Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - POLITRAITS (Politicians’ traits and public policies: learning how personal features influence fiscal outcomes)

Teaser

All over the globe, budgets and policies are set by political agents who are office-seekers. There is a growing literature in economics and political science that suggests that the individual characteristics of politicians -like their gender- may affect public policies...

Summary

All over the globe, budgets and policies are set by political agents who are office-seekers. There is a growing literature in economics and political science that suggests that the individual characteristics of politicians -like their gender- may affect public policies. Politicians’ features shape their preferences and incentives, which, ultimately, may have an impact on policymaking. The “POLITRAITS” project seeks to contribute to the understanding of how the individual traits of politicians affect public policies. The focus of the project is on two understudied dimensions: the loyalty of politicians to the party line, and the education of politicians. These two dimensions are economically and politically relevant for the society. On the one hand, educated citizens are overrepresented among the political elite but we know very little about the implications for policies. On the other hand, party loyalty is now at record high levels in many countries and this has important economic and political consequences. In the U.S., for example, the increasing levels of polarization combined with strong partisan loyalty in the Congress are causing governmental dysfunction and the American political system is becoming highly inefficient.

One of the studies of the POLITRAITS project examined theoretically and empirically the possibility that party leaders systematically use distributive spending to reward discipline within their party. Using data on party discipline in the U.S. House of Representatives the study finds that increases in legislators’ party discipline raise the amounts of discretionary spending their districts receive. Importantly, the rewards for discipline are larger the greater the gap between the constituents’ and party’s preferences (i.e., in conservative-leaning districts represented by Democrats or liberal-leaning districts represented by Republicans).

In another study, the POLITRAITS project analysed whether the education of local politicians has an effect on governmental outcomes. While some recent studies argue that highly educated politicians perform better in government, others find no effects of education on governmental outcomes. This article addresses this controversy using a novel dataset with information about the education, age and gender of elected local politicians in Spain and fine-grained economic and fiscal data. The study provides causal evidence that in municipalities where the party with more educated councillors barely won the election, governments do not perform better on a number of valence indicators. However, further analyses reveal that local governments led by more educated politicians have lower levels of capital spending and receive less capital transfers per capita.

Work performed

\"Application 1 has been completed and published as an article in The Journal of Public Economics (a Q1 JCR journal). The publication has been published in open access format: Curto-Grau, Marta and Zudenkova, Galina. 2018. \"\"Party Discipline and Government Spending: Theory and Evidence,\"\" Journal of Public Economics, 164, 139-152.

The paper “Party discipline and government spending: Theory and evidence” was presented on October, 9, at the “Historical Political Economy and Gender Politics Workshop”, Universitat de Barcelona: http://www.ub.edu/iperg/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Historical-Political-Economy-and-Gender-Politics-IPERG-2.pdf Prior to the start of the Fellowship, the paper had been presented in several international conferences.

With regards to Application 2, the collection of data was started and the most relevant information was collected (data on federal spending and vote share for incumbents). Unfortunately, there was no time to complete the econometric analysis.

The data collection and econometric analysis in Application 3 was completed and the paper is nearly ready to be sent for publication to a political science journal. The paper, entitled “Policymaking when the educated govern: A study of close municipal elections”, has been presented in the following events:
• 26/06/2018: 1st Workshop for Women in Political Economy, Falset (Spain)
• 13/04/2018: Regional Economics and Local Political Economy Workshop, University of Siegen
• 19/03/2018: SFB 884 Seminar Series, University of Mannheim, Invited seminar (https://reforms.uni-mannheim.de/ionas/sowi/reforms/news/news_archive/2018/#CurtoGrau )
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Final results

\"Application 1

Besides anecdotal evidence, there is a great deal of uncertainty regarding the relationship between party discipline and the allocation of discretionary spending. Application 1 contributes to this line of research by proposing and testing empirically a novel theory that identifies the condition under which party discipline is likely to influence government spending. The model predicts that higher levels of party loyalty are associated with greater amounts of targeted spending. Most importantly, this effect is greater the more intense the conflict between the party leader’s preferences and the voters’ interests. This study emphasizes the impacts of party loyalty on federal spending while the existing literature has mainly focused on the political consequences of party discipline. This emphasis allows us to disclose additional sources of uneven distribution of federal grants, namely, representatives’ loyalty to party lines and conflict between constituents’ and party’s interests. Therefore, the findings complement the existing literature and suggest that various studies on federal spending may benefit from taking party discipline and conflict intensity into account.

Application 3

A classical claim in political philosophy is that educated citizens are more able and socially minded, making them preferable political leaders. Recent empirical research echoes this elitist view and uses education as a proxy measure of leader quality. The results call this view into question. Using a detailed dataset about performance outcomes and fiscal policies at the local level, the results across multiple analyses are remarkably consistent with the claim that educated governments have different preferences and choose more conservative fiscal policies, but inconsistent with the view that they perform better and have higher \"\"quality\"\".

The results point to new avenues in the study of the determinants of fiscal policies. Existing theories about the choice of fiscal policies have focused almost exclusively on the role of public opinion, partisanship, the influence of interest groups, or the incentives provided by institutions. This study is the first to demonstrate that the education of politicians can have a causal effect on the choice of fiscal policies. This suggests that agency matters and that the identity of decision-makers should be further studied as a source of variation and change in fiscal policies.

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Website & more info

More info: https://www.martacurtograu.com/politraits.html.