Date:
Location:
Today's Speaker
Amy Pond (Washington University in St. Louis), "The Electoral Costs of Reforming Political Institutions"
Abstract
Biased political institutions can privilege one party over others, helping to assure that party’s future electoral success. Yet, despite controlling enough votes to make reforms, parties fre quently abstain from reforming institutions. What explains their forbearance? We elaborate a formal model in which citizens punish parties for any sort of reform, as they believe that parties could benefit themselves with biased reforms. Even if citizens are not informed about the content of the reform, they anticipate that biased parties are likely to implement biased reforms and they punish parties for any reform at all. Drawing on a survey experiment, we then evaluate the model using real proposals for electoral reforms in Germany. In line with the model, citizens become less supportive of the opposition and the opposition’s proposed electoral reform, when they are informed that the opposition is associated with the reform. By contrast, the coalition government’s proposal is perceived as less biased, arguably because it is already a compromise of three parties. The model thus helps explain the endurance of inefficient electoral institutions: if any reform is punished, even unbiased reforms are untenable.
Co-sponsored by FAS and IQSS, the Alberto Alesina Seminar on Political Economy supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying economic behavior in the political process or political behavior in the marketplace. In general, positive political economy is concerned with showing how observed differences among institutions affect political and economic outcomes in various social, economic, and political systems and how the institutions themselves change and develop in response to individual and collective beliefs, preferences, and strategies.
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See the seminar's full schedule at the Alesina Seminar page.
All interested faculty and students are invited to attend.