Speaker:
Fabio Padovano
- Université de Rennes 1 e Università Roma Tre
Monday, June 16, 2014
at
12:30 PM
Aula C, Plazzo di Economia
This paper aims at disentangling the set of information used by voters to cast their vote in municipal elections. Political accountability models assume that voters rely on past policy decisions of the incumbent mayor. Gathering this information is costly, and some voters may prefer to rest on low-cost information, like politicians’ observable personal characteristics. If incentives to collect information decreasewhen the size of jurisdiction increases, a larger share of voters should take these “information shortcuts” in large municipalities. Exploiting anoriginal dataset encompassing 896 French municipalities of more than 10,000 inhabitants over 2000-2012, we construct measures ofmayors’ competence. These measures arebased on past policy-makingand they proxy the sophisticated information voters may gather. We show that no link can be established between these measures and the set of mayor’s personal characteristics. We also confirm that proxies of costly information play a role in the reelection of the incumbent only in smaller municipalities.
- Programme Director
-
Luigi
Grossi
-
External reference
-
- Publication date
-
January 21, 2014
