehito Masuda","doi":"10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2025.102646","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2025.102646","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We experimentally study voter turnout in two-tier elections when the electorate consists of multiple groups, such as states. Votes are aggregated within the groups by the winner-take-all rule or the proportional rule, and the group-level decisions are combined to determine the winner. We observe that, compared with the theoretical prediction, turnout is significantly lower in the minority camp (the <em>Titanic effect</em>) and significantly higher in the majority camp (the <em>behavioral bandwagon effect</em>), and these effects are stronger under the proportional rule than under the winner-take-all rule. As a result, the distribution of voter welfare becomes more unequal than theoretically predicted, and this welfare effect is stronger under the proportional rule than under the winner-take-all rule.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51439,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Political Economy","volume":"86 ","pages":"Article 102646"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143349912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"State-owned enterprises, fiscal transparency, and the circumvention of fiscal rules: The case of Germany","authors":"Friedrich Heinemann , Justus Nover , Paul Steger","doi":"10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2024.102633","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2024.102633","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>State-owned enterprises (SOEs) provide opportunities for a more flexible and market-based provision of public services. At the same time, they may impair fiscal transparency and offer politicians discretion in the presence of strict fiscal rules if these only constrain the core budget. Using a comprehensive micro-data set of German SOEs, this paper studies a possible impact of the German debt brake on SOEs by tracking changes in financial indicators at the firm level that would hint to a circumvention of the rule. The identification exploits that the mounting compliance pressures over the lagged implementation of the debt brake from 2010 to 2020 differs across the 16 states. The results show that SOEs in fiscally more constrained states exhibit a stronger decrease in equity and reserves and a higher increase in debt compared to SOEs in less constrained states and the shorter the distance to the 2020 deadline. This result is based on a combined sample of state and municipal SOEs, a finding pointing towards the vertical spillover of a fiscal rule.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51439,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Political Economy","volume":"86 ","pages":"Article 102633"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143170588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unpleasant surprises? Elections and tax news shocks","authors":"Antonio C. David, Can Sever","doi":"10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2024.102622","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2024.102622","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Unanticipated changes in tax policy are likely to have different macroeconomic effects compared to anticipated changes due to several mechanisms. It is therefore important to understand what drives such policy surprises. We explore the nature of unanticipated tax policy changes by focusing on a political economy determinant of those events, namely the timing of elections. Using monthly data for 22 advanced economies and emerging markets over the period 1990-2018, we show that implementation lags tend to be longer for tax policy change announcements that are made during pre-election periods, thereby leading to a lower likelihood of ”tax news shocks”. We also find that implementation lags become much shorter for tax policy changes that are announced in the aftermath of elections. This pattern remains similar for different tax measures and types of taxes. The findings are robust to a number of checks, including controlling for various economic, institutional and political factors.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51439,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Political Economy","volume":"86 ","pages":"Article 102622"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143170589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Inequality, local wealth, and electoral politics","authors":"B.K. Song , Woo Chang Kang","doi":"10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2024.102617","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2024.102617","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We investigate whether the effect of rising inequality on electoral outcomes is conditional on local wealth within a country. In general, rising inequality increases support for left-wing parties among both poor and relatively well-off voters, but it also discourages turnout among those who are economically disadvantaged. As a result, left-wing parties’ electoral advantages become more salient in affluent localities, while they diminish in less affluent ones with larger shares of poor voters. To test these claims, we develop a unique measure of local inequality using actual transaction prices for residential housing in South Korea. Our analysis of aggregate data across four national legislative elections between 2008 and 2020 suggests that the effect of rising economic inequality varies depending on local wealth, generating political inequality where the policy preferences of voters in more affluent localities are better represented in the policy-making process.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51439,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Political Economy","volume":"86 ","pages":"Article 102617"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143170595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nicolas Cachanosky , João Pedro Bastos , Alexandre Padilla , Karla C. Hernández
{"title":"The institutional impact of left-leaning populism in Latin America","authors":"Nicolas Cachanosky , João Pedro Bastos , Alexandre Padilla , Karla C. Hernández","doi":"10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2024.102629","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2024.102629","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study the institutional impact 21st-century left-leaning populist regimes have in Latin America. Looking at the iconic left-leaning populist regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, we find that these types of populist regimes impose a significant deterioration on the liberal-democracy institutional quality of their countries. The institutional cost is significant and long-lasting, and our synthetic counterfactual suggests that liberal democratic institutions would have improved if not for these populist regimes.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51439,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Political Economy","volume":"86 ","pages":"Article 102629"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143171617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An unconsidered leave? Inequality aversion and the brexit referendum","authors":"Joan Costa-Font , Frank Cowell","doi":"10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2025.102648","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2025.102648","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines a behavioural explanation for the Brexit referendum result, namely the role of an individual’s inequality aversion (IA). We study whether the referendum result was an “unconsidered Leave” out of people’s low aversion to inequality. We use a representative sample of the UK population fielded in 2017, and analyse the extent to which lottery-based individual IA estimates predict their Brexit vote. We consider alternative potential drivers of IA in both income and health domains; these include risk aversion, alongside socio-economic and demographic characteristics. A greater aversion to income inequality predicts a lower probability of voting for Leave, even when controlling for risk aversion and other drivers of the Brexit vote. However, this effect is only true among men, for whom an increase in income IA by one standard deviation decreases their likelihood of voting for leaving the EU by 5 percentage points which would have reduced the probability of a leave vote, resulting in an overall remain majority in our sample. However, the effect of health inequality aversion is not significantly different from zero.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51439,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Political Economy","volume":"86 ","pages":"Article 102648"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143387915","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Local connectivity and corruption: Micro evidence from China","authors":"Qijun Liu","doi":"10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2025.102652","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2025.102652","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A sizable literature has shown that personal connections play an important role in corruption. Among such corruption activities, the most pervasive is corruption by native government workers through local networks. Yet, little is known about the effect of local connectivity on corruption. This paper studies how local connectivity affects corruption. The analysis is based on individual-level corruption practices from China (N = 57,270). Corruption is measured by rents extracted from a population. The results show that local connectivity reduces corruption: government officials serving at hometown are less corrupt in extracting fewer rents from the local population than government officials from outside the region. The effect was amplified by local network intensity but offset by ethnic diversity in a region. The findings reveal nuances for policy arrangements for control of corruption contingent on whether government officials are from the local population or from outside.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51439,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Political Economy","volume":"86 ","pages":"Article 102652"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143444630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Do party ties increase transfer receipts in cooperative federalism? – Evidence from Germany","authors":"Yannick Bury , Lars P. Feld , Ekkehard A. Köhler","doi":"10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2024.102630","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2024.102630","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Cooperative fiscal federalism needs multi-level consent to decide on the allocation of intergovernmental transfers. We study how parliamentary representation of municipalities on the federal level influences the allocation of federal transfers to municipal governments under this type of federalism. Using a regression discontinuity design in close electoral races, we find that a directly elected member of the federal parliament, who belongs to the party that leads the federal government, induces higher infrastructure transfers from the federal government to a local jurisdiction. However, our results show that this effect only unfolds, if the parliamentarian's party is simultaneously leading the state government. Moreover, we identify party competition on the local level as a motive behind the strategic use of federal funds. Thus, our results suggest that federalism inherently entails restrictions on misusing intergovernmental transfers for political reasons.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51439,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Political Economy","volume":"86 ","pages":"Article 102630"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143171618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Political advertising and consumer sentiment: Evidence from U.S. presidential elections","authors":"Cody Couture, Ann L. Owen","doi":"10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2025.102647","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2025.102647","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We merge panel survey data on consumer sentiment with data on U.S. political advertisements run from 2013 to 2020 and estimate dynamic panel data models predicting the effect of positive, negative, and contrasting ads on several measures of consumer sentiment. We find that political ads during Presidential election cycles have a significant impact. In particular, a higher intensity of positive political ads with an economic theme makes consumers more optimistic about their own current and future financial positions and the future state of the economy. Our findings also suggest that political ads impact sentiment through an emotional appeal rather than by providing information to viewers about economic fundamentals.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51439,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Political Economy","volume":"86 ","pages":"Article 102647"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143170598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What drives abnormal returns of stock markets in wartime? Evidence from 17 invasions","authors":"Vincent Hoffmann , Luu Duc Toan Huynh , Mei Wang","doi":"10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2025.102643","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2025.102643","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines the impact of contemporary invasions on stock markets within advanced and emerging economies. By studying various conflicts and their progression into wars, we aim to expose underlying patterns in stock market reactions. First, we conduct an event study to assess the stock market reactions to seventeen modern invasions from 2001 to 2022. We calculate cumulative abnormal returns for the respective stock market and each invasion. Furthermore, we introduce a regression model highlighting differences in stock market reactions between advanced and emerging countries. The regression model contributes to understanding the relationship between cumulative abnormal returns and each country’s geographic and economic characteristics. Invasions generally have a negative impact on stock markets, with emerging markets showing greater sensitivity and more negative reactions to invasions than advanced stock markets. Furthermore, the findings suggest that underlying drivers play a role in explaining abnormal returns during invasions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51439,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Political Economy","volume":"86 ","pages":"Article 102643"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143170600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}